Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Facebook IPO Fail & Bad Virality


If you haven't been following the Facebook IPO news lately, then you may not know that there's big trouble brewing over the largest social media network's IPO. Stock prices have dipped below $30, companies like SEOmoz are claiming a little slice of credit for the problem, and people are making satirical spoof videos already. When a company like this fails big, it's only to be expected that it would go viral.

Virality is a double-edged sword - while you always want to create content that goes viral in a way that gets you positive attention, it's difficult at best to control negative attention once it goes fully viral, especially for larger companies (and people) that are often in the public eye.

Is the virality of bad press a problem? Or is this outweighed by the benefits of having your content go viral? Has your company ever experienced bad viral press?