After two months of using Hootsuite Dashboard, learning through their online courses, completing modul exams and struggling with settings and creating new tabs with relevant and useful content I became a new Hootsuite certified professional yesterday!

What I want to say at this place is that I really appreciate the opportunity to have the access to Hootsuite University. It would not be possible without taking course COMM464 E-marketing at Sauder School of Business at UBC. Although the social media courseware was a useful supplement to the classes, some things were repeated many times (I promise, I will never forget that listening and conversing is one of the most important things when performing as a  e-marketer), other facts were so obvious (what is Facebook and how it works) that could have been left out. On the other hand the Hootsuite Certification courses were extremely useful and practical.

To be honest, I cannot wait to come back to Czech Republic and leverage all that knowledge I got through HSU in my school projects and in my future career. It might sounds selfish but I somehow feel HSU gives me opportunity to overperform other czech graduates in the field of marketing. After all, getting new competitive advantage is the reason why I wanted to experience other than european university in my exchange program.

If you are interested in politics in central Europe, you can check out the situation in my homeland where communist party gets enough votes to be the third in parliamentary elections. I will just save many years of my life not getting mad about that neither discussing how bad the situation is. Anyway I have already provided you with the insight into using social media in the campaigns in the previous entry. But another lesson for political campaign is:

“Even though your social media campaign is the best among others, it does not ensure your success. Different people (internet users as well as non-users) are keeping your fate in THEIR hands, it is purely up to them whether they will vote for you or visit your webpage or enter your store.”

Dear Mr. Schwarzenberg, let me advice you something. You already captured young people through social media at the beginning of 2013 when presidential election campaign took place. They already loved you, they were prepared vote for you in parliament elections since you lost the presidential ones. It was time to focus more on people who does not use internet so much and who hears more on the offline campaigns in recent weeks. These people were probably CSSD’s and communists’ voters. Smart combination of the online and offline campaign could have gained more seats in parliament for your TOP 09 to the detriment of communist party. I bet there will be new opportunity for doing that once the winners become losers in their after-election negotiation, no government is created in next weeks and new elections will be needed.

During my research on the topic of successful word of mouth and viral campaign, I have found one key point that all successful viral campaigns have in common – emotions. These emotions are mostly positive, cheerful, evoking laugh or at least grin and pleasant feeling. People want to have fun in digital world and spread their fun and good mood among friends and relatives. This is one of human characteristics that drives viral videos on the internet, it creates the desired shareable quality of the video.

Just think about some of the most spread viral videos. You can find wide variety of strong and mostly positive emotions. Let’s start at

–         cuteness (Charlie bite me, Daddy ate your Halloween candies, well…ethical aspects of having your own child as a main character of world wide spread video remain for another discussion), let’s go through

–         admiration (Redbull space jump),

–         obsession (recent Dior Homme with Pattison ),

–         feeling of sweet funny revenge (Prank war between husband and wife) or

–         just feeling of “WTF???” (Megawoosh) and end up at

–         pure hilariousness (Never say no to Panda).

But emotions and right content in your campaign are just the first step on the way to final success. They need to be amplified by other aspects and here are some advices:

1)     start at people who are open to share your videos  (we call them creators). These people will kick off the video to the online world,

2)     find appropriate channels and media for spreading,

3)     consider that nothing lasts forever (especially in today’s fast online world) and it is very possible that your viral campaign will last just a couple of weeks,

4) nevertheless it does not entitles you to bomb the digital world with other new videos. Remember, less quantity, more quality is golden rule for e-marketers!