Lessons You Learn from Going Viral

I have to say, this is the first time I’ve done a kind of presentation like this. And when Tom pitched it to me, I immediately latched on to it.

And not necessarily because I’m someone who enjoys the sound of his own voice, but because I think the opportunity to speak to people who are in a similar situation that I am, it’s actually something I really wanted to kind of grab onto. It’s more than just a speech. It’s more kind of like a it’s a collaborative crowdsourcing. I share a little bit about where I’ve been,

I can kind of start picking the brains of people who’ve been there, and sort of strikes me that there’s a lot of, a lot of people in a similar field that I am, a lot of marketers and certainly a lot of people from my part of the world as well, which is very exciting, not nearly as exciting, of course, as going viral.

Now, who among us has had the privilege, quote unquote, of going properly viral? (define ‘going viral’) I’m going to say to the extent that you produce something, you put something out there and you started receiving comments and likes and a speed at which you’re like, holy shit, this is like gone, 100 comments, 200 comments. The views have kind of grown exponentially.

Starts out with like 10,000 then tomorrow you’re on 50. However, all of a sudden I’m on a million, how did that happen? Like, properly, oh shit, this is actually gaining some real traction. I don’t want to, see that’s fine, because it is all relative. It is kind of all relative and there are lessons to be learned along the way.

I have had the quote unquote privilege. I’m going to say quote unquote privilege a lot because it kind of hits me a lot of going properly viral, three times, two of which involved things that I had done and I put out into the world and had kind of, blossomed. The other was one that I enabled to happen, and it caused a sort of minor political scandal involving the then Prime Minister of New Zealand.

I will get to that in a minute. But what I know is that from the three times that I have been involved in something going viral, three dumb lessons emerged. Not just personal discovery lessons, but lessons which I look at and think, from a business point of view or from a freelancer point of view, these are all actually really useful,

useful to know. I call them dumb lessons because they’re the kind of thing that you realise at the time. How did I not know that? How did that not occur to me, when that happens? And afterwards you’re like, it’s so dumb, but it’s so useful. There’s one thing I also know, and I’m going to quote Scott Galloway, the marketing professor, that things are never as good or as bad as they seem, which strikes me as a little bit like having it, having your cake and eating it too.

But you think about it, when something goes well, you think, that’s awesome. But is it? and when something goes bad and you get the then Prime Minister of New Zealand in trouble, is it really is bad as that? Well, oftentimes it kind of sits in the middle and he knows because he’s bored. So you know, it’s that kind of it’s not as good, it’s not as bad, but it’s in the middle.

And it’s something I always use to kind of keep me grounded. So I had the pleasure of being involved in three moments of virality. And from those moments I have learned three lessons that relate somewhat to building a business. And please, please take me seriously because someone has to. So viral moment number one. The yellow peg. Confession, I was a sick old man and I say sick and I say old in inverted commas.

I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease back in 2010, which not the worst thing in the world, but it was a little bit, to use the parlance of this country, a bit of a ballache. So I decided to do something about it from a positive point of view. So I launched a charity auction on New Zealand, on a New Zealand auction website, Trade Me and the idea was to start with a single yellow peg and then over the course of 12 months, trade up for better items, and then in 12 months time, sell the final item and donate the money to charity.

And it was, nothing at all other than just putting it out there, a little bit of a hit. It had 100,000 views in 12 hours, 500,000 in 24, and then 3 million over the course of a week. So I received emails from all over the world, a great deal of reception from everywhere, from as far afield as Guam. Simply said, Guam stands with you.

Which big ups to the American military establishment in Guam. It even made the news. I even got, you know the full, reporter coming up asking me for quotes and the full photographer treatment. It was, it was a bit of a thing. The varying problems with this, I had zero social media presence and by that I mean I wasn’t actually on social media, which for someone who now works in marketing is incredibly ironic.

But I wasn’t on Facebook, I wasn’t on Instagram, I wasn’t anywhere. So I really had nowhere to kind of direct anyone to other than the fact that these auctions auction existed. So keeping the momentum going was a real slog without having that thing to direct people to. And eventually I got to the point where I got to, auction off gold cufflinks, branded gold cufflinks from Al-Jazeera, of all things.

But it was an absolute slog to get there without having the kind of the infrastructure needed to kind of capitalise on it. So the lesson here, lesson number one, if you build it they will come. But unless you’ve got somewhere for them to stay, they will leave. So the question for us is what are we doing to attract more people, you know, more businesses, more clients, but what are we doing to keep the ones that we have?

Client acquisition is one thing. Client retention is another. And it’s an incredibly potent thing. We always talk about how do we get more business? How do we get more business, how do we actually utilise the business that we have, and how do we keep it? That was the first question. Viral moment number two. The quote “Gay Red Top”.

Okay, so I need to briefly explain some boring New Zealand political history for which I apologise, and, in the presence of a fellow Kiwi, you might understand a little of the context, but I need to introduce some quote unquote characters here. So in 2012, I was working in radio for what’s called The Farming Show, New Zealand’s number one rural radio program.

Such fun. And rural radio in New Zealand is kind of a big deal, it’s kind of like the New Zealand equivalent of the shipping forecast, everyone sort of listens ironically, but there’s an insane amount of money in it as well. The Farming Show hosted a charity golf day at which the star was New Zealand Prime Minister at the time, John Key.

Now John Key was a member of, sort of like the New Zealand equivalent of the Tories kind of that center right politician. And the idea was, you know, donate X amount of money, come play a round of golf with the Prime Minister. And like a good little brand nerd, I arranged for the farming show host to wear a branded red jacket.

Nothing wrong with that, perfectly fine respectable golfing attire. Cue the quote unquote banter. So the colours in New Zealand politics is similar to what you have over here. Blue for the Tories, red for Labour, etc., etc.. So the host is wearing a red jacket, to which the Prime Minister said, I’m going to try and do it in the strongest New Zealand accent I can muster.

“You’re going to be nervous when you line up in those par threes now, aren’t you? You’re munted mate, you’re never going to make it. You’ve got that Gay Red Top on there.” The literal Prime Minister of New Zealand on the radio. Exactly. So it was recorded on a Friday. We prerecorded it. The idea was it to air on Monday.

Nobody at the time besides me thought this was going to be a bit of a thing. It just seemed no one at all was kind of concerned that this was going to be, out there. So I posted it on Twitter over the weekend, and this is me thinking, well this will get a little bit of attention.

This will get the kind of people talking about the show. Yeah, send for the shitstorm that erupted because of it. It went viral, probably internationally viral, as in, picked up across different news networks across the US, UK, it caused a political storm in New Zealand as well. I just sort of went we’ll put it out there and we’ll see what would happen.

Understandably there are problems with this approach. I wanted eyeballs almost at any cost. I thought, this is great, not only do we have the Prime Minister on the show, but we’ve got him saying something kind of weird and funny and controversial. This will get people’s attention, which is actually a big mistake because I had not done my due diligence.

It was newsworthy, yes, but bad for stakeholder management. The Farming Show didn’t want their episode to be known for this political scandal. They wanted it to be, you know, we got the Prime Minister along for a fun charity golf day. Now we have to deal with this complete and utter catastrofuck because you decided to put it on Twitter, and there was really no crisis management from our part as well.

Like no one really thought, what would this mean for our brand? What will this mean? How do we kind of redirect attention away from this? Why is this the story? There’s no real thinking. It was just, it’s out there and it’s now, it has a life of its own. Yeah. So lesson two from this. Ignoring the temptation to just kind of get something out there when you’ve got something that’s really, you know, it’s going to kind of capture some attention, that in itself is not good enough.

It needs to have the sort of the infrastructure in place to keep it balanced, to keep it kind of an even keel. And the question is, what is the worst thing that could happen if this thing gets out there? And what is our risk management strategy if that worst thing were to happen? Now, what I should have done above all things else, is kind of pulled the show aside and said, hey, listen, before you go out and start hitting, hitting the links, he’s just said something that’s going to blow up.

That’s going to be the story. Just be aware of it. But in my infinite wisdom, having it out there was good enough. Never it is going to be good enough. The third viral moment. This came this year. Not in my name. So since the ‘Gay Red Top-gate’, I have been wary and weary of putting out any kind of political content.

But I believe silence in some sense is tantamount to support a crime that us privileged often commit. So I was moved over the summer by the spate of the violence and the racism that sort of marked it. So much of it just seemed like baffling to me and almost like, are we really in the year 2024. But then again, a lot of people will say, you know, this is a dystopian hellhole.

So yeah, of course this sort of thing was going to happen. So many things kind of bought into the mix. Things like this are bound to happen. But perhaps the most egregious part about this was being told, hey, this actually doesn’t involve you white guy from New Zealand, because you’re not a, you’re not an immigrant. You’re not the people these guys are mad at.

You are an expat. And I always thought there was a cognitive dissonance here because as far as I’m concerned, these are two different countries. I’m from there. I lived there I immigrated to there. Surely that makes me an immigrant. But no, no, no, no, an expat is what I was. And that’s the sort of the couch term afforded to people like me because of skin colour, because of language, because of shared kind of cultural experience.

I thought, well, I spent the first year living in this country being, actually answering the question, you alright with, Yes, I think so. Is there something wrong with me? So I’m talking about cultural kind of similarities. Sometimes it meets up, sometimes it doesn’t. So I launched a marketing agency back in June. I called it MJO Creative.

I considered part of my launch strategy was to get myself out there as much as possible. If I’m going to be marketing anything, I’m going to be marketing myself. And video was going to be a huge part of that. So whenever I put out a piece of content I have two goals in mind. Number one, proof of quality.

I need to spend time showing that I actually know what I’m talking about. So everything that I do is sort of predicated on the idea that, yes, I’m not just a Johnny come lately, I know what I’m doing, and here I’m going to talk about the things that I know what I’m doing so you know that I know what I’m doing.

The second part is to showcase creativity and personality. This is the kind of creative thinking that I go through when I create something. And this is me. This is what working with me is going to be like. What you see is what you get. I wear my heart on my sleeve, for better or for worse, there’s no kind of show,

it’s all me. People will kind of say, well, why, why in the world of personal branding, why is this important? Because I feel that you need to know who the person is you’re going to be working with. And if you get a sense of what their vibe is and what they’re about, then yeah, you’re going to work with them.

And if they’re not what you’re looking for, you can go look somewhere else. I feel like I would rather have people work with me with eyes wide open than be surprised that, oh, you don’t sound like you’re from the UK, and have that be a big surprise.

Hence, I put this out. So it was a four minute long video highlighting the absurdities of what I thought of the expat on immigrant argument, and I found it was something that I was in a position to speak about and to speak about with, not necessarily think a degree of, knowledge of expertise, but I felt like from a position of sincerity it needed to be out there.

And I put it up on both LinkedIn and TikTok, and it was a very deliberate choice. So, I knew LinkedIn because as I said, I do things to showcase that I know what I’m talking about, but also to demonstrate who I am. I thought this was actually a pretty important part of who I am, so it needs to be out there.

The TikTok, I thought, I want to give the algorithm a little bit of a try. I want to see if this thing will actually take flight. It was more or less just an experiment to see how far the algorithm will reach, and it turns out it reached quite far. It had 675,000 plays, 5000+ comments, most of which were fairly positive.

I went from three followers to 5000 followers. And on LinkedIn it had 100,000 plays, 1000 comments. And I thought there was another one there but no, that was it. 1000 comments. But there are some problems with this. It was fantastic for visibility, absolutely great for people saying, hey, you’re that guy from that video. It had absolutely zero influence on helping me to grow my marketing business.

6000 comments, of which there was zero business meetings. None of them saying, hey, because of that video, I went and discovered other things that you had done and I’d like the cut of your jib, you know, I think this might be worth a conversation. Nothing. So it was a worthy message. I’m glad I did it.

I would do it again in a heartbeat, but not so much for generating immediate business. So the third lesson, and it’s an obvious one. Don’t expect to go viral to lead to instant success. Business growth is a lunch box, day in, day out, come in, put in the time kind of thing. So the question that comes off of that is after going viral, what comes next and are we okay with that thing being kind of a boring thing?

It’s one of the questions I got asked when I applied for journalism jobs, particularly with The Farming Show strangely enough, it’s like, how do you feel that we could all be working on this massive story, like, you know, it could be another earthquake in Christchurch, and we’re all running around, you know, getting interviews and doing things around that

and you are writing a story about bees, or something kind of like small fry. Well that’s the game. We go from doing, you know, these big, glorious things, one video I put out immediately after that one got something like 600 views. And I keep thinking at the time, man, but come on, surely I’ve got an audience now,

Surely I’ve got that momentum. It doesn’t play out that way. The algorithm is designed to not privilege certain pieces of content, and just because it worked once doesn’t mean it’s going to work again. But that’s actually fine. It’s totally and utterly fine. And like I said, business success, putting content out there, it’s a day in, day out thing. Sometimes it’s going to land, sometimes something’s going to go viral where you think, I did not expect that to happen, but it’s almost like a example of serendipity than anything else.

It just happens sometimes. There’s no kind of logical thinking behind it. It just is. But like I said, 6000 comments, not a single business meeting. And that’s a dunk on me because maybe I should have followed that up myself. But just because something is popular and it could just be, it could just be the piece of content someone consumed for four minutes and then moved on to something else.

It doesn’t equate to business success. You have to dig in and do it, keep going. Keep putting things out there, particularly when it’s boring, particularly when you’re not getting that level of attention, because that is where the business will come from. So those are the three lessons, and the following slide contains gratuitous self-promotion. So, like I said, I run a little place called MJO creative.

I help SMEs, founders with personal branding, content creation, and marketing strategy. And that QR code actually does work because I tested it about 4 or 5 times just to make sure. But that is it. Three times I went viral, two were deliberate, one I would have done differently. But three lessons that are now informing what I do, and advice that I would give people I work with,

and indeed, marketers who are also in a similar position, like, what do we do if a piece of content really pops off, how can we capitalise on that? And what can we do to grow? And does this actually mean anything? It’s, like I said, it’s never as bad or as good as it seems. It just is. The point is you just keep showing up time and time and time again.

And from that consistency comes something greater, I think, than going viral. And that is, something that is, consistent and real and makes you, you know, happy for getting up every morning and doing this kind of work. So that is it. That is the presentation. If there’s anyone has any questions, comments, slurs, boos, questions about New Zealand’s storied political history, I yeah,

anything now’s your chance. But that’s it.