FIR #485: Is It Time to Stop Trying to “Go Viral”?

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19d ago 19:55

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Things change fast in the digital world. On the other hand, business tactics can be slow to adapt. Crafting content with the intent of “going viral” has been part of the communication playbook for more than a decade. There was never a guaranteed approach to catching this lightning in a bottle, but that didn’t stop marketers and PR practitioners from trying.

That effort is increasingly futile, as the social media companies that host the content have altered their algorithms, and people are paying attention to different things these days. This has led several marketing influencers to suggest that it’s time to move on from the attempt to produce content specifically in the hopes that it will go viral. Neville and Shel share some data points and debate whether going viral should remain a communication goal in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 485. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and it is time to stop making going viral the point of our work. I’m not arguing that reach is irrelevant. I’m arguing that virality as an objective is a strategic dead end. High variance, low repeatability, and increasingly disconnected from outcomes that matter. I’ll explain right after this.

For years, viral success stories seduced communicators, and I’m among them. There’s a thrill in watching that graph spike, but we’ve learned a few hard truths. First, virality is unpredictable by design. Platforms tune feeds to maximize their goals, not yours. Second, even when you catch lightning in a bottle, the spike rarely results in any kind of durable advantage. A new peer-reviewed analysis of more than a thousand European news publishers on Facebook and YouTube, published in the journal Nature, found that most viral events do not significantly increase engagement and rarely lead to sustained growth. In other words, the sugar high fades, and it fades fast. Meanwhile, veterans of content-led link earning have publicly stepped away from virality as a North Star. Fractal, an agency that once made viral part of its brand, now says flatly, and I’m quoting, “We don’t care about viral marketing anymore, and neither should you.” Their pivot is toward durable metrics like authority, affinity, and relevance. You might think that’s a vibe shift, but it’s not. It’s a strategic correction. Even the classic research on viral ads, the eye tracking work that taught us how emotional arcs and brand cameos drive sharing, was never proof that you can plan a viral outcome, only that certain creative choices improve your odds at the margin. Helpful craft guidance? Yeah, sure. A basis for corporate OKR? That’s objectives and key results? Nope. Layer on platform dynamics and the case gets stronger. Meta’s shift away from news culminating in the shutdown of CrowdTangle, the very tool journalists used to see what was going viral, has reduced transparency and made spikes harder to both trigger and to verify. When the scoreboard moves behind a curtain, playing for highlight reel moments becomes folly. In some markets, we can literally watch viral news get deprioritized. In Australia, publishers report Facebook engagement at all time lows as memes and creator posts fill the feed. If the feed favors entertainment over information, it also favors retention over reach. Your viral playbook ages out fast in that environment. The New York Times captured the cultural angle. The internet that rewarded sudden mass attention is giving way to one that rewards depth: revisit rates, creator loyalty, community momentum. A share count trophy doesn’t impress the algorithm anymore. Sustained, meaningful engagement does. So what should replace viral as the goal? Let’s cover a few things. First, it’s designed for compounding attention, not explosive attention. Planned content is a series, not a stunt. Build episodic formats: office hours, ask me anythings, recurring data notes, anything that trains the audience to keep coming back. The scientific finding I studied earlier is the tell. Durable growth comes from consistency, not from lucky breaks. Second, shift your KPI set. Trade shares and views as headline metrics for return rate, session depth, qualified traffic, assisted pipeline, issue literacy, whatever truly maps to your business or reputation outcomes.

Neville Hobson: .

Shel Holtz: Fractal’s rationale for de-emphasizing virality in form of authority and affinities is a good model. Third, optimize for platform fit, not platform luck. Where audiences actually engage, optimize to the native behaviors that correlate with retention. A quick example outside our usual stomping grounds, science communities now see richer discussion on BlueSky than on X because the culture and mechanics favor constructive back and forth over dunking. Smaller network, higher quality signal. Build earned elasticity into distribution is the fourth tactic. Yeah, keep a line item for opportunistic amplification. Creator partnerships, timely collaborations, paid boosts that extend life for posts that deserve it. But treat amplification as gasoline for a fire you’re already tending, not a match you light and hope it sets the world on fire. Fifth, prepare for attention risk, not attention gain. The wider your message travels, the less control you have over how it’s interpreted. Your plan needs counter message, clarification assets, and issues response baked in. Meta’s data opacity only raises the bar for preparedness. So when does a viral goal still make sense? Well, there are edge cases, awareness blitzes for entertainment launches, urgent public interest alerts, or short run stunts designed to trigger specific behaviors.

Neville Hobson: Hmm

Shel Holtz: like getting signups during a defined window of time. Even then, the viral moment has to be tethered to a post-moment system, a next step path, a nurture stream, community onboarding, so the spike has somewhere to go. If you’re still writing, “go viral” on a brief, cross it out, replace it with create repeat engagement among the right people, increase qualified discovery, or raise message salience with priority stakeholders. Those are hard, unsexy verbs, but they’re the ones that move the work forward. And if you’re thinking, “we’ve always chased reach, why change now?” consider the evidence. The platforms don’t reward virality the way they used to. The data windows are narrowing and the best research we have shows spikes don’t stick. Plan for compounding attention. Let virality, if it arrives, be a bonus, not the business model.

Neville Hobson: Good assessment, Shel. I had to admit, I was thinking about the two words, viral marketing. And what came to my mind, as it’s not a topic I’m kind of thinking about every day, was what we saw a decade ago, which was spontaneous stuff that largely wasn’t planned, although much of it was planned, but didn’t really work. Things like, for instance, I reminded myself today and I looked at the video, the Chewbacca mom back in 2016, I think it was, that was a surprise hit. I mean, really, it was natural. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t planned. It was brilliant. It was wonderful, actually. But it perhaps illustrated the point you’ve just made, which because that wasn’t part of any kind of plan at all, it was spontaneous. So it didn’t have any kind of road to go down. It just corrupted and grabbed lots of attention. And that was it. The guy whose name I can’t recall nor his company, but who was interviewed on the BBC, sitting in his home office, business suit and tie and all that, and his two little children burst in. One was a little toddler and one was even younger, who came in on like a baby stroller. And then the maid came in behind to drag them out. And all the time the interviewer was asking the questions and he was saying, “I do apologize. I’m very sorry about this.” It was super. And that went viral. I think it was. Yeah, he was in lockdown. So he was doing that. So that that would end about 2020. So I think the, you know, the that time was one where these ideas were emerging, that the the kind of places where you could stimulate this weren’t as widely

Shel Holtz: That was during COVID, right? When he was doing the broadcast from home.

Neville Hobson: covered as they are today and there’s more of them today. But apart from that, the whole landscape has shifted and mindsets have shifted even. Knowing that this is going to be our topic today, I actually asked Google is something I do quite often, just a simple provocative question, is viral marketing still a thing? So Google search, was not GPT or perplexity, none of that. And the AI overview result was actually quite interesting. Yes, viral marketing is still a thing, says Google, but it’s evolved to be more sophisticated and integrated into social media strategies. While going viral is never guaranteed, it says, the core concept of creating engaging content that people want to share spontaneously remains a powerful tool for brand awareness and can be boosted by social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. And that, I think, makes total sense to me, that qualifier of it, which we didn’t hear very much a decade ago when Chewbacca Mom and the BBC interview guy were the stars of the online world. But that to me always made sense that you don’t do something from a business point of view, just get it out there. Yet lots of people did precisely that without any seeming strategic approach to what was the outcome they were expecting of this other than to get thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people sharing it or commenting or liking it or whatever. What were you going to get from all of that? Where’s your strategic aspiration in that regard? That’s different now. And I did take a look at Fractal’s piece that was actually published back in 2021. That’s quite old. But nevertheless, I’ve seen others saying that’s it, viral marketing’s done. And I think it’s more nuanced than that. You need to qualify it. One thing I did like from the Nature report, the analytical report, almost academic report, Nature did, was defining, or they say, identifying two primary types of viral marketing, which I’ve not really heard many people talking about. They call it a loaded type virality, which manifests itself after a sustained growth period, growth phase, representing its final burst, followed by a decline in attention. The second one is the sudden type virality, with news emerging unexpectedly that reactivates the collective response process. And they talk about quick viral effects fade fast, while slower processes lead to more persistent growth. So this is now a far more evolved and attractive proposition to consider this. So I would say just based on my quick Google AI overviews read up and skimming parts of this Nature report that I think I don’t think it is time to drop going viral from the list of marketing. I’d say you need to prep yourself for the new way of doing this or a more effective way of doing this as part of your marketing strategy. Don’t you think?

Shel Holtz: No, I don’t. We’ll disagree on this because if you look at both of the examples you shared, the Chewbacca mom and the guy on the news.

Neville Hobson: But don’t forget that was 10 to 15 years ago.

Shel Holtz: Yes, it was, but neither of them were trying to go viral and neither of them were representing a brand that wanted to expand reach. They both just happened to catch the attention of people who said, “this is really fun or amazing. I’m going to share it.” And then other people shared it. I remember even at the height of the viral video craze, the agencies that said, “we can help you go viral,” basically were saying, “we think we have cracked the code on what makes things go viral. We are going to develop our videos so that they conform with those things. And maybe one out of 10 that we produce will go viral because there’s also some secret sauce that we haven’t been able to decode yet.” And now on top of the difficulty you had planning for something to go viral back then, now you have the algorithms that aren’t rewarding the kind of content that it did reward 10 years ago when those kinds of videos did go viral. I mean, think about Oreo 10 years ago, 11 years ago when I think it was their 100th anniversary and they had the hundred days of Oreo with different sort of memes about Oreos. And they would replace them with something unplanned when there was a breaking news event and they could come up with a way to design one of these images so that it was consistent with the news that was breaking. And a couple of those went viral. I don’t think they would today. I don’t think the algorithm would necessarily reward them the way they did back then. So I think if you create something that’s clever and entertaining and it happens to go viral, or even if you bake in some of the things that you hope will make it go viral, that’s fine. But I don’t think that should be your plan. I think your plan should be those other things that I referenced, getting people to come back, having repeat visitors and slowly building the audience, building the community. They’ll share, but it doesn’t need to go viral at that point in order to deliver the kind of ROI that marketers are looking for.

Neville Hobson: So I think the AI overview bits and pieces that Google popped up from a number of sources say all of that, actually. I mean, all those examples from a decade or more ago, I don’t think are relevant today because of the fact things have changed along the lines that you’ve said. But I think I like the way in which this summary talks about why viral marketing is still relevant, that actually says all the things that you’ve just said. Emotional and entertaining content, share worthy ideas, timely and relevant, audience engagement, that’s what you’ve got to aim for. They also talk about, those by the way, what the results of this search say are the key elements of modern viral marketing. That’s what you said. So whatever you call it, maybe the viral needs to be pushed away into the shadows a bit more, I think, because…

Shel Holtz: especially post-COVID,

Neville Hobson: Yeah, so, you know, I still hear people not much, I have to admit, but I saw someone writing about it on, I think it was LinkedIn, about creating a viral video. And thinking that you’ve never been able to create a viral video, you’ve been able to create a video that may go viral, but people tend to not quite see that point of view. So what’s changed that I say, using the video as an example, you create a piece of content that you get amplified through social media and set aside algorithms for a second. That’s emotional and very entertaining. Lots of people like it. And it’s part of your plan of other things you’re doing around product X or whatever it might be. And platforms today make it easier than they were even 10 years ago for content to spread quickly. As Google AI says, acting as a force multiplier for marketing efforts. So I think there’s still mileage in looking at this method of, let’s call it viral marketing. It still has legs in my view, if you approach it the right way and create it or look at it in terms of what you describe, which fits exactly what Google’s AI overview says. This is not about Chewbacca mom or BBC interview guy where it was spontaneous. People thought it was terrific and they shared it. That was it basically. It still shows up, by the way, when you do and the BBC interview guy says he’s indelibly got in his resume now, the BBC interview guy, as it’s called. So people are you without one, right? So I think it is worth considering it. Maybe don’t call it viral marketing. This is really part of your overall marketing strategy that you employ all the things you mentioned and all the stuff that’s mentioned here to. And indeed all the stuff that the Nature report mentioned too about the two types of viral marketing. So I think it’s got legs still.

Shel Holtz: In terms of brands, I’m trying to think of something that went viral in the last few years and something that they wanted to go viral. There’s been plenty that has been spread around that I’m sure they wished hadn’t gone viral. But I can’t think of a marketing effort that has taken that path in the last few years. I just can’t think of one. So I’d rather put my energy elsewhere.

Neville Hobson: Maybe they’re not doing it. Yeah, they’re not doing it the way they did it before then. So they’re doing it, they’re calling it something else.

Shel Holtz: I remember there was one, I remember reading an interview, I think we talked about this on the show at the time, even though it’s probably a decade ago. He spent money to have a video go viral. That was what the agency planned and it didn’t. And he was upset until he started getting a lot of lead generation response. It turned out that it had only been seen by about 1,500 people, but they were the right 1,500 people, because of the tags, was a very technical video, and it actually led to return on investment. I remember somebody saying, “having a hundred people see your video is a win if your target audience was the U.S. which has a hundred members.” So how much reach do you want? You want to reach the right people. You don’t want to reach everybody who’s not going to buy your product or spend money on your service. I’d rather target, I’d rather build an audience. I’d rather focus on episodes and recurring content that brings people back over and over and over again. Maybe one of those will go viral and if it does, it’s a win.

Neville Hobson: Well, I think you’ve actually then differentiated that quite well, because the example you gave of the agency who tried to plan the viral video or plan the video to go viral, I don’t know quite, I’m not quite sure how you would do that, to be honest. Is the issue there? What you described in terms of the actual outcome, which sounds like it was accidental, they certainly didn’t plan that. But again, that’s what 10 years ago, I think you mentioned. So now I’m pretty sure that that would not be the case. It would not be done that way at all. They would, I would imagine if they were doing this now, would be definitely well structured, well thought through as part of their marketing activity. And maybe the viral wouldn’t appear anyway.

Shel Holtz: could be, but if anybody has planned for something to go viral out there and had success with it, drop us a line. We’d love to know about it. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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