The Vuvuzela Proves Its Power and Goes Viral
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Love them or hate them, right now, vuvuzelas rule.
If you’re one of the few in the dark, the vuvuzela is a two-foot plastic horn producing an incredibly loud, high-decibel, monotone sound. It is the symbol of South African soccer.
Thanks to the power of social networking and 24/7 news coverage, the intensity of the vuvuzela’s sound caught the world’s attention. The discussions to ban the horns from the World Cup set the viral ball in motion, and further gained steam by bans from Wimbledon and Major League Baseball.
Because of the let-them-stay/make-them-go-away controversy, this inexpensive piece of plastic produced huge sales in stores and online. Social media channels ran wild with the stories and pushed the vuvezela into:
- Becoming the ‘first-ever’ World Cup trending topic on Twitter.
- Being the topic of hundreds of Facebook pages, both pro and con,
- Generating YouTube’s latest hoax – the addition of a dedicated vuvuzela button.
What makes viral campaigns work?
A viral campaign is a challenging and unpredictable maneuver. The competition for attention is enormous. It’s easy to analyze why they work, but difficult to engineer them to work. Public tastes are finicky and unpredictable.
In the case of the vuvuzela, the built-in force of the nearly-127-decibel horn was formidable:
- The name itself is memorable.
- It produces an incredibly annoying sound.
- It was linked to a global sporting event centered around a host country that knows controversy.
- It generated worldwide protests and hate mail producing endless press coverage.
Add them up. The toot was the trigger.
Photo: Martin Meissner/AP via The Guardian UK. Sound file: WikiMedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
