[herawaq]

Most online will be familiar with the term viral. It is mainly applied to videos on youtube that get a lot of hits within a short period of time.
There is an article that explores the science of making a video go viral. But most video's that do go viral have an element of entertainment involved in them, however the kony video this year which is also discussed in the article showed that serious material can also go viral.

I have noticed of late that although Islamic material do not get picked up by many of the mainstream news they still achieve relatively good success rates in how much they are spread and then viewed/read/watched.

Unfortunately the objective is a double edged sword since the intention has somewhat drifted from the objective whereby dawah was about changing the life of the individual and not just a counter of how many times a person has viewed, nonetheless we should have a positive outlook and think that the more people that do view is a sign of a positive impact although not always measurable.

Here is a few methods I would like to outline in attempting to make Islamic content go viral:

The least understood and the least common denominator is SMS. SMS has no relation to online marketing how is possibly one of the most effective.

You see it most effective when you get those SMS to vote online to stop some banning of a vote against something in a certain country or a law will be passed against Muslim. A flood of text message go out and when you go online you see that there are 1,000,000's of signatures already. Now granted that the subject matter is important, but if a person puts the effort in he/she depending on where in the world they are can gather a few hundred numbers in their contact list. And even if you do not have a few hundred as long as you end the message with a call to action to pass on the message it can often go viral.

Now you can not use this method continuously so what you want to make sure is that were you direct the person to go online to see the material there has to be a 'list building' method. It can not be emphasized how important it is to capture a list of emails of as many people as possible.

If you are intending to promote a video you should embed that video in a website and let them view the video on the website and then ask then to sign up to a list. Statistically more people have email then an account with any other type of site i.e. youtube. So it is far easier to get them to provide their email and then every time you release a video you email to let them know, then ask them to subscribe to the video also. Or you could do both when they first see the video by asking them to subscribe to the video and the email list. But know that most people find it easiest to hand over their email, also the benefit is that you can communicate with them without a video i.e. just a plain text email.

It is important to create a strategy and funnel you audience. If you can acquire a list of 100,000 people then you can work off the average conversion rate of 3-4% that will view/read/ your material. This equates to 3000- 4000, it is this core audience that will assist in pushing the material further.

Connecting with those who have blogs, twitter accounts and other social media audiences.

Try to connect with all the above. Find other people who collectively have a large presence online and build a rapport. Try to aim for an audience collectively of 100,000. I once made a comment on MuslimMatters and they asked if I wanted to do a blog post. Therefore do not be surprised how easy it is to connect with people who have an audience. Once the connection is made and strengthened then proceed to create one compelling piece of material that they will be happy to promote on your behalf. This will not be your usual material since the objective is to get their audience to sign up to your material to come in the future. And since everyone's audience base is different you would have to be general in this approach. If you have the resources then you can create of piece of material for each audience i.e. a guest blog post.

However I feel one piece of material that is general enough but of outstanding quality will suffice since you just want them to tweet or write a small article that redirects their audience base.

VIP mailing list - What would work exceptionally well but does I have yet to see is a collection of content creators working amongst themselves in cross collaboration.

blogher.com is a site that collaborates all the blogs written by moms into one single network that provides cross promotion. The intention is to allow visitors to find a vast array of articles written by different moms that you would not normally find. Therefore using the similar pretence creators of Islamic content should unite and develop a single distribution network. Once site that shows content from all the other websites but at the same time the others sites encourages all their visitors to sign up to the network to be notified about new content. A digest email can be sent out on a daily basis for the audience to see all the latest content.

Some innovations to this should encourage content creators to cross promote by socially sharing material from other sites, thus not only is the network sharing the material but also the website owners. Sharing could include bookmarking on 3rd party site, tweeting an article, etc. Fun elements can be developed by providing badges to put on sites that give points to a site owner for the more material that is shared.

I believe there is great potential for Islamic content to become more constructive in how they can be distributed to gather a more audience base.

I think it is time that great content that is produced gets better distribution across the web. The most important think that we can achieve is to avoid contamination of the Muslim mind with all the material that is out there.

In conclusion it is important to get a wide reach with the best possible material. But I see that a lot of the best material does not get a wide audience due to a lack of marketing skills. If we can improve this inshAllah then content on sites like deoband.org, hikmah.co.uk, etc can reach a far wider audience base.