Does Silly = Success?

During a recent trip to Vietnam, I scanned the local paper during breakfast and was pleasantly surprised to find a story about Toronto, but was stumped when I discovered that it focussed solely on the silly antics of the now infamous “Ikea Monkey”

Frivolous news stories in the media have always been around, but YouTube has brought sharing these quirky stories to a new level of sharing – going viral.  So I started thinking, “How did this story about a shearling coat-wearing Monkey running around a Toronto Ikea parking lot, which made it all the way to a local paper in Vietnam, affect Ikea?”

Did this high level of amusement inadvertently generate the right type of advertisement for Ikea?

If you search links about going viral, you get a variety of tips and tools on how to improve your chances to join the viral epidemic.  There are also several market researching studies availability.  To help share the lowdown on the download, here are two articles that are sure to provoke your creative thinking.

Jonah Peretti is the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed.

http://www.facebookstories.com/stories/1942/essay-13-ways-to-make-something-go-viral

Neetzan Zimmerman is Senior Editor at Gawker

http://gawker.com/5912376/this-is-how-you-make-something-go-viral-an-impractical-guide

Coincidentally the last time I came across an article about Toronto in a foreign newspaper was last summer in Chicago reading a New York Times story about the antics of Mayor Rob Ford at Toronto’s Silly Hall (oops, I meant City Hall).  I will leave it to you to spot the parallels.

Hope my “Free Idea” makes your Friday!

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