Designing viral content: lessons from a little birdie

Designing viral content: lessons from a little birdie

Viral marketing is an inexpensive and effective method of generating interest and brand awareness of your business; but despite this examples of law firms producing viral content are few and far between. So how can law firms design content which has potential to go viral? in order to answer that question its worth exploring the common attributes of two of the biggest viral success stories of the year so far; Flappy bird and Casino law.

Flappy bird

In May 2013 Dong Nguyen uploaded Flappy bird on to the IOS App store and a monster was born. For those of you not familiar with the IPhone and Android app here is a synopsis: A maddeningly difficult challenge in which you play a small bird, navigating through a series of pipes by tapping the screen to maintain altitude.

Nguyen’s game is the viral success story of the year so far, with no promotional or marketing spend the game shot to the top of the app charts, attracting over 50 million downloads and amassing nearly 16 million tweets. The game  netted its developer a reported £25,000 daily in advertising revenues before he decided to remove the game – not bad for two days work.

Casino Law

Personal injury lawyer Jamie Casino (real name Jamie Biancosino) has provided one of the best examples of a viral marketing campaign for a law firm with this epic two minute youtube video which aired locally in Savannah, Georgia at half time at the Superbowl. The video might not be to everyone’s taste but there is no doubting its impact having been viewed nearly 5 and a half million times!

So what lessons can be learned from these success stories? How can law firms design content which has a propensity to be shared?

Lesson 1) Simple Content is effective

Flappy Bird is about as basic as it gets when it comes to gaming apps. Content you produce does not need to be complex, sometimes simple is better.

Lesson 2) you don’t need to be big to go viral

Big brands like Electronic Arts spend millions on product development and marketing every year; Flappy Bird proves that with the right content and an element of fortune content produced on a shoe-string budget has the ability to go viral.

Lesson 3) Play on emotions not logic

Law firms are generally good at producing content that conveys their credibility and appeals to logic but very rarely do law firms succeed in appealing to their audiences emotions.

One of the main reasons why both Flappy bird and Casino law’s efforts where so successful is that they both stimulated an emotional response from those who watched and played.

Flappy bird angered and frustrated its audience to the extent that many where compelled to share this experience with their social networks. Casino Law’s two minute Youtube clip abandoned all attempts to build credibility; instead it was exciting, over-the top and above all memorable.

Summary

Content that arouses high emotion tends to be shared and discussed at a higher rate than content which leaves viewers feeling indifferent. The next time your firm is creating some content for the blog or to share with followers try this exercise; send the content to three or four friends; ask them to write down the three emotions that content stirred. If you see the words humour, anger, curiosity, amazement, interest or astonishment then you’re on your way to content that generates high levels of social engagement, sharing and brand interaction.

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