While perusing the interwebs this afternoon, I came across a photo shared by a Facebook friend.
In it was an iPhone shot of a guy on a train and a short paragraph from the poster explaining that she had just spent the past few hours listening to this guy & his buddies brag about cheating on their wives and she was disgusted.
Digging a little further, I found that the photo was posted to her timeline Wednesday, June 5 and by 2PM Friday, June 7th, it had been shared nearly 45,000 times. No, that’s not a typo, FORTY-FIVE THOUSAND shares in 2 days (including me).
What’s even more interesting is that the lady who originally posted the photo has only 59 Facebook friends.
So what can we learn from this? First, don’t talk about cheating on your spouse in public (or even better, don’t cheat).
Second, you never know who’s going to be watching and listening – online or off.
Third, and most important, that social media is an extremely powerful medium that can sway public opinion, take down governments, win elections and out cheaters of all types.
Social media is so powerful that every person, regardless of the size of their network, has the ability to create content that will spark the imagination of the populace and make it easy for people to share with their friends, who will share with their friends, and so on…
More and more brands are recognizing this power by interacting more online and creating online content to try and capture that lightning in a bottle moment when their content goes viral.
While no one has yet discovered the magic formula for creating viral content, this example alone proves that it is possible for anyone to get their message out there and have it not only heard, but repeated.
