The three pieces I used are the book Advanced social media marketing how to lead, launch, and manage a successful social media program by Tom Funk, an article from the New York Times “From viral video to Billboard 100” by Jenna Wortham, and viral marketing for utilitarian products by Christian Schulze. These three pieces all contribute to my project because they explain the use of virality and social media in business practices and means to become successful. The book by Tom Funk has a lot of great ideas that answers many research questions I have proposed. Funk explores the different platforms that use advertisement on social media. Many platforms make a lot of money through he uses of ads to which companies pay to have their ad published on the site. There even is a section for Facebook which arguably makes their bulk of money off ads and who were in recent discussion on court about certain ad pop ups. As well as this Tom gives your insight on campaigns that you yourself can run that many of these huge platforms use. This all ties to my research because a lot of what I am asking is how social media platforms make money and how business use these viral tactics to become successful like these platforms. The article speaks about an old video on YouTube about an interview of a man speaking on a recent burglary. That video itself was a viral hit and caught the attention of many talk show hosts and memes. A quartet of musicians in Brooklyn saw an opportunity to take this funny video and produce a song from the man. With the help of some software editing the band was able to create a parody of the song called “Bed Intruder Song”. what followed from this song was that it became a hit as it sold 91,000 copies on iTunes, more than 16 million views on YouTube, and reached number 39 on the iTunes singles chart. This example is the epitome of my research because it shows that virality can equal success. In this case as a song it reached no. 89 onto billboard’s hot 100 as it was ahead of many famous artists like Katy Perry and Usher. Here virality was used to help this band become successful reaching heights they never thought they would achieve. Virality does not always mean success but here we see that people are able to no matter the platform. In the database it speaks more on Facebooks use on viral media and advertisement but from all sources each find a way to explain practices from business that you did not even realize they use. The big picture is that there are many ways to manipulate virality and social media to benefit your business and it’s a tool everyone should explore as the world becomes more digital.
A Blogs@Baruch site
