Home | Insights | Critical Mass | #IfAFoxWasInMyBed (Mini Viral In Action)

This is a classic example of how a small scale viral can spread really fast within a social network. A peculiar picture of what was perceived to be a fox on a bed started circulating within a social network via twitter after being uploaded to a plixi account. Now here's the s curve magic. A girl tweeted:

"Lets start a #TT #IfAFoxWasInMyBed hahahaha"

Now remember the most important people in any small or large scale viral movement are the early adopters. This tweet was initially retweeted by a few close followers of the individual before the 1st tweets on the topic. These early adopters helped begin the spread and just like that we had the necessary momentum to initiate the exponential growth within the s-curve. This tipped a cycle whereby growth of the twitter topic contributed to growth of the pic and vise versa. Growth of the twitter topic was perhaps hindered by the local time of day, 1am, as this particular social network is English. This also effected the time span of the topic with people going to sleep but even then the picture raked 15000 views in the hour with a considerable amount of people contributing to the topic.

This demonstrates unique ways for you to market yourself. Perhaps the way forward is to really begin to personalise communication to tend to specific social networks, with a series of taylored mini virals as opposed to one generic viral.