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!