Hark! A Thing About Viral Marketing

I give no end of thought to marketing myself and my offerings better online. The brass ring that we all chase these days is the prospect of "going viral"- of organically touching a nerve with something, then having the initial wave of people generate a second, and the second a third, and so on. That's the dream, but it's so maddeningly elusive. Worse still, it's utterly capricious. You might hit it with some painfully-wrought labor of love, but you might also hit it with a video of a cat boxing a toddle.

I have not so far put a lot of effort into making that happen for me. I don't know that it's something that you can force, but the thing that you might do is to try and ride trends that are already happening. I don't naturally seek to do the things that everyone is doing, myself. I'll notice that everybody is churning out "first world problems" on Twitter, and contemplate trying to do the same. The idea invariably stirs less than nothing in me emotionally, and so I don't bother.

Nobody may ever take an interest in what I'm doing, but at least it's my thing. I distrust the viral thing anyway, and the trending as well. They look to all the world like true populism and meritocracy. Seemingly, the things that people want are rising to the top, unimpeded and uninfluenced by anything except the will of the many. I wonder whether that's true. When there was little or no money in the internet (and subsequently, the social networking of Web 2.0, if that's where we're at), maybe that was so.

These days, I'm included to see big money shaping things once again. Things go viral because companies want them to. That's my thinking, anyway. Maybe I'm just saying that because I haven't mastered it all yet. I'm sure that if it was all on my side, I would see the rightness in it. If it turns in my favor tomorrow, I'll sing another tune. Until then however, I put my stock in conspiracy theories and my resources in superstition.