Viral, to my chagrin, has become synonymous with social media success. It’s even showing up on business cards. Here are just a few titles I’ve seen of late; viral brander, viral manager, viral marketing planner, viral strategist, director of viral marketing – the list goes on.

Unless they refer to physicians, scientists or CDC employees, titles shouldn’t include the word ‘viral’. It’s often not the individual’s fault, and I know most of them didn’t choose their official roles. But the companies they work for, by and large, don’t understand social media. So this post is more of a constructive critique of the concept of viral than an excoriation of those that employ this terminology or ask people to create viral content.

Consider this an anti-viral manifesto. Let’s read the definition together.

It’s not just semantics; when we employ negative terms with gusto, it affects us and those around us. Michael Martine got this right when he told us to; ”stop hunting customers and penetrating markets – start speaking the language of caring”. I don’t want to be on your target list, and I don’t want to be exposed to your content virus – I mean – viral content. The verbiage we use is often indicative of our intent.

Terminology aside, viral shouldn’t be a benchmark, period. How one qualifies something as viral is arbitrary, but whatever standard they use, it’s typically unreachable. So if your job is supposed to entail creating viral content, more than 99.9% of your time will be spent failing. Asking someone to create the next OK Go video is like asking a web designer to build the next Facebook (and I know people that have been approached for both).  But what really sucks, what makes me feel sorry for people that work for people that yell ‘viral’ all day long, is that no amount of blood, sweat or tears can make something ‘go viral’. Virtually none of the creators of the most popular, homegrown YouTube videos expected their success. But this logic has no bearing on what is expected of people with Viral in their title and on their resumes.

“But if success is repeatable, there is a formula!” Sorry, but no. People capitalise on the audience they attain from their first round of success. Normally, it doesn’t even matter if the second piece of content bears any resemblance to the first, just that it is marketed to the same network. Have you ever retweeted or shared via Facebook a video or blog post that you hadn’t read or watched in its entirety? I have, although I try not to make it a habit. But the content I ‘blindly’ share is without a doubt from sources I trust. In other words, they have established themselves as trusted in my mind by producing excellent content initially. They become trusted content providers. If you are viewed as such, your network will do the heavy lifting once you give them something to spread.

“Content is king!” Not really. If whatever you’re sharing is great, it will be shared more. But if it’s not so great, and you have an existing fan base,  it will still get traction that most young bloggers, video-makers and such will never see with their own work. As Brian Clark, one of the most successful bloggers ever, explains; ”content is not king when there is no kingdom.” People that continue to see ‘viral success’ have not stumbled upon a magic formula. They have created a kingdom for their content. If we keep sharing crappy content with our kingdom, it will eventually revolt (by way of unsubscribing, not sharing, leaving nasty comments), so we are still incentivised toward quality work. There’s your justice.

The good guys still win. Success is still largely merit-based in social media. Trust agents still win. People (and the companies they work for) that work hard to build networks of brand advocates still see ROI from their efforts. They know that all the metrics involved in supposedly calculating viral-ness don’t mean diddly if they can’t point to results that mean something to someone that hasn’t the faintest about social media. They know that those out there claiming to be able to create viral content through some surefire process will ultimately fail. And they don’t sweat it, because they know the good guys still win in social media.

Ian is social media manager at Bazaarvoice.