13 truths debunking myths around virality

The article shares expert take on virality - the most abused and overused term in social media.

Digital media being the Mecca of marketing now, the metrics of content success measurement has evolved from digits to virality. Thus, skimming off the rich cream from what goes around in the industry, we get you the best views on virality in the social era.

“Whether you’re a politician running for office or comedian or a musician – the more true you are to yourself the more the audience responds. Audiences are smarter than we think; they see truth and respond to truth. At the same time audiences are highly variable around the world.”- Rishi Jaitly, CEO Twitter India

“There are compromises that you need to make, positions you need to take, fundamentally as human beings first and content creators later. I genuinely believe in something hence I won’t work with a particular brand, like probably a Fairy & Lovely commercial and then money does not matter in such cases” - Gursimran Khamba, Standup comedian and Writer, Co-founder All India Bakchod

“There are primarily two things which could actually lead a content to become viral or not- one is definitely the content itself and second is the experience which the user is having"- Shreyansh Pandey, Creative Producer, The Viral Fever (TVF)

“People put out risky content for the heck of it, throw in obscene language, some nudity and sex thinking the content would fly but consumers today are very smart and that’s not going to work.” - Ashish Patil, Vice-President, Yash Raj Films

“I think if at all one has found two-three things as commonality of stuff which has worked in the past, we’ve done a bunch of things outside of comedy. But you don’t need to box yourself in and limit yourself to comedy, there’s a lot of stuff that goes viral like with music or even cats”- Ashish Patil, Vice-President, Yash Raj Films

“In Japan suppose, the piece of internet content that has travelled farthest on the internet is usually sent by a kid with 50 followers, that kid has tweeted a video of someone falling down a slide and that’s got hundreds and thousands of re-tweets or cats, cats are a rage on Twitter. That might not work in India, so identify the taste of your audience” - Rishi Jaitly, CEO Twitter India

“Ideas are a piece of shit; we actually spend the least amount of time discussing ideas. TVF’s code lies in story-telling and that is what we plan to do for another decade”- Shreyansh Pandey, Creative Producer, The Viral Fever (TVF).

“Authenticity is the driving point. So you got to be authentic and have a point of view but there is no fixed formula for viral content.”- Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO, Viacom18 Media

“The process of developing content for us starts with consumer specific content” - Ashish Patil, Vice-President, Yash Raj Films

Industry men, the best in their worlds plugged in conversations that revolved around social media’s sensational term- virality. Thus Social Samosa filtered the tête-à-tête that echoed the room for all their readers to get a thorough opinion from the experts in the field.

The experts shared their thoughts a the EEMAX Global Awards on October 17-18.