Learned with the help of donuts…
Friday, February 3, 2012, at the end of a week of work, Nuno Gomes, creative director of Three Ships Media Agency decided to relax. And had fun drawing on the blackboard in his office, a table that explains social media creativity with the help of donuts. To Doug Ray, multimedia producer at the Agency, the ideas seemed terribly funny so he took his phone  and took a snapshoot of the board and, after passing through Instagram , posted it on facebook and announced it on twitter.Then, laughing, he went home.
Four days later – on 7 February at 10:39 – the photo reached 100,000 Like on Facebook. And thousands of references on Twitter. This photograph:

Social media explained – Twitter: eat a donut. Facebook: I like donuts. Foursquare: here is where I eat donuts. Instagram: here is a vintage photo of my donuts. YouTube: watch, eat a donut. Likedin: My skills include eating donuts. Pinterest: Here’s a recipe for donuts. Last FM: Now listen “donuts”. Google also: Google employee are eating donuts.

Surprised by the unexpected success of the photo – which to date has raised over 112,000 likes  – Doug drew some conclusions. “Old as the hills” but very true.
One.  You never know when something will go viral
It wasn’t his intention to make a viral. It was Friday afternoon and needed to fizzle a little after work. Simply you can not plan a viral.
Two. Loosen up
They didn’t care whether they might offend someone or if this thing had been done before using a far less tasty subject than donuts (even good artists steal, or copy- or something like that). Sometimes controversy can be good. And the only way to get there is through a full creative control. Sometimes it’s best to give up control to give partners more room to work…creatively.
Three. Sometimes the best ideas are the easiest.
There are a lot of projects that can and should require many hours of work. But sometimes the best ideas – and most successful – are coming on time. I used donuts for just talking about them. It took only five minutes.

Four. Low-Tech is OK.
Sure, they could have done everything in Illustrator and Final Cut Pro. But in this case, low-tech approach worked. Why would he need to make things more complicated than they should be?

Thanks to social medias, viral marketing become easier and easier. Even before the ages of social medias, viral marketing had proven to be  successful in generating word-of-mouth. However, with the arising of social medias, like Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, marketers were given the perfect media channel to turn ads into becoming truly vira, sometimes, even spreading so quickly that in a matter of some hours a clip would be seen by millions of viewers all over the world. Take for example the pepsi commercial for the Super Bowl, only 9 days after being put online the video has been seen over 4 millions of times.

The blog post on WIRED  Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media, even if it is from 2009, gives an interesting and critical view upon how the marriage between social medias and viral marketing can be on the one side quite chaotic and unorganized, but on the other side, strong and successful complements that have a strong impact on consumers’ mind.

Hereunder, quoted are some parts of the blogs that I find very interesting:

“Like Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man, social media and viral marketing have fallen in love and become one. They are virtually indistinguishable these days and follow the same basic principles as early forms of viral marketing. Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. Call someone. Now it’s tweeting and leaving comments on Facebook pages. Viral marketing is the concept, social media is the tool.

Social media and viral marketing are virtually interconnected (no pun intended). The success of social media — in allowing people to gather in groups of mutual interest and to share what’s meaningful in their lives — is really the foundation of viral communication. In terms of viral marketing, we’ve seen that people will happily pass along your marketing as long as: 1) the content is entertaining and 2) the message is genuine.  In the case of milk, I believe we’ve been successful in both respects.

The first challenge is to create outstanding content — without that to stand on, nothing else you do will work. Next is to identify the right “neighborhoods” where your message will find the desired “crowd.” In our case, the crowd was teens and tuned-in parents, and the neighborhoods were social networking, entertainment and music sites. Next, using all sorts of analytics that abound on the internet, is to choose individual sites for their traffic and demographics. Finally, using many of those same analytics, engagement needs to be quantified to determine the success of our communication and media strategy and to tweak it as necessary. Put all of these elements together, and you’ve got a winning viral marketing program; if any one is missing, you’ll miss the mark.

Viral social media is what it’s become. Twitter, at first a place to tell everyone what you ate for breakfast is now a place to promote yourself, your company or your product.” (Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media retrieved from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/organized-chaos-2/)