Viral and Vital

Vital or viral? It's tempting to pick one, but the real problem is the content nobody would ever miss.

Sometimes when I write these things, a cute title comes to me, and then I try to hang a couple of hundred words off that idea.

This week, “viral and vital” popped into my head, a title that kinda encapsulates the idea so neatly that this article could be a tweet, or maybe just a title.

Or, to follow the analogy of the newsletter title, 1¢ or some pocket fluff (whatever is worth less than 1¢).

Once you’ve written a massive spoiler as a title, you might assume a choice: our content needs to be vital to our audience, not viral.

Cute, but is that simple?

Vital content has depth. It is beyond useful. It is needed.

The greatest litmus test of content: if it didn’t exist, would anyone miss it?

Like when the bored flight attendant tells you what to do if the plane lands on water, the briefing has a narrow audience focus and a need in a specific moment in time; it’s not for everyone.

When that content is shared with you, you might try to ignore it and do something else, but it becomes pretty bloody vital when you can see the Hudson River lapping over the wing from your window seat.

That moment in time when a piece of content becomes vital might not be immediate. It is there for when the need arises, when the problem needs to be solved, and it becomes vital.

And no, it doesn’t need to be life or death. It could be that podcast you listen to on a Friday morning on your walk that, if it wasn’t there, your life would be poorer for it.

While vital is for the few, what you need to be viral is to provide that frisson of light entertainment, instant outrage, flirtation, or some other hotline to the amygdala in your whole audience right now. A quick dopa-hit.

The temptation is to make this a comparison or a choice between two options, being vital or viral, but that would say that all popular content is ephemeral, which wouldn’t be true.

Most of all, it would ignore a third option.

Vapid.

The stuff we do because everyone else does it, the pointless press release, the inside-out content that talks about us and not how to solve the problem.

Who the fuck needs to know that the lifejacket company was formed in 1902 and revolutionized the use of closed-cell foam? We just need to know where it is, and that it floats.

Vapid content is the content nobody cares about. Ever. There is no viral or vital moment for it.

Understanding which of the three V’s your content falls into is a simple set of questions: why are we creating it, who’s it for, when will they need it, and, as I’ve said in this thing more than once, will anyone give a shit about it?

When they are standing on the wing with wet feet, absolutely.