Kony 2012

The viral video, ‘Kony 2012’ is an extraordinary example of the power of viral marketing. It took a day to hit a million views; six days to reach 100 million. More than a million people left a comment about it on Youtube. On Facebook, 11 million people “shared”. The video attracted a whole host of controversy which particularly stemmed from A Canadian girl of Ugandan descent who uploaded a video film of her response to Kony2012 in which she says she told her parents about Joseph Kony and they said: “He’s been dead for years!”

Furthermore, various dissenters argued that the charity, ‘Invisible Charity’ were embezzling money. Whilst these claims have since been proven false, the campaign has largely been discredited especially since its driving force, Jason Russell was caught on video ten days later, ripping his clothes off his back and running out naked into the street.
Whatever the criticisms, the campaign did have a big effect and shows the potential of viral videos.

For example, Anneke Van Woudenberg, from Human Rights Watch claims that:
“Whatever one thought of it, it massively, massively raised awareness of Kony. And awareness is step one in pushing for policy change. We found so much more interest from a whole range of policymakers. I’ve been working in central Africa for 13 years. I’ve been documenting LRA atrocities since 2006 and Human Rights Watch has been doing it since the late 1990s. There have been peaks and troughs but we have never seen the kind of interest that Kony2012 created.

“It was very very exciting. There has been so much engagement from the UN. They’ve passed resolutions. The US was the audience for the video and they’ve said they will keep their field advisers here, which was by no means clear before. The time limit has been lifted.

“There’s still a long way to go but the criticism of the video, which was so scathing and vitriolic and which focused on Invisible Children, has just completely missed the point. Kony is still out there but the implementation of UN strategy is the thing that will make a difference. And it achieved that.”

Kony 2012

KONY 2012

Wow! Two days ago one of my Year 9 students mentioned something to do with “Kony” and that “I would like it as a media studies teacher” during an English lesson, but I had no idea what he was talking about so I asked him to concentrate on the war poem he was supposed to be studying!

That same day at least 5 other students mentioned the name, Kony and I started to twig that this was another example of how the internet has the potential to virally spread something across the globe at incredible rate. If students in Qatar were talking about a film made by Americans about Uganda, it seems probable that many other children from many other countries would be doing the same.

So, I have eventually got my 30 year old prehistoric brain into gear and have watched the Kono 2012 video on YouTube. The video now has 43,354,020 views and I can see the ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ numbers changing before my eyes. There are currently over 1 million likes and over 40,000 dislikes.  YouTube data shows:

	Date	Event	Views
A	05/03/2012	First view from a mobile device	15,056,327
B	05/03/2012	First embedded on – facebook.com	5,975,618
C	05/03/2012	First referral from – facebook.com	5,045,410
D	05/03/2012	First referral from YouTube search – kony 2012	2,729,179
E	05/03/2012	First referral from a subscriber module	1,440,203
F	05/03/2012	First referral from – twitter.com	955,954
G	05/03/2012	First referral from YouTube search – kony	667,356
H	05/03/2012	First referral from related video – KONY 2012	246,031

Therefore, it appears that I wasn’t that slow on the uptake after all – I was actually told about the video on the same day it was published on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. It truly is incredible that the video has reached so many million views in such a short space in time and it appears that the filmmaker, Jason Russell’s claim that “we can make a difference” is correct. The charity behind the documentary, Invisible Children, is already receiving millions of dollars in charitable donations and they have spent over $8 million on media work (25%), offices, employees etc. This is not a one off documentary, the campaign is said to have started ten years ago and a cursory look at the charity’s YouTube page shows that the page started in 2006 and that there are 276 videos.

This is such a great new media case study because it really helps support the ‘democratisation of the internet’ thesis and also it really proves the power of non-traditional viral advertising.  ‘Make Poverty History’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mJU58A9SNc) are perhaps the original viral marketers in the charity world but this viral campaign has taken things to a new level.  Viral marketing is so fantastic when it catches on because the advert passes on from like-minded user to the other, therefore seeking out the audience for free. When a campaign does become popular, it can snowball and is passed around so quickly via the myriad of SNS tools on offer.

Furthermore, thanks to web 2.0 the interactivity levels are so high, it means that audiences have instant access to not only the official media but also comments, parodies, newspaper reviews etc…For example, there is a Tumblr page called ‘Visible Children’ and this has collected critical responses about the video and charity: http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/ . Also, The Guardian has posted a video collating responses from school children about their verdict on the movement: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/mar/08/kony-2012-schoolchildren-video?intcmp=239. The response across new and traditional media has been huge and the debate will continue for the short to mid-term future. However, it is clear that the viral campaign has a shelf life which the charity has acknowledged because they will remove the video in December.