eROI NYC Interactive Agency

I came across something interesting today and it made me think about the nature of what “going viral” means and how something gets there. Almost every conference or event I have been to this year spends some time with this question.  I am almost sick of the term, but alas I am here talking about it.  It started for me like it has many times before….I got a link via email. This link was from a web developer in Portland and it shot me to the vid below.

Pretty dope right. A little long but still cool, especially if you are a fellow fan (This album changed everything for us in HS).  What was even more interesting to me than the video was when I took a look at the stats.  The views for the last three days read like this: 4, 1, 30, 13.9K. Today is only half over and it has 10.6K already. So what happened? That jump is crazy. What percentage growth in views is that? (first to tweet @masagatani or email chris@eroi.com the answer gets a beer on me).  The real question to ask is not what happened but how it happened.  The first thing I thought was to check digg…here are the results of my search there and the vimeo stats. I love the comment from the guy who made the vid:

So it got some love from digg. 40 or so comments so far. But that’s not enough right? Right…Around the same time as the diggs we start to see bloggers taking it and running. Here are links to a few of them we found:

solejunkie, 2dopeboyz, thedailyswarm, streetlevel, grandgood, buzzfeed

And there are plenty more that blogged it. All on our magic date July 23. So we can attribute a ton to that. And lets not forget the final peice of the puzzle…..the new link universe: twitter.  I searched Wu Tang Lego just as I did for Digg and the blogs and a ton of came up. Check it:

The original tweet from that search:

Thu 23 Jul 20:31 @outerpublishing:  wu tang clan still aint nuthin 2 f*ck wit through lego http://vimeo.com/5452385 http://vimeo.com/5439960 – all u 90s babies respect da gods

So there it is the perfect storm on the 23rd that created the traffic boast. A lightning storm of email, blogs, digg, and twitter.  Let’s call it Perfect Storm Viral. Of course I am leaving out a ton of other entry points but leave a comment….What am I missing? What else could have contributed to the spike? And for the real Wu fans, didn’t he do a great job capturing the feel of the real video?