How To Go Viral On Any Platform
Crafting Viral Content: Emotions, Editing, and Uncommon Truths - March 22, 2021 (about 4 years ago) • 11:32
Transcript:
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
|---|---|---|
Shaan Puri | First of all, creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling. You've done it a ton! I mean, you built The Hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. This is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog posts you guys wrote.
Also, you're a writer, so you kind of have a process where you sniff out stuff that you think is going to go viral. Whereas for me, I'm not really a writer. This is kind of me just trying to get it.
| |
Sam Parr | You have the "it" factor. I think that you can study how to do it, but I also believe that you can just be born with the skill set. I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both innate—we have that natural gift—and also something we learn and master through practice.
| |
Shaan Puri | Right, I think you've tried it a lot more, and therefore your hit rate is higher. Personally, I just think that. But the question I was going to ask you... no.
| |
Sam Parr | I mean dude you got to a 120,000 followers on twitter in like basically 6 months | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, that's true. So, I wanted to share how this came about because I think this is ultimately more interesting. The rant is kind of interesting, but the way this happened, I think for people who are listening, they'll probably find it interesting.
The way it started was a pretty high-profile VC person called me one day. I had never met them before. They said, "Oh, you seem interesting on Twitter. I'd love to meet." So, we did a phone call, and then we were talking about each other's backgrounds. This is cool.
Then they were like, "Well, what do you think of Clubhouse, by the way? I gotta ask." I think they asked because they had looked at investing. They ultimately didn't invest, and they were trying to figure out, "Am I going to kick myself for the next 5 years that I missed this deal, or is this going to be a good pass?"
I basically went on this rant on the phone about it. It just kind of came out of my mouth, like the way I explained it here, without the whole dramatized TV show script. I shared the reasons why I think it's going to struggle, and they were like, "Wow, that was great! That was amazing!"
I was like, "Shit, I should have written that down. That would have been a good piece of content." So, I quickly said, "I gotta go," hung up the phone, and went to my computer. I just typed the whole thing out. Then I was like, "Okay, whatever." I kind of edited it, took it out, and I did your tip, which is I took a break for an hour.
| |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | just went went and did something else came back and I edited it for about 30 minutes | |
Sam Parr | editing is the magic to everything | |
Shaan Puri | it doesn't matter | |
Sam Parr | If you're talking about a viral tweet, good email editing is the magic. They say, "Write drunk, edit sober."
| |
Shaan Puri | Oh, that's a great one! I've never heard that. I love that. I think Ernest Hemingway said it.
I used to just edit in the moment; I'd write in the moment, and that was a mistake. The tip you gave me a while back was to go do other things and let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes. And that's... yeah.
| |
Sam Parr | And there's actually some science behind it. I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a "shower thought"?
Yeah, of like not doing it. So there's science behind doing something really hard and then not doing it, and then things hit you. There's science behind why that works. So that's kind of what you're doing.
| |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, basically, the brain relaxes in some way. When it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a new way.
So, okay, then I post it and whatever, you know, shit goes wild.
Oh, sorry, the other part that I forgot, which I think is my new thing—it's something I've been doing. I'm curious if you do something like this. Before I write anything now, at the top of every page, I have a template. At the top, there are like seven lines that say, "What reaction is this meant to get?"
I have seven emotions. It's like "LOL," meaning this is meant to be really funny. Then there's "WTF," where it's like, "Dude, what the fuck?" That's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or when people are pissed off, and you want to explain, "Hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening," and people would be like, "Oh my God!"
Then there are other ones like, you know, "Aww," for something really cute, or "Wow," for something that is awesome, like, "Wow, that is kind of amazing."
Wow, wait... did... | |
Sam Parr | I tell you that I do this | |
Shaan Puri |
No, I actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos, Rubber Republic. They had a search engine where you would just search by one of these emotions, and it would pull up viral videos that were based on that emotion. Why is it so smart?
| |
Sam Parr | So, the way to go viral is to always start with the emotion that you're trying to evoke in someone. We already know that certain emotions get more shares.
For example, creating depression or sadness doesn't get shares, but creating outrage gets far more. With small tweaks, you can make something sad outrageous, and that's far better.
| |
Shaan Puri | Right, you know, so it's either amazing, super funny, or really, really outrageous. It's also really touching and heartwarming—that's another one that's hard to do.
Then, the one I had for this, which is kind of like a new emotion, was, "Finally, someone said it." I actually think that's its own genre that I didn't even have in my template. I was like, "I think this is gonna go viral," but it doesn't match any of these.
I thought, for some people, it's gonna be "WTF? Like, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What an asshole." But I thought, no, it's gonna go viral because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking but they've been afraid to say or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it because they agree with your opinion and you state their opinion for them.
| |
Sam Parr | It's the idea of recognizing something that you feel, but you weren't sure if other people feel it. However, you see it on paper.
The same example is with location. So when you see, like, how you know you're a San Francisco bro...
| |
Shaan Puri | how you know you're a san francisco bro or how do | |
Sam Parr | I know, do you know Sean Purdy? Like, if I saw an ad that said, "Do you know Sean?" I'd be like, "Oh wait, that's directed just towards me."
The emotion that you just evoked was like, "Finally! I didn't think I was the only one who thought like this." It's a recognizing... it's a recognizing something type of vibe.
| |
Shaan Puri | And they're really sharing because they're like, "I knew it! I'm right." So they're not saying, "Wow, he's so right." They're actually saying, "I'm right. Read this; this proves I'm right."
This is a real subtle thing, but I'm so interested in studying the psychology around why people do what they do. Why do they share what they share? Because I want to grow an audience, and this is the best way to grow it.
I feel like this process that I'm doing... I'm so glad you said you do it too because I thought I was a little crazy. I was like, "Oh my God, that's what..."
| |
Sam Parr | We used to do... I mean, that's what I do when I start with the emotion. Then I start with the package—like, how am I packaging this? Then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there, right?
I'm always trying to find something that catches my attention—just one fact or one line. So, for example, I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know what reCAPTCHA is? You know, like...
| |
Shaan Puri | when you sign up for something | |
Sam Parr | You're signing up for something that says "spot." Nowadays, they say like, "spot, click the thing," or "type in the whatever picture is assigned, click it."
| |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, it'll be like, you know, "Where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights."
By the way, here's a good example: I saw this meme that was about that reCAPTCHA with the traffic lights. In one of the squares, just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it.
This shows the guy in a suit, sweating like crazy, like, "Oh, fuck! Should I include that or should I not include that?"
And that's one of those moments where it's like, "Me too, dude!" I always feel that way. I'm always confused by this thing that's supposed to separate the password to a...
| |
Sam Parr | I always feel that way. Now, here I can take it another way. Do you want to know when I looked that up on Wikipedia? Do you want to hear a fun fact?
Do you know why they do it this way? It's because people like Google... I might be butchering this just a little bit, but the idea is the same. People like Google are paying reCAPTCHA to translate stuff.
For example, somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are actually helps Google, and Google is paying you money for that.
| |
Shaan Puri | You recapture...
So, the original CAPTCHA was developed by a guy who was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Mellon. CAPTCHA originally consisted of letters. Remember? It was always these kind of script-like, hard-to-read letters, but you could read them.
Basically, they had scanned a bunch of book pages, but the computer was not good enough at translating all the book pages into text because some of the pages were a little rounded, wrinkled, or kind of fuzzy. The computer couldn't do it, but a human eye could easily read them. So, they basically outsourced the work and solved two problems with one stone.
On the website side, they just wanted to make sure you weren't a bot signing up for their service, like a scammer who would spam everybody. But then they also did good in the world because that project ended up transcribing millions and millions of books— I think all the books that they had scanned eventually.
Then, CAPTCHA 2, or reCAPTCHA, is about image classification. For self-driving cars, we need to know, "Is this a bus?" or "What is this?" I think that's where the original idea was: classifying images while letting humans do it as they sign up.
| |
Sam Parr | And the inventor of reCAPTCHA, the second one, his name is Louis von Ahn. I think that's how you pronounce it.
| |
Shaan Puri | he did both and that guy started duolingo | |
Sam Parr | And he, when he started Duolingo, he started it for two reasons.
1. He, I guess, just cared about helping you learn a language.
2. When you are learning the language, you're actually translating stuff that a third-party service is paying for you to translate.
| |
Shaan Puri | so that's crazy so what a genius | |
Sam Parr | the exact emotion that you just had of this guy's crazy that is the emotion | |
Shaan Puri | wow this guy's a genius | |
Sam Parr |
Trying to evoke by sharing that... I can tell that story in probably 5 tweets, and I bet it will... Like, virality is pretty impossible to predict, but I can bet that there's like a 3 out of 10 chance that it's gonna have legs.
| |
Shaan Puri | I could save it | |
Sam Parr | I could say this checks all the boxes to get popular. I can't... anyone who says that they're going to be able to predict it, they're wrong. Like Sean's thing just reached 5,000,000 people. He was like, "This is not gonna work," right? It's a popular thing.
| |
Shaan Puri | Part of what you had there that was good is that you took something we've all seen. It's relatable. Oh yeah, I've filled one of those in.
So, you took a very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is really cool. Like, there's one I saw yesterday: you know Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise; his real name...
| |
Sam Parr | no what is it | |
Shaan Puri | It's Tom... Tom Cruise. Something like his middle name is Cruise and his last name is like some, you know, random name. He changed it to Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name. It makes total sense that he did it.
So, yeah, his real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV or something. I don't even know how you... | |
Sam Parr | pronounce that pronounce that | |
Shaan Puri | Tom Mapother versus Tom Cruise. So, you take something really familiar; we all know Tom Cruise, right? Boom! Here's the uncommon: "Did you know...?" And then it's like, "Oh, sweet! Like, wow!"
You know, that one doesn't have as much shock factor, so it won't go super viral, but it'll get a lot of likes. The closer you can get to that surprise gap between what I thought I knew and what's real, the more shares people will get.
| |
Sam Parr | Yeah, I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I like the book **Made to Stick** and I like the book **Contagious** by Jonah Berger.
**Contagious** is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular. **Made to Stick** is about how to say something so people remember it.
|