Do you think that there is no demand for your product? no problem. One of the ways we can take is to create the demand for something that user will later want. (But before making the next steps is important to make a real market research)
How to create demand? Make viral content, do something that will convince the user to buy your service or your marketplace.
In 2017, some BuzzFeed employees were scheming to prank their boss, Ze Frank, on his birthday. They decided to put a family of baby goats in his office. Now, BuzzFeed had signed on to the Facebook Live experiment, and so naturally, Dao Nguyen decided to livestream the whole event on the internet to capture the moment when Ze would walk in and discover livestock in his office.
Dao and her team thought the whole thing would last maybe 10 minutes, and a few hundred company employees would log in for the inside joke. But what happened? Ze Frank kept on getting delayed:
he went to get a drink, he was called to a meeting, the meeting ran long, he went to the bathroom. More and more people started logging in to watch the goats. By the time Ze walked in more than 30 minutes later, 90,000 viewers were watching the livestream. Dao's team had a lot of discussion about this video and why it was so successful. It wasn't the biggest live video that they do had done to date. The biggest one that they had done involved a fountain of cheese. But it performed so much better than they had expected. Now, a reasonable person could have any number of hypotheses. Maybe people love baby animals. Maybe people love office pranks. Maybe people love stories about their bosses or birthday surprises. But her team wasn't really thinking about what the video was about. They were thinking about what the people watching the video were thinking and feeling. They read some of the 82,000 comments that were made during the video, and they made the hypothesis that people were excited because they were participating in the shared anticipation of something that was about to happen. They were part of a community, just for an instant, and it made them happy. Dao's team decided that they needed to test this hypothesis. The following week, armed with the additional knowledge that food videos are very popular, they dressed two people in hazmat suits and wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded.
Eight hundred thousand people watched the 690th rubber band explode the watermelon, marking it as the biggest Facebook Live event to date. So here it comes the most frequently question:
How do you make something go viral? The question itself is misplaced; it's not about the something. It's about what the people doing the something, reading or watching. what are they thinking? Now, most media companies, when they think about metadata, they think about subjects or formats. It's about goats, it's about office pranks, it's about food, it's a list or a video or a quiz, it's 2,000 words long, it's 15 minutes long, it has 23 embedded tweets or 15 images. Now, that kind of metadata is mildly interesting, but it doesn't actually get at what really matters. What if, instead of tagging what articles or videos are about, what if we asked:
How is it helping our users do a real job in their lives? In 2017 Dao's team started a project to formally categorize their content in this way. They called it, "cultural cartography." It formalized an informal practice that we've had for a really long time:
Don't just think about the subject matter; think also about, and in fact, primarily about, the job that your content is doing for the reader or the viewer. Let me show you the map that we have today. Each bubble is a specific job, and each group of bubbles in a specific color are related jobs.
Many media companies and creators do put themselves in their audiences' shoes. But in the age of social media, we can go much further. People are connected to each other on Facebook, on Twitter, and they're increasingly using media to have a conversation and to talk to each other. If we can be a part of establishing a deeper connection between two people, then we will have done a real job for these people.
Dao Nguyen gives some examples of how this plays out.
This is one of her favourite lists:
"32 Memes You Should Send Your Sister Immediately" immediately. For example, "When you're going through your sister's stuff, and you hear her coming up the stairs." Absolutely, everyone's done that. Watching your sister get in trouble for something that you did and blamed on her. Yes, we've done that as well. This list got three million views, Why is that? Because it did, very well, several jobs:
"This is us."
"Connect with family."
"Makes me laugh."
Here are some of the thousands and thousands of comments that sisters sent to each other using this list. Sometimes we discover what jobs do after the fact.
This quiz, "Pick an Outfit and We'll Guess Your Exact Age and Height," went very viral: 10 million views. Ten million views.
I mean - did Dao's team actually determine the exact age and height of 10 million people? That's incredible. In fact, they didn't. Turns out that this quiz went extremely viral among a group of 55-and-up women, meaning that not only the young generation, but also the experienced generation is doing, and that's incredible because it means that any business can reach their customers through the power of viral content. Age is a state of mind.
This quiz was successful not because it was accurate, but because it allowed these ladies to do a very important job - the humblebrag. Now, we can even apply this framework to recipes and food. A recipe's normal job is to tell you what to make for dinner or for lunch. And this is how you would normally brainstorm for a recipe:
You figure out what ingredients you want to use,
what recipe that makes,
and then maybe you slap a job on at the end to sell it.
But what if we flipped it around and thought about the job first? One brainstorming session involved the job of bonding. So, could we make a recipe that brought people together? This is not a normal brainstorming process at a food publisher. So they know that people like to bake together, and they know that people like to do challenges together, so Dao's team decided to come up with a recipe that involved those two things, and it was a challange:
Could we get people to say, "Hey, BFF, let's see if we can do this together"? The resulting video was the "Fudgiest Brownies Ever" video.
It was enormously successful in every metric possible - 70 million views. And people said the exact things that we were going after: "Hey, Colette, we need to make these, are you up for a challenge?" - "Game on."
It did the job that it set out to do, which was to bring people together over baking and chocolate, the potential of this project is huge. But the reason why this framework es even more exiting is because it changes the relationship between media and data. Most media companies think of media as "mine." How many fans do I have? How many followers have I gained? How many views have I gotten? How many unique IDs do I have in my data warehouse? But that misses the true value of data, which is that it's yours. If we can capture in data what really matters to you,
and if we can understand more the role that our work plays in the actual life, the better content we can create, and the better we can reach customers,
Who are you? How did you get there? Where are you going? What do you care about? What can you teach us? That's cultural cartography.
