By now, I’m sure that you’ve seen this low-res of photo of #Alexfromtarget on your newsfeed

Alex was the overnight internet sensation who went viral for no apparent reason. It was a blurry picture of the teenage boy that blew up and generated over 600k followers for this Target employee. Shortly after the incident, the founder of digital marketing company Breakr – Dil-Domine Leonares decided to take credit for starting this “social media experiment” . This presumed PR move has generated a enormous amount of backlash, because quite simply, he tried to take credit for something that is much greater than the effort of one person or one firm of 7 employees.

Going viral is a collective effort, the greater the success the bigger the intricately connected web of people and factors that contributed to it. In Leonares’ Linkedin article, he summarized how he approached influencers and encouraged them to retweet the picture with the hashtag #Alexfrom marketing. The authenticity of his claims aside, influencers and hashtags are critical first steps in increasing the reach of a piece of content, but even then there is no guarantee that your content will be able to take off, nonetheless a piece of content with seemingly little unique appeals. Even if his claims were true, that he really did approach the company’s followers to jump on the #Alexfromtarget bandwagon, there is no way pinpoint exactly what made the picture of Alex spread like the way it did, as there have undoubtedly been countless attempts by individuals or organizations with far more followers than Breakr that have tried to promote their content with the same basic methods. Because ultimately, what Leonares described in his article are the most basic and fundamental steps to amplifying content, without any unique and innovative approach to the subject matter.