Going Viral

           It is not easy to make a trend go viral. Since the explosion of social media, many different trends have been able to claim viral fame as the internet has expanded to so many different audiences. The term “going viral” refers to any creation that is being shared, particularly on the internet, at an exponential rate, such that it reaches many more viewers than just those known to the creator. In todays world, it seems like a new concept or image goes viral every day, so often that it become hard to keep track of them all. With so many ideas exploding into mainstream success, we thought it would be easy to create our own concept and get the message heard.

            The College of New Jersey is a medium sized college that competes in Division III athletics. It is no secret around campus that a great majority of our sports teams are fairly competitive and perennially contend for conference, and even NCAA championship titles. However, despite the plethora of talent hailing form our beautiful institution, my partner and I felt that school spirit was not anywhere near the level that our athletes played to represent. It was for this reason we decided to launch the hashtag “#WeAreNJ”. This hashtag was meant to mirror that of other famous athletic institutions and boost overall campus pride in athletics.

            Our primary medium for this experiment was snapchat. We reached out to tcnj.snap, the campus snapchat account, and asked them to promote the hashtag and send us any snapchats they got with people who used the hashtag in order for us to be able to count how many people took part in the fun. Our secondary medium was Instagram, which we elected not to use as a primary medium because we feared many people would refrain from using he hashtag in it’s early stages due to the fact that it was not yet popular and wouldn’t get people the “likes” they so desperately desired. In addition, it would be impossible for us to see how many people with private accounts used the hashtag. TCNJ contains around 6,500 undergraduate students, as well as countless alumni, so we decided to set the bar pretty high and hope for 1,000 participants. Unfortunately, we fell short. We got around 40 members of Greek life to take part, while getting around 17 athletes, totaling to approximately 57 participants. Even though we did not accomplish our goal, we felt it was a good way to spread school spirit, even in the most miniscule way.

            We realized that our mistake was that we attempted to target a large group of individuals at once. According to an article written in Entrepreneur Magazine, the way to make something go viral is to write it for just one person, and make it so that it has such a profound effect on that individual that they can’t help but share it (Viral Paradox). According to shareprogress.org, the concept of sharing ideas is crucial in making an idea go viral (The Math of Going Viral). Our hashtag was something that was primarily motivated by us, not by the individuals using it. It was for these reasons we believe our hashtag did not reach it’s intended goal.

DiPiazza, Daniel. "The Paradox of What Makes Something Go Viral." Entrepreneur. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2016. <https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/254630>.

@shareprogress. "The Math of Going Viral - ShareProgress." ShareProgress. N.p., 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2016. <http://www.shareprogress.org/blog/math-going-viral/>.