Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Sasha Pasulka

Last Thursday, a reader of my celebrity gossip blog sent mean email tip. “A 10-minute clip of the Kendra Wilkinson sex tape just leaked!”she wrote. “It’s so hot – watch it!” I clicked on the link she sent me, andwhat I saw in the video wasn’t an eager Playboy sexpot – it was a teenage girlbeing pressured by a boyfriend to engage sexually in a way that wasn’tcomfortable for her.

“No one should think this is hot,” I thought. “This shouldpiss people off.”
How a Post Goes Viral
I wrote a quick rant about it, titled “Why the KendraWilkinson Sex Tape Should Make You Angry,” and I posted it to my gossip blog. Acouple hours later, several major gossip outlets had republished it, and thenext morning an editor at Jezebel – the “ladyblog” arm of Nick Denton’s Gawkerempire – asked if she could republish it. In the following twenty-four hours,the post on Jezebel had over 100,000 page views and 1000 comments. It was beingretweeted by the minute, and reposted on Tumblrs and Reddit, where the commentcounts numbered in the thousands as well. Editors from news outlets across thecountry emailed me to ask for permission to republish. Suddenly, Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend was a poster child forpost-modern feminism.

My role in this must have come as an amusing surprise toanyone who remembers last year, when I became a talking head for the Gosselinscandal based on a piece I’d written several years earlier called “Is AnyoneElse Watching Jon & Kate Plus 8?” I wrote it casually, after catching amarathon of the show one Sunday. When I read the comments, I was shocked at the strong emotions people felt toward this family, both positive and negative. Readers posted their opinions and passed the page along to their friends, and the simple post became a rallying point for Gosselinfans and foes worldwide (and continues to be to this day). I was interviewed by CNN, Radar, and the New York Observeras though I’d been living in Jon and Kate’s basement for years.

The Kendra event was downright upsetting to the handful offeminists who remembered how my website and I came to be put on the map: Iwrote a piece in 2006 applauding the (first) Britney Spears nip slip that – Godonly knows how – was Google’s top hit for “Britney Spears nip slip” for over ayear, and reposted by more outlets than I care to remember.
A Hot Chick Talking About Sex Is Not Enough to Make Your Video Go Viral (Trust Me) 

Despite the fact that I once taped an exclusive thirty-minute one-on-one interview with the chick from the Mini-Me sex tape, where we discuss, in intimate detail, how a normal-sized woman has a sex life with a man who stands barely over two feet, the most popular video on my YouTube channel is a two-minute clip of me talking to the camera about how I dyed my hair black. The second-most popular is a friendly and entirely asexual chat with Talita Silva, the winner of a reality-TV fashion competition on the Style network called Running in Heels, which I later found embedded on the blogs of young fashion hopefuls everywhere. 

The chick from the Mini-Me tape is a distant third. 

I never emailed the Kendra Wilkinson piece to anyone. Inever submitted it to BuzzFeed or Digg (in fact, its Digg count is a whopping3, which tells you something about the Digg demographic). Same with theGosselin piece. Or any one of the Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or JoeFrancis (blech!) pieces I’ve written that have taken on a viral quality.

What I’ve done is slowly and carefully built an audience thatreads the site daily, that engages in its content, and, when a piece strikes achord with them, they share it with everyone they know. Because it resonatedstrongly with them, it’s likely to do the same with their network. This is howcontent becomes viral.

The pieces I’ve actively designed to go viral? Never, everhave.
“Designing” Viral Media (and Why You Shouldn’t)

So here’s the moral: Please stop running around your startuptrying to figure out how you’re going to make content go viral. I want to tearmy hair out when people ask me what they can do to make their blog posts orvideos go viral. “Do you think it’s good enough to go viral?” they askexpectantly. I muffle a scream. “You can’t do it that way!
Let me say that again: You can’t magically “make” something “go viral.” Anyone who says they can do that for you is lying. And all the hours you spend having meetings about it and exchanging emails about it and storyboarding it? Aren’t going to make your content go viral. Your startup has limited time and resources as it is. So, please, I’m begging you, STOP. 
Viral Strategies That Work
 
What you can do: Focus on building a product with inherently viral components. Farmville was one of the first to do this, and it’s paid off in spades. 
Is there a reason a user would push something about your product to their Facebook wall? To their Twitter? Put a badge on their blog? Can you integrate this functionality into your product and streamline that process for users?
Is there value to your users in inviting their friends to use your product? How can you play off the egos of your users? How can your product help them promote themselves and their interests? These are the conversations you should be having when you talk about “going viral.” These are the conversations that produce meaningful results.
If you’re going to do a blog or video content, make it relevant to your market, engaging, and regularly updated. As cheesy as it sounds, write from the heart, and write what you know. Don’t spend hours link-baiting on a topic that doesn’t even strike a chord with you. (If nothing about your startup’s industry or product strikes a chord with you, consider how you got yourself into this mess and how you might best get out.)
Make it easy for your audience to share your content. I find the oft-used ShareThis widget is overwhelming for the average user. Does your reader really need to be able to share your content on Link-a-Gogo? On Aviary Capture? On PimpThisBlog? What social networks does your target market use primarily? (If you can’t answer this, you haven’t done enough market research.) Choose two or three and call them out specifically with large, easy-to-use buttons integrated with your theme. 
It takes time to find a voice for your company and to figure out what your users will want to read or watch. Play around with ideas. Listen to the feedback. Practice writing honestly and openly; practice writing what you think, rather than what you think you should think. If you work slowly to build a loyal audience that finds value in the content you’re producing, every now and then you just might hit it out of the ballpark. 
Oh, and I’ll save you the time in searching for the Mini-Me interview. I pulled it a few months ago at the request of its subject, who is now pursuing “legitimate” acting work. If you retweet this post, I’ll send you a private link. (And THAT, my friends, is how you make content go viral.)

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