Viral posts: theory and creation

Aims of the tool

- To give the participants an advocacy tool;
- To practice responsible usage of social media;
- To develop media literacy skills;
- To develop the digital skills;
- To raise awareness of, and attention to, a social issue your project tackles.

Description of the tool

1) Present Jonah Berger's STEPPS system that works to make any idea go viral. Alternatively, you reveal the letters, and the participants need to guess what are the words behind the letters.

You can also choose to find several posts or campaigns related to your project that went viral and have a social impact; analyze in what way they follow the STEPPS.

Some examples:
Charles Lister on Twitter: "Last week, a boat carrying ~750 desperate refugees sank off the coast of #Greece -- only 104 survived. Today, a search is on for a submersible carrying 5 wealthy individuals in the Atlantic. Both are tragedies, but one achieved hour-to-hour media coverage. Guess which... https://t.co/1OHRmFbCbp" / X

Amna afshin Ali on Twitter: "June 14 2023: Migrant boat disaster June 18 2023: Titanic Tourist Submarine missing #GreeceBoatDisaster #Greece #TitanicRescue #titanicsubmarine #titanicsubmersible #Titanic https://t.co/3TgU2baTOF" / X

2) Discuss how it can work and what it may mean for each (type of) social media.
Connect it to the previous sessions and pieces of info you have learned during the project.

3) Discuss what type of people/skills are needed in the team to create really viral posts.

4) Connect people in groups based on the skills they possess or the ideas they have.

Give them the task of creating a post related to your TC's topic that would follow the STEPPS and have the chance to go viral.

Would be nice if each group chooses a different social media. For example, you can write the names of the main ones and let a representative of each group come and blindly choose. There needs to be N+1 number of social media in the hat, where N is the number of teams.

Or they can form groups based on experience with certain platforms.

The participants will need to create a strategy for each specific social media (would be nice if you had a session on social media strategy before this one. You can also print or post in the group unspoken rules of usage of each of these social media). They can also "hire" experts from other teams.

5) The participants can work outside for the duration named by you (between 20 minutes and an hour), and post the links to Facebook/WhatsApp groups of your project. Alternatively, they can present their post on the projector.
After each group presents, discuss if the viewers/listeners felt an emotion and whether it was the emotion intended by the creator. Why/why not?

6) Debriefing. What we have learned, what was interesting, what was challenging, and how were the roles in the group split?

7) Closer to the end of the TC, come back to the posts and notice if any of them got any virality and why/why not.