The most successful viral marketing campaigns didn’t start as viral concepts. They were just ideas. No one knew for sure they would go viral.

But we content creators (bloggers, artists, writers, comedians, authors) have many inspirations. Any blogger can tell you that 90% of their blog posts do OK but a few blog posts get massive shares, likes and comments. Why? We don’t always know.

Some people want to reverse engineer success. If we could only analyze the Old Spice commercials and reproduce that. If we could draw the lessons from BlendTec and do that for your company. How many of you have succeeded with that? And by success, I mean AS AMAZING results as Old Spice or BlendTec. Not just “kinda good”, “some response”. Let me know. I haven’t heard of anyone succeeding that way.

But I’m not surprised about that- and if you are, you’re looking at it the wrong way.

Viral Successes Are Inspired

Viral and social success comes from inspiration and creativity. Novelty. ”Wow- what is this? I’ve never seen anything like this before!”

We have trouble reproducing creative success and virality for the same reason there’s a sophomore slump. Outliers are outliers by definition. They can’t all be great. We return to average (regress to the mean).

Ask author Elizabeth Gilbert about the pressure of trying to write a follow-up to Eat Pray Love. She did an amazing TED talk about it. She explained how and why we don’t control our genius.

Do you think Picasso or Van Gogh knew which of their paintings would be most famous? Did they have the power to create their most successful art whenever they wanted?

When we are having ideas and creating, we don’t know how it will be received. We can’t know. We can only create. That’s where great art and great comedy and great content comes from- inspiration.

You Can’t Reverse-Engineer Inspiration

If you’ve ever created anything and waited for that flash of inspiration, or even written a blog post and had writer’s block, you know it’s not totally in your control.

When we analyze and try to reverse engineer, we end up creating a Frankenstein the entire village wants to kill. It looks like creativity, but it’s not creative. It looks like art, but it’s not. It looks like other viral marketing videos, but no one responds to it.

For a while I joked that you can’t just create a viral video by throwing hot women, cute animals, and a guy faceplanting off a skateboard into it. Using the elements of many successes don’t ensure future success. And then Vitamin Water created something very much like that, the following video which includes 8 or 10 Internet Memes:

It doesn’t work, does it? I don’t know about you, but I feel manipulated, like they thought that referencing these memes would be as exciting as those memes were originally. Or maybe they’re just trying to say “we know about memes therefore we’re cool too”. Or maybe it’s just like those Oceans 13 movies that have to succeed because they include so many proven Hollywood stars. Either way, it seems too obvious, like you’re trying too hard, and the video only gets 223,000 views despite having had the advantage of national TV distribution. It was seen by enough people that if it had word-of-mouth power, it would have gone NUTS.

Truly viral videos at this level get MILLIONS  of views, so this is a failure by that standard. And it should be. You can’t be awesome by just throwing in everything that’s funny into one thing. Even if you’re Family Guy, you have to tie them together somehow. Another example- The Heat and the Knicks haven’t won imediately just by throwing all-stars together. The recipe for awesomeness and champions is more complicated than that- and every winning recipe looks slightly different.

Just Work

So anyhow, the point is- you can’t plan awesomeness… not when creativity is involved. You engage in the process of being creative, which has nothing to do with previous successes. You create. You work. And some of your creations are awesome, but most are just good. Some of them suck. That’s the way it is.

If you want to succeed with content marketing, you just have to keep creating. And stop trying to copy or reproduce previous successes- yours or anyone else’s. Accept that some of your work will succeed amazingly, but most of it will not. Enjoy the work. Support the people who are doing the work.