If you’re hoping for your latest content to go viral, it has to do one thing: evoke strong emotion. Key word there is “strong”. If someone lightly laughs at something, or is slightly inspired, that doesn’t make them jump to the “share” button. It has to be to the level of awesome. Awesomely funny, upsetting, uplifting, offensive, whatever the emotion is–it has to hit it hard. P&G’s Olympics ad is doing that–to the tune of 5.4 million views. Your latest blog post on why you like your company’s product isn’t doing that.

Someone recently sent me their viral video. They actually called it that. It had 2,000 views, which is more than a lot of videos out there, until you realize that they sent the video out to a subscriber base of over a million people. That’s not viral; that stinks. However, that same video being emailed to 10 people and getting 2,000 views, that’s something that has started to get buzz.

You can’t make something go viral. You don’t decide, I don’t decide, the audience does. Asking for something to go viral is almost as absurd as calling your newest launch a “viral marketing campaign.” Really? Your campaign is to get people talking to other people about your company? What campaign isn’t about that? Viral isn’t a campaign, it’s a result of a good or really bad one.

In the middle is you or your brand. When you push out content, it always hits a good percentage of your First Circle. That’s your brand fans on Facebook, your followers on Twitter, the creepy people still on MySpace. It can also be personal friends and family. A percentage of those in the First Circle will always share your stuff for a multitude of reasons. They know you, so there is more reason to find an inside joke funny, they think you’re attractive (that’s a hot logo you got there!) so they always “Like” whatever you share. That means your content can always easily reach the Second Circle. It’s getting the content to spread past that circle that is the difference between viral and spiral.

That Second Circle have little to no brand attachment or relationship to you. They will spread the content based on its own content merits. Once they start sharing it with no brand umbilical cord attached, you know you’ve got a good one on your hands.

When we made Reflections Of Motherhood the goal was simple: to make moms smile, cry, and share. You’ll notice in the video itself there is no branding for the client, Nummies Nursing Bras, up until the very end when the owner of Nummies, Alison Kramer, is holding up the last sign, thanking everyone. After we launched this video and it went viral, many brands tried to replicate it but, among other reasons, they don’t go viral because they make it a commercial right out of the gate. It opens with a logo, their logo is plastered throughout, just to remind you that “this feeling is brought to you by us!” People don’t share commercials, they share emotions. With over 700,000 views of the video, her company has been written about on every major parenting site online and received the equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars in publicity. Would those numbers change if every sign the mom’s held up had a “Nummies Nursing Bra” stamped on it? The best commercials are sometimes not commercials at all.

The video spread organically versus artificially. Artificial viral is when you bribe or tell people to share something with condition. I can get 1,000 likes on a Facebook status if I promise to raffle off an iPad. Heck, people would hack into their mom’s account to get a chance for an iPad. That’s not viral, it’s artificial. It won’t reach the third circle, but it will tick them off. People have only so much social currency with their friends/followers and if they plead weekly for votes to meaningless contests or invites to apps, eventually their friends tune them out, block their feed, or unfriend them.

The problem with viral is when it spreads for the wrong reason. Once it starts to go, you can’t really put that toothpaste back in the tube. One of the case studies in the Book Of Business Awesome/UnAwesome started off terrible–and ended up making the brand look pretty good. In a viral nutshell, a FedEx employee was seen on video chucking a delivery over a fence and walking away. Worse for FedEx, the package contained a new monitor. Do you know who orders monitors? Geeks.

Geeks like me. If you want one takeaway from reading this: never upset the geek. They will mess your brand up. So the video of the monitor chucker was uploaded by the geek customer, since it was done right in front of the apartment camera (seriously, the FedEx truck was lined up in the frame so perfectly, it’s like UPS parked it). It was uploaded and started catching viral fire like nothing we’ve seen in a while. It had all the elements of a geekalanche: a geek being wronged, a big corporation not caring, and a perfect exposé video. And it took off. Then FedEx did something amazing. It owned up to it.