viral | David Lee King

I Went Viral on TikTok!

April 6, 2021 By David Lee King

@davidleeking
Thawing out my fingers – #raynaudssyndrome is weird! #coldhands
♬ Drive Forever – Remix – Sergio Valentino

Yes – I have a TikTok account – trying to figure it out! And … a few weeks ago, I actually went viral on Tiktok!

What happened? I posted a short video of a weird thing my fingers do (Raynaud’s disease – in my case, it’s harmless and just a bit annoying). It looks a little strange visually, so I posted a short video, showing what I do to get circulation back into my fingers. I thought someone might find it interesting.

Well. I was correct about that! My TikTok videos don’t generally get watched all that much (up to now, my most “popular” video had been watched around 650 times). Hey – I’m a middle-aged dad on TikTok – not exactly the target audience.

I hit that that many within an hour after posting. Within 5 hours, it had been watched over 194,000 times. As of today (about 2 weeks later), it’s been viewed over 204,400 times.

It’s been really interesting to watch what happens when something this immediate (Tiktok can be very in-the-moment immediate) starts getting viewed a lot.

Side effects of one video going viral:

My other videos got watched. People visited my profile page and watched some of my other videos.
I gained more followers – about 100 more.
I received a LOT of comments on that video.
I reached 2 out of the 3 requirements to turn on the TikTok Creator Fund (a way to earn money using TikTok). There’s no way I’ll reach 10,000 followers, so not gonna happen. But still, I did get “at least 100,000 video views in the last 30 days.” And I’m over 18, so I nailed that requirement.

Why did my video go viral?

It was a very short video – those play better on TikTok.
Slightly weird, quirky content (my strange fingers)
Accidental clickbait labeling (see below)

Accidental clickbait labels – some people misunderstood the labeling on my video. That labeling said “Thawing my Fingers.” From that, some people thought I had frostbite, and was “thawing my fingers” the wrong way. I received a lot of comments about that, even though I said what was going on in the video description and in the hashtags. Apparently that helped keep my video showing up in the For You page of the TikTok app (that’s my guess at what happened with TikTok’s algorithm, anyway).

That type of “accidental viral video” has happened to me once before with a YouTube video. My video titled “Learning Blues harp” … was just a video of me, documenting that I was learning how to play harmonica (blues harp). But some people thought I was actually sharing a lesson on how to play Blues Harmonica (and were pretty disappointed when they watched my video!).

In both cases, that type of slightly “bait and switch” labeling can sometimes lead to more comments and interaction on the video. Not suggesting that as a permanent strategy! Just documenting what I think happened.

Finally, just a reminder that social media content IS important and can get you noticed in the weirdest ways, and can be an interesting way to grow your account. Even after a couple of weeks, my video is still being viewed.

This can also happen to your library content! My library has had a couple videos get really popular (at least compared to our other video content); one is a music parody video, and the other shows off some of our more unique content (fore edge books).

We have also had Twitter content picked up in international news (back when we had a book challenge).

Definitely fun to have your content noticed!

PS … feel free to follow me on TikTok. Mostly pretty random content (sorta like my instagram account). But if it helps you figure out TikTok, feel free. There’s also a growing number of libraries to follow, as well!

Responding to Viral Trends

July 14, 2016 By David Lee King

Pokemon Go Players Last week, Pokémon Go went live at the app store. Within a few days, it had gone viral. And within a week, pretty much everyone with a smartphone is playing it!

I first heard about the game through some Vine videos I watch. Then Monday, I read some articles about it. When I left for the the day, I saw two groups of teens – one group inside the library, and one walking around outside the library – playing.

Then I started sending emails, some other staff did the same thing, and we figured out a couple of ways to respond to the phenomenon of Pokémon Go (my library has five Poké Stops!).

Pokémon Go is a fun, fast-spreading viral trend right now. Will it last? I’d guess Nintendo hopes so! It definitely won’t be the last viral trend to appear.

So – how should you respond to these viral trends? Here are six steps to responding to Viral Trends:

Trend watch. Listen to the news, read trend-watching blogs, etc. They will help you keep up-to-date on what’s trending.
Play with it. If it’s an app, download it and figure it out. I walked around the library, catching Pokémon, and discovering where all our Poké Stops were and what they did. If it’s a book, read it (think Harry Potter). You need to be familiar with it – familiar enough to tell the boss what’s going on.
Alert staff. Figure out if you need to let other staff know what’s going on. For example, I sent an email to our managers (we share evening shift duty) explaining what the game was, and why they might see roving groups of teens with their smartphones out.
Brainstorm responses. Get a group of staff together and quickly figure out some small next steps. You don’t want to spend a week (or two, or three) figuring out a nicely-crafted response. It’s viral, so you will miss the boat! At my library, we did some quick brainstorming.
Actually do something. Out of our brainstorming came some social media posts sharing that the library has some Poké Stops, and we followed that with a blog post on our website. We also discovered Lures, which draw more people to Poké Stops.
Figure out if there’s more to come. It’s possible that Pokémon Go will allow businesses to buy ads/sponsored locations. We’ll look into that when/if it happens.

I love what a church down the street did – check out the sign in the image below. Free water for Pokémon Go players! Those are my ideas on responding to viral trends. What are yours? Please share!

Pokemon Go sign at a church

6 Tips on Going Viral

April 21, 2015 By David Lee King

Last week, my library posted a Youtube video for National Library Week that went “viral.” No, not millions of views viral, but over 100,000 views in a week viral. Which is pretty big for us!

That’s not our most watched video ever … yet. I’m pretty sure it will make that in a week or two. But it is our most viral video to date, meaning that it spread around the web pretty fast, and was reposted in quite a few places with larger audiences.

How did we do it? That’s a good question, and ultimately it’s hard to predict what will “go viral” and what won’t. That said, there are definitely some ways to make your videos better, which will help get your video viewed by more people.

6 Tips on Going Viral:

Start with great content. You have to start with the content. It has to be well-done and interesting enough for people to watch for 1-3 minutes, and then want to share with their social media friends.
Create something that makes sense to your viewers. Our video was written from the customer’s point of view, which helped it be interesting to more than just a librarian audience. This isn’t always the case for truly viral videos (triple rainbow, anyone?), but it certainly can’t hurt!
Have a hook. Or 2. Or 3. By “hook,” I mean have something in the video that catches people’s attention. This video had several: It was done for National Library Week (captured a library industry audience); we used people in our community (captured a local audience); and we inserted a ton of Taylor Swift “easter eggs” in the video (captured Taylor Swift fans).
Give extra attention to audio and lighting. Again, the goal is not Hollywood quality – we are a library, after all! But to the best of your ability, make sure your audio, lighting, and video is good enough that it doesn’t detract from the content of the video.
Use people who don’t mind being “in front of the camera.” We’re libraries, so we’ll probably use library staff in the video, which is great! However – have you ever watched a library video that was sorta painful? Bad singing, obviously reading a script, very nervous, etc? Believe me, I know – I’ve made some of those myself! There’s an easy way to fix that. I’ll bet you have some library staff who do better behind the camera (writing, filming, helping out), and some who do well in front of the camera. Use appropriately! Also think about training staff to be in front of the camera, or maybe partner with a local theater group.
Push it everywhere. We published our video on Monday morning. Then we posted it to our website and pushed it hard on Facebook and Twitter pretty much the rest of the week. We even used a couple of hashtags (#NLW15, #swifties, and #taylorswift) to attract more viewers. All that sharing helped a lot.

If you follow these 6 simple tips, will this guarantee your video will go viral? No. It’s hard to say what will capture the attention of a bunch of people for 2 minutes!

But if you follow these six simple tips, you will definitely improve your videos. That’s always a good thing.

Image by John Harwood

Watching Local News go Viral

February 23, 2009 By David Lee King

We live in a new world. A world in which local decisions made by very small groups can go viral, can be spread by a variety of social media tools, and can even reach global and unintended audiences. We are no longer private or anonymous! I watched just this thing unfold last Thursday at my library’s Board of Trustees meeting.

We Went Viral

By now, some of you have probably heard about the decision my library’s Board of Trustees made last Thursday regarding restricting access to four books in our collection. By the end of the evening, our very local library board meeting was the 7th hottest “trend” in Twitter.

I had decided to tweet the board meeting – I posted play-by-play public comments made by people in the community and the deliberations of the board on a hot topic. I used #tscpl as a hashtag, since I wanted to provide an easy way for people to follow the meeting as it progressed.

And I started tweeting. I took photos of the local TV news vehicles lined up outside the library and a few pics of the meeting, and posted them to Twitter via the TwitPic service (a service that lets you easily share photos on Twitter). Jim Ogle, general manager at a local TV station (and cool tweep at @jimogle), was also present and tweeting at the meeting, as were a few other Twitter users.

Who followed the conversation? Local Topekans who weren’t at the meeting were following. Library staff that worked the evening shift were following along, too. Since I have my tweets linked to my Facebook status, Facebook friends were also following and participating by making comments and asking questions. Other librarians were following the meeting, as well.

At some point in the evening, our hashtag, #tscpl,”trended” on Twitter. What’s trending? “Trending topics on Twitter are keywords that happen to be popping up in a whole bunch of tweets. We measure these topics and adjust them in real-time throughout the day. It’s a great way of finding out what’s happening right now.” – from Twitter’s blog.

And like I said, we were the 7th hottest trend for a while – sure wish I had a screenshot of that! The screenshot I DID get is from my iPhone, capturing some Twitter Trend-watching services that noticed our hashtag was trending.

We Went Global

The next day, the conversation continued, and it went global. People continued tweeting about the meeting and the decision, and I posted news stories as I found them. An AP reporter was at the Thursday meeting, so we made the AP newswire… and we quickly made the USAToday, the International Herald Tribune, and the Taipei Times, of all places. And of course the usual library–related news sites noticed.

Some unintended but interesting sites: two adult industry news sites (found via twitter searches for tscpl and topeka), some book industry news sites, and a children’s rights group. With some of these, I’m guessing they follow a combination of keyword searches and RSS feeds – they primarily picked up the AP story.

The conversation on those sites is continuing, since many of them allow comments on each article! It’s actually quite interesting to compare the local comments on the Topeka newspaper story to the comments on the USAToday story (98 comments so far).

We’re No Longer Private

What’s this all mean? That Twitter works great as a real-time information spreader and conversation starter. That people are interested even in seemingly local stuff. That … yes … even your small library board meeting is no longer private.

The WORLD is watching.