What makes a video go viral?

It's Friday again and it's time to watch Rebecca Blacks super hit (of course for all the wrong reasons) number-'Friday'

Those who don't know the back ground - Rebecca Black, a 13 year old teenage, hit the internet limelights in March when her video went viral on YouTube.  The video was a gift to her by her mother - a $2,000 package by Ark Music Company, that helps aspiring teenagers create music videos (report). Although she must have definitely made up this money from the YouTube views and iTunes downloads her song is getting ( Mashable recently calculated the amout to be more that $60,000), but this comes along with a lot of nasty comments on the video, more than 2 million dislikes on the YouTube channel, plenty of spoofs, a Good Morning America interview, more than 100 million views and what not!

All this makes me realize that if there is anything that makes such videos go viral (by the way, that is another billion dollar question haunting meeting rooms of marketing departments that want a super hit video for themselves post the success of Old Spice, Dove and Will It Blend) - it is us! It is we, the people, who control the social web and make these videos go viral. It's not humor, not kids, not crazy science experiments and not cute animals. It was this massive buzz generated by people that made this song popular, since in my opinion, there was nothing so special in this song and there must be 100s others like this.

All of this reminds we of David Armano's words in his TEDx talk on Social Media, that 'media isn't social, but people are social and social media is just about people.'

By the way, another interesting thing that went viral was was a blog post called 'To Afridi, with love' post Pakistan's loss to India in the World Cup semi finals. This blog post and related conversations has lead to the creation of a group called India - Pakistan friends on Facebook! Now we can say Zuckerberg did something that 100s of politicians could not ;)