Remember the “ice bucket challenge“ from a few years ago? The one where all of a sudden, our newsfeeds were filled with people pouring buckets full of ice on themselves in front of a camera?

I remember being wildly fascinated and mildly repulsed by this sudden social media onslaught—not knowing at the time that the purpose of this challenge was to raise awareness about ALS. However, I have a strong feeling that neither did its enthused participant Shane from my Facebook friends list, who’s primary engagement in life up until then seemed to be the countless (and excruciating) gym selfies that dotted my newsfeed.

Still, more than 17 million people participated in the “ice bucket challenge,“ including Bill Gates and former US president George W. Bush. Over a two-year period, the money raised through the challenge—$117 million to be exact—helped fund research and development of treatment drugs. It is widely considered as one of the most successful social media marketing campaigns of all time.

So, did all these 17 million people (including our friendly, neighbourhood narcissist ‘Shane’) participate in this challenge out of the goodness of their hearts, trying to raise awareness about an awful disease? Call me a cynic, but I doubt that was the case. At least at first.

To understand why content goes viral, we need to first understand how people think and what their motivations are for sharing things on social media. It is important to remember, that in social settings, who we want to be perceived as, influences our actions a lot more than who we truly are.

Academically, there are three widely established characteristics of viral content: one, it is ethically appealing (helps construct a favourable social image), two, it invokes an emotional response, and three, it requires active participation of some kind. Simply put, things that interest us and make us look good are the ones we’re most likely to share. And the „ice bucket challenge“ masterfully encapsulated these elements.

One can take these core learnings and apply them to any business context. When designing social media content for a specific product, it is important to first understand the social values of the target audience—not all groups share the same ones. A group of fashion designers would likely idolise style over everything else, as opposed to a group of adventure travellers, whose heroes would have little to do with style, and more with something functional—like experience.

The next step is to then design content that provides the audience an opportunity to create social currency (recognition) by publicly exhibiting these values to their peers—have the adventure travellers publicly post about their adventure-filled trips, rewarding the one with the most ‘likes’.

Understanding the ‘social’ in our social content is an excellent starting point for synthesising that desirable but elusive marketing contagion—as was so cleverly done by the makers of the „ice bucket challenge.“**

**However, that’s only half the battle won. In his book ‘The Tipping Point,’ Malcolm Gladwell talks about the trajectory that viral content follows—it is governed by the same mathematical concepts of geometric progression and exponential growth that a biological virus is. And like biological viruses, social content also needs some ‘superhosts’ or key carriers, that ‘infect’ vast buckets of the population in order to cross the epidemic threshold. to be continued