What NOT To Do When Your Brand's Post Goes Viral

(Emergency All-Hands to define what caused yesterday's post go viral)

*We join as the team throws out ideas about why they think the post went viral. CMO joins later (for reasons we'll discover at the end)*

Merch Mgr: Maybe it was because it included [a specific product]? Let's do more of that.

Fulfillment Mgr: Maybe it was because we had more people in the video?

CX Mgr: Hmm, maybe it was because it included a few customers?

Email Mkting Mgr: What time did you post it? Send time makes a difference.

Social Media Mgr: What was special about the caption? I feel the caption is 50% of the reason for video success.

Demand Planning Mgr: Yea, when I post with a 3 word caption on my personal socials, they do better.

Social Media Marketing Intern: The other 50% of the video success is the first second. You had Sir Worthington the Third (CFO's dog) in that clip. More of that.

Head of Video: This is great.

Dir of Marketing: Totally, and we didn't even use the whole time. I'm bummed [CMO] wasn't here for this.

*CMO enters*

CMO: So how'd it go?

Director of Marketing: So well. We identified the things that made this video go viral, and now we're just going to replicate.

Head of Vid: Yup - in future videos, we'll:
- Include [Merchandising's favorite product], 
- At least 3 people, 
- Customers
- Post at 9:37AM 
- Use 3 word captions
- Always put Sir Worthington in the first second.

CMO: Classic.

Dir of Mkting: What?

CMO: I wanted you all to have this meeting without me for this exact reason.

Dir of Mkting: I don't follow

CMO: The tendency with a viral video is to drop everything and try to decode exactly why it went viral. And every time, there's a meeting like this where we develop a laundry list of things that caused it to go viral. I've seen it in my 2 previous companies.

Head of Video: What's wrong with that?

CMO: I know we feel the need to get off the hamster wheel of over-reliance on our bottom funnel direct response ads, but this knee-jerk reaction distracts us from the existing process and feedback loop we'd already set up, measured by a specific metric of follower growth per view in the first 24 hours. While this video got tons of views, it didn't hit our minimum threshold for this KPI.

CMO: Any one post can do anything. We look at minimum 3 videos to learn anything.

CMO: The process is working. We've seen our smoothed resilient base of revenue from organic and direct traffic grow over the last year as a result of this process.

CMO: It has increased our contribution margin, growing profit last quarter 30% over the year before.

CMO: It's not sexy, but this is the definition of Brand Building.

CMO: Exceptional creativity, steadily improved over time with a feedback loop driven by a carefully selected metric that represents quality growth and a tight connection to a steady increase in revenue coming from organic and direct traffic, and therefore, profit.

Everyone: 🙌

—
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