Viral Video

AHA - Viral Video

You may have seen the video of a woman in Britain who, for no apparent reason, picked up a friendly cat and put it in a garbage can. Links to this video were emailed all over the world, it was uploaded to Facebook and YouTube and the clip appeared on a range of broadcast news shows.

AHA TAKE

Apart from shaking our heads at the cruelty involved – the poor cat was stuck in the garbage for about 18 hours – and the seemingly randomness of this nasty act, there are a couple of things that a communicator can take away from this video.

  1. If the wired in world are interested in something, they share it. Positive or negative, if it catches the attention of a few people, it gets sent on and on and on. I got this video sent to me five times yesterday from people all over the world – people that weren’t connected to each other, just to me. Think about the risk and the opportunity in this. It’s huge!
  1. You never know when you are being videotaped. This mean act was caught on a home security tape. Clearly, the women didn’t realize it was there. Think about how many cell phones are now enabled with video. In fact, it’s our understanding that they don’t even make cell phones without at least a camera anymore. We’re all human and we do things that we wouldn’t want put up on YouTube. What does that mean for a CEO, senior executive or board member? You can’t publicly step out of line with an organization’s values and think that at some point, somewhere, it isn’t going to be discovered and, may be, uploaded to YouTube.

What do you think? What else can we learn from this video?

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