According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Twentieth Century Fox paid a high school valedictorian to plug a movie “I love you, Beth Cooper” in her graduation speech. The idea was to create a viral buzz for the movie. This idea came from a company called the Intelligence Group which Fox hired. Obviously the name Intelligence Group falls quite short. Companies have been very unsuccessful over time trying to mimic situations to get viral buzz. It seems buzz only really catches on when the buzz occurs independent of a companies efforts.

The book Citizen Marketers provides a load of excellent case studies of why and how viral buzz catches on and what it is that creates the buzz. One of the most important factors to buzz is the trust of the community and full disclosure from the company. If you want a message to go viral the community wants and needs to trust the message if they don’t trust the message the community will not only squash the message but they may give you a bunch of bad press as well. I’ve seen a bunch of cases where bad press was the viral buzz that ended up being created and in some cases such as EA games “acts of lust” contest they probably achieved their objective because bad cheep press is better than no press at all and they have created quite an anti EA buzz.

Case in point the Wall Street Journal article while not terribly critical of Fox does put them in a bad light as the speech and video failed to go viral, the school expressed disappointment, and the parents refused to comment. It seems to me Fox would have done better to consult one of there own companies to understand what creates viral buzz better by asking the folks at MySpace what really gets a viral campaign to take off.

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