Reader’s Question: What Makes a Blog Post Go Viral?

I received the following email from a reader in response to my previous post, Jonah Peretti, Founder of BuzzFeed—What Makes Something Go Viral?:

Hi Paul,

Stumbled on your blog via google. Pretty cool stuff you write about! I have a quick question about your article about stuff going viral! Have you found anything about how Blogs can make use of it? How would you go about it? Now that would be interesting to hear!

I am probably not the most qualified blogger to answer this question, but I will attempt to extrapolate an answer from my knowledge of viral media that I hope will be useful and insightful just the same.
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Kony 2012: Invisible Children Gone Viral

On February 20th, 2012 the charitable organization Invisible Children launched a campaign with the release of a 30-minute Internet video on Vimeo entitled “Kony 2012”. The video was released to gain awareness of the many crimes committed by Joseph Kony, the leader of an international (although the video focuses primarily on Uganda) guerilla group by the name of the Lord’s Resistance Army with hopes that this awareness will result in more American support ultimately leading to his arrest.

Despite the video being the subject of this blog post, my goal is to focus on the viral nature of the video and the Kony 2012 campaign, and not to get into a political discussion about Joseph Kony or the Invisible Children organization.
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