We’ve got something to tell you. We know who Angry is… Now it’s time to let the secret you’ve all been wondering about out!

So… who is Angry MR Client?

I, Angry, am… Oana Stroie!  I’m a 28-year-old woman originally from Transylvania  (that’s in Romania). But I’ve hung up my fangs and, after a pit stop in the Netherlands to see the tulips, I bought an umbrella and an Oyster card and moved to London. And FACE.

First let me tell you a bit about my journey into the exciting world of market research. It all started when…

…After graduating from my MSc in Marketing Management at RSM Rotterdam, I joined the Global CMI department at Philips HQ in Amsterdam. Starting as a Market and Competitor Intelligence Manager, after a couple of years I decided to move even closer to consumers and product innovation by taking on an Innovation Intelligence position. This role made me realize just how extraordinary and fascinating the consumer research world can be. Being a client-side researcher gave me the chance to work with big data, lead quantitative and qualitative research projects, explore new methodologies and interact with many research agencies.

It’s this that provided the fuel for my “angry client-side researcher” persona – and, because everyone loves a mystery, I thought I’d make it an anonymous account!

A few months ago, I decided to follow my heart and move to London. And it was time to start practising what I preached on Twitter. So I made the move to agency-side, joining FACE in April.

Why FACE?

FACE is the most innovative and inspiring research agency I’ve met so far.  You are part of a select group of new generation research agencies who constantly challenge the industry to be better, faster and smarter. You get that participants are not a bunch of demographics, but human beings who do real things in the real world and deserve to be treated as active participants not passive respondents. You are the kind of company where courage wins over complacency and where innovation wins over “old school” thinking.  It’s the combination of brilliant researchers, leading edge methodologies, and smart and creative thinking that made me fall in love with you.

What is your new role at FACE?

Officially, I am the new Account Manager for the UK Qualitative Research Team. Unofficially, I’m an undercover client inside an agency, using my insider knowledge to make sure that our clients get the best service and actionable results out of their partnership with FACE. If you like, I’m making sure all FACE’s clients are @Delighted_MR_Clients!

What do you think should change in the agency/client relationship?

I think there’s a big opportunity for clients and agencies to work together on a more continuous basis. In this always-on world, I see no reason why consumer research should be purely ad hoc. I strongly believe that the future of research is in real time tracking combined with ad hoc deep dives. It ultimately involves the “holy trinity” of research: qualitative, quantitative and social media research.

What do you do outside FACE?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, shall we? I’m a bit of a Twitter addict. I follow anything #MRX related, especially #NewMR, but also lifestyle bloggers and trending Twitter topics. I also love dancing salsa (any salsa club recommendations in London?) and lately I’ve been enjoying exploring the English countryside. Oh, I also have a cat blog.

And yes, I really did teach my cat to high five me (here’s the proof!)

What’s next?

As sad as it will be to close off the Angry chapter, I believe that as with any good story, it becomes time to reveal who the “culprit” was. So here it is: the @Angry_MR_Client reveal. Hope you enjoyed the ride? I really can’t thank everyone who’s been with me in this journey enough. It’s been amazing!

To answer your inevitable questions, as of next week I will change my @Angry_MR_Client Twitter handle to @OanaStroie. But I will definitely continue to tweet and blog about #MRX and the research world. Watch this space…

Best regards,

Angry MR Client

Keep in touch with Oana:

• Email: oana.stroie@facegroup.com
• Twitter: @OanaStroie
• LinkedIn: Oana Stroie

He’ll be presenting our latest social media research study, How Stuff Spreads #1: Harlem Shake vs Gangnam Style. We used our social media platform Pulsar TRAC to measure the spread of the Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style memes. How did the YouTube videos get shared internationally across social media? Was it top-down or bottom-up? Influencer-led or community driven?

You may already have seen the infographic of this study on our blog or the Guardian Data Blog – now hear the full story from Fran himself. Learn how to measure a video’s social media performance and shareability – and find out the 8 key factors that take a video viral.

Digital Shoreditch is one of London’s best creative technology conferences, and we’re excited to participate in this year’s event. Each day is themed on a different topic, such as “Tomorrow’s World” and “Make & Do.”

Fran is presenting in Wednesday’s session on “Future Brands: The next challenges and opportunities in advertising and consumer engagement.” Other speakers include Mark Earls on “Advertising 2020” and Dan Broadwood asking “What can brands learn from anonymity?” We’re expecting it to be an interesting and fruitful conference.

Keep track of Face, the events we attend and our thoughts on what we learn by following us on Twitter (where we’re now @FaceResearch) and LinkedIn.

Philip’s presentation will focus on the role of socially intelligent research in helping companies to be more successful. Socially intelligent businesses think and act in real time through ongoing discussion with their consumers, beyond just social media. As Philip will discuss, one or two data sources are no longer enough. Researchers must be able to combine the depth of qualitative research with the breadth and scale of social data. This can mean bringing social and mobile data directly into online research communities, or using social media data to validate qualitative findings.

If you’ll be in Philadelphia, drop by and say hi. Philip’s presentation is on June 18^th in the Liberty Ballroom at the Philadelphia Marriot Downtown.

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Won’t be able to make it to Philadelphia? Read more of Philip’s thoughts here on our blog, or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Image by Flickr user ClizBiz

The reason I like online communities, though, is really that they give you the time to spread out the steps of a product trial and allow us to look at and examine each one in turn, rather than having to go through everything at once in a retrospective manner with more traditional methodologies.

Even that depth, though, is overshadowed by the simple ease of doing a product trial with an online community. It is typically very simple to do. Here are the basic steps we go through:

1. Make sure everyone has the product to try out. You can do this a few different ways. Perhaps you ask all the participants to pick it up in the stores – getting a little shopper feedback along with the product trial. You might just want to send the product to your participants, keeping things simple. Maybe the product is in test phases and you need everyone involved to try and keep it as low-key as possible? That’s doable, too.

2. Capture first impressions of the product or packaging – before use. The first impressions people have of the product can be very important. After all, if the item looks scary, they probably won’t buy it no matter how useful. So, ask people what they think of it and what they think using it will be like. We like to do this first before the other product trial questions so that their actual use of the product doesn’t affect their memories of their first impressions.

Videos can play a big role in bringing this step to life in the research. Have you ever seen the unboxing YouTube videos people post of themselves opening up new technology purchases? This style of video can be included in an online research community, capturing people’s initial reactions in real life.

3. The first trial. Finally we let everyone use their products, and ask them all those questions you usually find in a product trial. We typically split this step into two phases. The first phase is a private task where participants know no one will judge them and they can speak freely. They are also not influenced by what the others in the community are thinking.

Then for phase two, we open it up for debate. Participants compare experiences, commiserate and recognizing their own experiences in what others are saying. This helps the larger trends bubble up to the top. We might repeat this two phased approach periodically throughout the community, depending on the research questions.

4. Capture product trials on video. One of the most illuminating steps of an online research community product trial is watching people actually use the products. Are they using your products the way they were intended? Are they making assumptions about what the product can or can’t do? Researchers can also pick up on things that the participants might not even realize are interesting. For instance, they might not think to mention the cord of a hair drier getting tangled – but this could be useful for the product designers.

5. Keep the trial going. Why stop at one test? By making sure participants have enough time to use the product at least two times, we can get a real strong idea of the plusses and minuses people are experiencing. It also gives participants time to get used to the product, explore its capabilities, and really evaluate it on its merits.

Usually this takes the form of a long-term online diary. We ask participants to add an entry every day or every time they use the product. This helps us also gauge triggers for use as well as any barriers to use. To add a little more color, participants can also include images and videos at this stage, as well.

6. The product review. Now that we’ve captured all the real-life experiences as they happened, we can now look at the product retrospectively. This time we get participants to think about how your product compares to others on the market. If it’s something entirely new, we can get them thinking about where else it might fit in their lives, or how it could be tweaked and improved.

This part doesn’t have to be boring, either! Finding creative and fun ways for participants to express themselves increases the quality of the responses. Participants might answer a quick mini-survey about specific functional concerns and also write up an “Amazon review” style description of their experience just like they would on a reviews website. Other fun ideas we’ve done in the past are image grabs where participants search online for conceptual images that express their feelings about their product and video reviews where they talk to the camera about the product, while they hold it up.

The real strength of running a product trial through an online community is that it can reveal the entire process from first impressions, through multiple uses, to comparing the product to others that participants may have used. By separating the steps out, we can get a clear snapshot of each stage, without people trying to remember what it was like the first time they used the product a week later. An online community can shed light on how a product lives in a person’s home while they are using it, using photos and videos to bring it all to live.

It’s a lot easier to do this in online communities where participants have more time to adjust and get used to an idea, live with it and imagine how they would use it daily, how they would change it and improve upon it.

Image by Flickr user onefish2

One of the many factors in the success of an online innovation research community is recruitment. Choosing your participants has several layers. For instance, you need to be sure they can participate in the first place – daily access to a good internet connection (which could be at work) is a must, as is being comfortable online.

Beyond that basic layer, you then have two choices. In general, there are two types of groups to choose for an innovation project. The first are those who are passionate about the product or service and are also part of the target audience. This type of consumer gives a great glimpse into how what we’re working on can fit in with the consumers’ daily lives. This group is most useful during the exploratory early stages of innovation.
Once the ideas progress, you need to bring in the group 2 type of consumer, your innovators. These people are like the first group, but take things a further. Here are some of the traits, in no particular order, we look for in a great group 2 innovator for an online research community:

• Adventurous – When it comes to innovation, you can’t be constantly looking over your shoulder. Participants in these communities have to be happy to encounter and think about new things and how things can change.

• Articulate – We love participants who love to talk. Outgoing and adventurous isn’t enough, they also have to be happy to speak their minds, no matter how silly an idea might be at first glance. Sometimes those are the best ideas!

• Creative – Some of our favorite participants worked in creative professions. Everything from animation to cake decorating. Of course, working in a creative field isn’t a requirement, but being able to think creatively is a definite must.

• Passionate – In order to help innovate a category or product, you have to be passionate about it. Our innovators, whether online or offline, have to really care about what they are doing. A casual user just won’t cut it.

• Knowledgeable – Beyond just loving the product or service, they also have to know a lot about the industry or brand. This brings the ideas to a whole new level of nuance and creativity.

• Detail-Oriented – While there is definitely an opportunity for probing in online communities, it helps if participants are very thorough and detailed in their responses from the get go. It also gives the other participants something to talk reply to – leading to some great interactions on our message boards.

Finding your group 2 consumer innovators is not always easy, but it is important to get it right. The research relies on the participants, so we like to put in the effort to find the right kind of people to work with. Recruiting these participants can be a multi-step process, sometimes starting online with a Facebook or Twitter announcement to a brand’s online audience, followed by a quick qualifying survey, then a phone discussion to verify requirement criteria such as being articulate, and finally perhaps even a trial online community or in-person workshop – all before the actual research begins.

We know, though, that not everyone can take a time out during a busy Wednesday for a webinar, so we recorded the presentation. Now you can watch it at your leisure.

Like what you see in the recording? We’re always available for a chat or for more information. You can join our newsletter to be informed when our next webinar will be, or contact us  for more information about how you can use Pulsar TRAC for your business. Just contact us.

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Francesco D’Orazio is the Chief Innovation Officer at Face. Connect with him on LinkedIn here, or share your thoughts about Big Data with us at @FaceResearch.

Streamgraph > Tue 07 May – 10 pm / Wed 08 May 10 pm

Nightingale Rose or Coxcomb Diagram > Tue 07 May – 10 pm / Wed 08 May 10 pm

Data based on 100% of public tweets collected, analysed and visualised with Pulsar TRAC 

As you might have heard, we’ve just launched a new social media intelligence tool Pulsar TRAC, and along with it, we’re releasing a new series of data studies called How Stuff Spreads in collaboration with our social data partners Datasift.

How Stuff Spreads will look at how digital content (videos, articles, websites, and images) travels the social web. This, the first instalment, looks at how two memes spread on Twitter: Gangnam Style vs Harlem Shake.

Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake were viral phenomena, generating thousands of spin-off versions and billions of views. By using Pulsar TRAC’s Content Tracking technology, we are able to track any social media conversation containing a specific URL and analyse who is talking about it, gateways and hubs, topics of discussion, geography of the discussion and key channels.

Me (@abc3d) and Jess Owens (@hautepop) wanted to understand how Gangnam and Harlem became global memes. So we set out to compare how the top 5 versions of each video were shared on Twitter, looking at 8 dimensions of each meme:

Shape: Number of shares per video, over lifetime of the meme

Lifespan: Number of consecutive days where people shared the meme 500+ times

Popularity: Number of unique users sharing the meme over its lifetime

Shareability: Total Twitter shares per each million of YouTube views

Globality: How international was the meme?

Amplification: How influential were the people who shared the meme

Variation: How much did attention to the meme vary day-by-day?

DiffusionNetwork: Hubs and nationalities who drove the spread of the meme

Here’s what we found out.

1) Memes have different shapes. Gangnam Style showed a top down or ‘vertical’ pattern, with the original video generating 10x as many YouTube views and shares as any of its variations. Conversely Harlem Shake was more bottom up or ‘horizontal’ in its dynamic, with the original seed sparking thousands of variations, some of which did better than the original in terms of views and shares.

2) The shape of a meme affects its lifetime. We defined a meme as ‘live’ (popular and actively shared) as the time when it was getting at least 500+ URL shares on Twitter per day. Whereas Gangnam Style lived for 172 consecutive days, Harlem Shake only survived for 29.

Why did Gangnam, the “top down” meme, live over 5x longer than the “bottom up” Harlem Shake? A possible clue may come from the three-part-process of social movement formation which Charles Duhigg describes in his book “The Power of Habits”:

“A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.

It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.

And it endures because a movement’s leader gives participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership”

Whereas Gangnam Style offered a strong top-down narrative with an easily identifiable leader in Psy, Harlem Shake had a more distributed narrative with no real leadership and guidance outside of the format. Consequently it didn’t succeed in creating a ‘habit’ that would outlive the interest from the local and community networks who where the real engine behind this meme.

3) Regardless of their shape, memes spread in waves. Both memes showed a very spikey distribution, with attention to the video fluctuating dramatically day-by-day. We quantified this variation by first calculating the standard deviation of the daily sharing rate (i.e. how much sharing levels varied day by day), then dividing by the mean to give us the coefficient of variation.

Typically all the videos saw a lot of variation in the rate they were shared, with Gangnam Style being more consistent (196% variation) then Harlem Shake (338% variation). But three videos stood out for showing much more variability: YouTube Gangnam Rewind (807%), Britney Spears learning Gangnam on the Ellen Show (574%) and basketball team Miami Heat’s Harlem Shake (517%). These videos each saw a massive launch spike – e.g. Britney with 15,792 tweets carrying the link on September 11 2012, and Miami Heat’s Harlem Shake with 63,927 on March 02 2013.

How did they achieve this? Each video was led by an individual or organization with massive reach – YouTube and Britney Spears both have 26m Twitter followers, and Miami Heat has a strong community of 1.2 million. This means they were able to activate a big existing audience to get the video out very quickly on Day 1 – hence the big spike in sharing. But within a couple of days, that audience was saturated – everyone who’d be interested had already seen the video. The Britney Spears variation of Gangnam Style, linked to The Ellen Show, was only newsworthy within a brief timeframe. Miami Heat’s take on the Harlem shake was particularly relevant to the basketball community and expired once the “local” reach was somewhat exhausted. So sharing dropped off precipitously – hence the big variation score.

It’s almost a risk to be a social media influencer – you can activate a large audience very quickly, but that attention can be burnt through equally fast. By comparison, the Gangnam Original video had one of the lowest variation scores (114%). Psy was new to Western and Latin American audiences, so the video travelled more slowly through social networks – but this helped attention sustain for fully six months.

4) Small communities drive virality. The relationship between communities and viral spread is reinforced by the fairly high density and modularity of both the Gangnam Stye and Harlem Shakes networks. This highlights the key role of small communities in spreading the meme. Within the Gangnam Style network, 14% of the people sharing the link passed it on or grabbed it from someone, while within the Harlem Shake network the connected sharers increase to 17% of the overall pool of users. These figures are remarkable considering the globally dispersed diffusion of the memes.

By contrast, influencers only accounted for a small percentage of the total buzz. Out of 767,000 unique mentioners of the Gangnam Style videos only 64 generated more than 100 retweets and only 8 more than 1000. Out of 173,000 unique mentioners of the Harlem Shake videos, only 9 generated more than 100 retweets. That means that for Gangnam Style less than 5% of the total shares were directly connected to the influencers, and for Harlem Shake only 1%.

5) Both memes transcended physical geography, even though both were born out of specific geographic areas and subcultures.

We measured the memes’ Globality (% of shares coming from countries other than the top one, usually the USA). Both memes were very international, but Gangnam Style turned out to be more global then Harlem Shake (78% vs. 63%) This makes intuitive sense – Gangnam Style started in Korea and spread to win massive popularity across North America, Latin America and Europe. Most viewers didn’t understand the lyrics, but the strong visual character meant this didn’t matter. By contrast, some of the Harlem Shake videos were much more geographically and culturally specific – particularly the Miami Heat basketball Harlem Shake, which got fully half (49%) of its sharing from within the United States.

This is also clearly shown in the network analysis, where the number of retweets spanning from the central nodes of the Harlem Shake meme network confirms this US-centric pattern of engagement. Conversely the central nodes in the Gangnam Style meme network are connected to a very diverse range of countries.

6) Popularity doesn’t mean Shareability, and Shareability doesn’t imply Popularity. While Harlem Shake turned out to be 3x more shareable then Gangnam Style, it still ended up being 4.5x less popular in terms of the number of unique users sharing it.

How did this happen? This is certainly connected to the higher mainstream coverage of Gangnam Style which lowered its currency in social media – there’s little value in sharing something people are seeing all over the TV. It’s also connected to the greater iteration and ‘localization’ of the Harlem Shake meme. This made its videos more relevant to hundreds of small local communities across the globe – so the Norwegian Army video was heavily shared in Norway, the Miami Heat video in the United States and so on. Essentially Harlem Shake had currency but didn’t have scale. Gangnam Style had less currency but had massive scale.

It’s a difficult balance for a meme to strike. Community drives Shareability but doesn’t give you Scale (Popularity). Top-down influence drives Scale (Popularity) but kills Shareability. While Shareability is a key requisite of virality, scale is what enables and sustains exponential growth.

7) Memes are like currencies: you need to balance accessibility (or ‘money supply’) and inflation. Gangnam Style became globally accessible through top-down mainstream sources (High Popularity), but this gave it high social inflation so it wasn’t valuable to share (Low Shareability). However, scale sustained its long term growth. Harlem Shake was not as easily accessible because it was driven more by small communities (Low Popularity), but for the same reason, being less easily accessible, it remained highly valuable (High Shareability). Lack of scale was what made Harlem Shake growth short-term and eventually killed it prematurely.

Conclusions: 8 things we learnt about how stuff spreads in social media

Based on what we’ve seen from studying the spread of the Gangnam Style and Harlem Shakes memes on Twitter, we see 8 common things to watch out to make things go viral:

• Bursts and Rises: 2 models of virality. The Burst model is bottom-up: the variations are more powerful then the original seed and there’s no clear leadership or narrative. The meme relies on community relevance to spread. The Rise model is top-down: the original seed is always stronger than its variations and has a clear leader dictating the narrative. Bursts spread widely more quickly but don’t endure. Rises spread more slowly and less widely but they tend to endure because the meme has a focal point. Chose your model of virality and plan accordingly.

• Triggers. Whatever the model, virality is triggered by surprise, cultural relevance to a community, and endorsement by a leader or the media.

• Waves. Whatever the trigger, virality is not a steady affair; it spreads in waves and spikes.

• Communities drive viral spread way more than influencers.

• Glocality. Memes transcend geography but a successful meme needs a balance of both local relevance and global appeal.

• Leadership. A meme needs a focal point to live longer. Virality is only sustained through a strong narrative and leadership.

• Slow and spikey wins the race. Weak ties and communities sustain for weeks but they don’t give you scale in the short term. Top-down media and celebrity endorsement gives you instant scale but burns out within a couple of days by decreasing the shareability of the meme.

• Memes are like currency: you need to balance supply (or accessibility) and inflation. In order to achieve high shareability and high popularity the meme supply has to be expansionary but strategically controlled so that it doesn’t negatively affect its shareability. This at the same time gives the meme the scale that can trigger and sustain exponential growth.

Dive into the Gangnam Style diffusion network

Dive into the Harlem Shake diffusion network

* For more information contact the authors at Francesco [at] facegroup.com and Jessica [at] facegroup.com or visit www.pulsarplatform.com

Francesco will be talking about 7 practical approaches to understanding big data. He will be speaking about how to gain insights and value from the social web by introducing a methodological framework for big data and social media research. Before jumping into the 7 practical research approaches and techniques, he will be doing an overview of the key tools and the different types of data that are available, as well as how to gain access to them.

If you can’t make it to Budapest to see Francesco’s presentation, you can still join our similar webinar “5 Things to Do with Social Data That Aren’t Keyword Tracking.” Francesco is presenting this webinar on May 8^th at 11am EST.

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Francesco D’Orazio is the Chief Innovation Officer at Face. Connect with him on LinkedIn here, or share your thoughts about Big Data with us at @FaceResearch.

Yes, influencers do help – I’m not going to deny that. Get Lady Gaga to tweet about your charity or fashion statement, and tons of fans will go out to investigate it. Want mothers to start using your diapers? Yes, try to get the mommy bloggers to write something up about them. But that tactic will only do so much. It leads to a spike in sales, but not a long-term trend. As a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, it’s limited.

This has been known in the publishing industry for quite some time as an effect of book clubs. An initial spike is launched by one large book club, like Oprah’s book club (she’d be your influencer), but the long-term trend continues as smaller book clubs pick up the torch and then those readers pass on the good book to their friends in turn.

This phenomenon becomes traceable as a long tail. It’s not just about the niche topic, it’s about the niche communities, of which there may be several for each topic.

We did a joint study with our sister agency Blonde not too long ago that illustrates this nicely. This study was actually where we developed the concept for the content tracking feature of Pulsar TRAC, our recently launched advanced social intelligence platform that pushes social media research beyond keyword tracking.

Meet Irn-Bru

Irn-Bru is a soft drink that’s spectacularly popular in Scotland. So much so you wouldn’t be far off calling it the national Scottish drink. In fact it is one of the rare carbonated beverages to outsell Coca-Cola in any market.

Coming from such a position of strength in its main market, the marketers at Blonde decided to do something a little different when launching a recent commercial. This allowed us to demonstrate the power of small groups in spreading something – and even compare this with the power of influencers.

Releasing a Commercial

Blonde released this commercial by giving it to just one person: a regular young woman on Twitter who had won a competition. Rachel Orr (@larachie on Twitter) started out with just 153 Twitter followers – bang on average. Irn-Bru promoted her account and managed to increase her follower count to 329 – still not exactly Lady Gaga levels – before they gave her the link to the YouTube commercial.

But a few of those followers were “influencers”. Blonde encouraged some of Scottland’s top tweeters to follow @larachie with the incentive that they’d use this as a way to measure their influence. Some of these people included @AndrewBurnett, Head of Social at Yard Digital, and the band Bleed from Within (@bleedfromwithin).

After @larachie tweeted the initial YouTube link, the video reached 100,000 views in one day, led by her but amplified by these influencers.

Small groups trump influencers (at sustaining growth)

So, we have learned that influencers are really awesome at jump-starting an ad campaign. Likewise looking back to my book club example, influencers jumpstart sales. (Thank you, Oprah!)

But how do you keep those sales growing? This is where small groups trump influencers. Small groups, not big influencers, are the Holy Grail of word-of-mouth marketing. Sticking with our book club example, these key groups are the smaller book clubs, the ones that hear about a book from the big influencers and then bring it to people in their community, who then carry the book to another gathering or tell a friend who is part of another book circle, and so on. This is how something goes from an initial spike to a burgeoning trend.

We can see this play out online. In the microcosm that is Twitter, that Irn-Bru commercial continued to grow even after the influencers had played their initial role. Over the next 21 days, the commercial’s YouTube stats increased from 100,000 to 650,000 views. That’s about 26,000 people per day. This coincided with the commercial being passed around smaller, interconnected groups.

The visualization above  depicts not the number of shares or mentions, but the number of connections each account has with other accounts that have also mentioned the YouTube video. As you can see, quite a few are really small – those would be the small groups. Those are the ones that are apparently behind the growth in views for the next three weeks after @larachie launched the commercial.

Yes, the influencers were really helpful. Yes, they probably jump-started the whole thing. But the ones who kept it going, who probably got the video mentioned on the Poke’s Viral of the Day three days after the launch, were the small groups.

Here’s the difference:

• Influencers: Contribute a big spike, good for a jump start and initial push
• Small Groups: Contribute more sustained engagement and spread, good for the long term

Find content small groups can get behind

This commercial managed to appeal to many small groups because it was funny, original, and took creative risks. And, of course, because it was Irn-Bru and in Scotland.

This won’t always be the winning content recipe (especially if you’re not Irn-Bru and in Scotland). You need to find content that appeals not just to your audience, but which appeals to specific niches and communities within your audience – the more the better.

Once you do that, your content has a higher chance of spreading naturally – virally. You may still want to include some influencers in your release strategy, of course – It’s not an either/or situation. But if your content isn’t something small groups can get behind, it won’t travel.

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In May we’re releasing a substantial new study into the dynamics of viral video. Sign up for our mailing list here to be one of the first to know.