Why #Olajumoke Orisaguna Went Viral, According To The Guys at BRI

By Sharon Akinjeji

Nigerians still cannot get over the phenomenon that is Olajumoke, and with good reason… her case is so interesting that a lot of people have been using her as a point of contact for Baba God to #PickUp.

But wait, let’s think about it without involving religion, if Baba God has not picked up, why not just start your own damn phone company?

Viral cases like Olajumoke’s ‘miracle’, phenomenal as it seems, happen around us everyday, we wonder how they come to be, we wonder what jazz the person is using, whereas in the end, when closely observed, these things are determined by certain factors.

Not to totally remove you from the subject matter, we are talking about cases going viral, not randomly hawking bread onto a photo-shoot. Okay… moving on.

 

WHAT MADE #OLAJUMOKE GO SO VIRAL?

 

• The Initial Medium: Virality depends on medium. Ty Bello shared Olajumoke’s story on her Instagram and Twitter. These two platforms are real-time and conversational, which makes it easy for people to share and discuss Olajumoke’s story. Facebook wouldn’t have achieved how fast the story travelled in the time Twitter and Instagram did. Plus who even goes on Facebook these days?

• It featured an amateur/unknown/underdog in an unscripted moment: The virality of stories often depends on a random person, in their own unique way, achieving some sort of feat that a famous person would ordinarily not do, but doing it in a way that people can all relate to.

 

• It was an emotional rollercoaster: Do Buzzfeed videos make you laugh? Does Maheeda make your eyes pop? Does HONY (Humans of NY) make you ”awww”? The if you can understand all these, then you can understand that for a story to be talked about and go viral, it MUST evoke some sort of emotions from the audience.

 

• Novelty: Why would people talk about you when they’ve not already seen what you have to offer before? When you are not Maheeda lol. People like to believe they have seen it all, so to get them to stop, find out and talk about you, your story has to be goddamn NEW and different. A good case in point is our subject matter Olajumoke, everyone can agree that no hawker has ever photobombed an international act in Nigeria and made it to print, but, she did. Unlike this other girl, who showed up on Ciara’s page, her case may have been interesting as well, but Olajumoke has already ripped the ‘newness’ off that story

• Notable personalities with a wider appeal were present – and name-dropped:

This video of Bear Vasquez on Youtube has over 40M views, there is nothing interesting about this video, it just shows a guy shouting “oh my God see the rainbow” over and over for 3 minutes. However this video didn’t go viral until Jimmy Kimmel tweeted something about it. Basically, some ‘influencers’ must be part of your viral mix for your story to actually go viral and reach a larger audience. In the case of Olajumoke it was Tinie Tempah, in the case of Justin Bieber it was Usher, in the case of Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, it was Ray J.

 

Click here to download the full report from www.bhmng.com.