Have you ever had a piece of content go viral, but wish that ANOTHER piece of content had gone viral instead? Join the club.
Three examples of unintentional viral content
Here are three examples in which the “wrong” content went viral. Two of the examples are personal, but the first example has nothing to do with me, the Internet, or even the 21st century.
Example 1: Steam behind the wrong song
Back in the 1960s, a singer named Gary DeCarlo was working under the pseudonym Garrett Scott. “Garrett Scott” needed a single, so he was slotted to record a song called “Sweet Laura Lee.”
Because it was a 1960s single, it needed to have a B-side. You couldn’t let all that vinyl on the back of the record go to waste. Any song would do, since it was just filler for “Sweet Laura Lee.”
So DeCarlo and two of his friends resurrected a 1961 song called “Kiss Him Goodbye,” went to the studio, added a silly chant because the 1961 song lacked a chorus, and cranked out the B-side in an evening session. They did it so quickly that the chorus didn’t even have any real words, just “na na.” Actually, the B-side was SUPPOSED to be bad so that disc jockeys would play the A-side:
B-sides in the ’60s were often ad-hoc affairs designed to be clearly inferior to the A-side so that disc jockeys wouldn’t flip the record. The three musicians who recorded this had that in mind for this song, and kept it simple: there is no bass or guitar on the track….
From https://www.songfacts.com/facts/steam/na-na-hey-hey-kiss-him-goodbye
The song “Sweet Laura Lee” went nowhere, but who cares? The record company liked the B-side, invented a fake band name Steam, and the song “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” went to the number 1 position on the Billboard charts. A real band named Steam was formed and went on tour…without Gary DeCarlo (although DeCarlo received songwriting royalties).
Example 2: Becoming the unintentional Shipley expert
Fast forward to the 21st century and my creation of blog content for Bredemarket.
I needed to populate my blog with both content marketing-related content and proposal-related content, so in December 2021 I wrote a post entitled “96 Smiles: All about the Shipley Business Development Lifecycle.” I’ve been familiar with the Shipley lifecycle for decades, but probably not as familiar as hundreds if not thousands of proposal practitioners.
But I’m the one who wrote the blog post about it.
And it kinda sorta became popular. I went to Google on Friday morning and searched for the words shipley 96 step, and these are the results:
So now, right behind Shipley Associates itself, the next leading authority on the Shipley Business Development Lifecycle is…ME.
So now the bredemarket.com website is getting all sorts of traffic related to Shipley, and my Ubersuggest account is, um, suggesting that I optimize the website to capture even more Shipley traffic.
Except that I’m not really doing much with the Shipley process itself; I just talked about it.
Of course, the traffic may have nothing to do with capture and proposal management, since the post makes several explicit and implicit references to the ? and the Mysterians song “96 Tears.”
You may detect a music theme in these examples. It gets better.
Example 3: When neglected music becomes more popular than my current gig
Bredemarket started in August 2020, but it isn’t my first foray into Internet money-making.
I’ve been creating instrumental music for decades, and in 2017 I started creating and selling music on Bandcamp under the name “Ontario Emperor.” While I haven’t created any new music there since 2019, and while I haven’t done any promotion in years, I did do a little bit of promotion back in 2017, going so far as to set up a Facebook page called “ontarioemperor,” which I’ve mostly ignored.
What I HAVEN’T ignored is the slew of social media channels for Bredemarket. Some of you are aware of this, since you’ve recently received invitations from me to follow Bredemarket on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and YouTube. If you haven’t, feel free to click on the appropriate links and subscribe now.
So as I’ve been building up my Bredemarket social/content presence and spending a lot of time on this, I received a notification from Facebook this week that, with no effort on my own, my neglected ontarioemperor Facebook page now has over 600 followers.
So as long as you’re following me everywhere else, go ahead and follow me there also.
Now I’m not sure how much Ontario Emperor’s Facebook popularity can benefit Bredemarket, since there’s little or no discernable overlap between synthetic music fans and people requiring marketing and writing services. But who knows? I could be wrong there also.
Sadly there is no Spotify link here since Ontario Emperor’s music has never been uploaded to Spotify, but you can listen to the song “For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation” on Bandcamp. Coincidentally, I recently posted a free version (with no listening restrictions) on one of the Bredemarket web pages. Or you can listen to it below.
A final thought
So sometimes things you want to promote don’t get popular, and things you don’t necessary want to promote get popular.
Rather than being disappointed, just go with the flow, say “na na” to the naysayers, and speak about Shipley with soothing instrumental music behind you.
Take care of yourself, and each other.
Bredemarket 
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