Viral Marketing: The Mannequin Challenge
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonydimoro/2016/11/08/remember-the-harlem-shake-meet-the-mannequin-challenge/#76c6fa682345
This article discusses the latest trend since the Harlem Shake and the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: the mannequin challenge. The mannequin challenge is basically when people film themselves and their friends holding one single pose, pretending to be mannequins. Typically, these poses are funny, such as when an athlete is posing like they just fell off of a treadmill. This challenge has reached many celebrities, ranging from various professional sports teams, to news stations, and even to the White House. Given how popular this challenge is getting, this article is saying that it may reach the same amount of popularity as the Harlem Shake. The Harlem Shake was a dance that went viral through people posting videos of them doing it, with their friends, sports teams, classrooms, etc. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge occurred around 3 summers ago, where people posted videos that went viral of their friends dumping buckets of ice water on their heads in order to raise awareness and donations for ALS.
The article also discusses the impact of viral marketing on brands that participate. As mentioned in class, viral marketing occurs when something is spread via adoption through a social network. As mentioned in this article, the brands that participated in the Harlem Shake “saw tremendous results from posting simple, silly videos… results that certainly impacted their internet marketing initiatives.” This tends to occur for a similar reason that product placement works so well in movies. When people see their favorite brands posting these entertaining videos, they are more likely to watch them and then think favorably of the brand. Therefore, this causes people to interact more with these brands, bringing them more and more success and traffic as the videos continue to go viral.
The article shows some examples of brands and their successful Harlem Shake videos – Pepsi had the most viewed one with 4.9 million views, followed by Red Bull with 3.9 million. In fact, Pepsi, Red Bull, and Top Shop (the brand with the third most views on their Harlem Shake video) are now nominated for The Shorty Industry Awards, which are the most prestigious awards in social media. The main reason these videos got so many views is because of viral marketing – people would see the videos, and share them with their social networks. Then, the people in the person’s social network who first shared the video would share it, particularly if that person was a weak tie, to their own social networks, and the phenomenon would continue, connecting many social networks until the video went viral.
I am really curious to see how the mannequin challenge will do compared to the Harlem Shake. Additionally, I wonder who started the mannequin challenge, and how they got the video to continue spreading until it went viral and reached so many influential people.