...that in the last ten minutes you watched a video of cats doing funny things, a baby singing in a car, a puppy just being a puppy, or hopefully the “apparently kid”.

And you aren’t really sure how it happened, but it was just sitting there, on your newsfeed, staring at you, and you thought to yourself, ‘there is nothing more important that I can be doing right now other than watch this cat do a somersault.’

And then you were laughing out loud to the point where your coworkers were huddled around your desk seeing what the fuss was about. So you sent it over to them and before you could count to ten, they were laughing and peeing and sending it to their friends, who are also struggling through a similar 9 to 5 hell somewhere far away, and would love nothing more, if only for a few seconds, to escape the monotony.

And that my friend is how a video goes viral.

Now reading this you are probably thinking, ‘wow, I am a sad pathetic individual who needs a hobby and should spend more of my time catching up on the news or actually do the job I am being paid to do…

But where’s the fun in that?

Sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy generate millions of page views each day and they succeed by praying on one simple thing: human emotion.

A recent study confirms that videos that evoke human emotion have the greatest viral potential. Even though videos with positive human emotion have the greatest viral potential, videos that evoke negative emotion have a higher chance of spreading than those with neutral content. 

Researchers have also found the reason videos with emotional content spread are because emotions are contagious. Just like you can catch the common cold, or yawn after seeing someone else yawn, people can “catch” on to the emotions of others.

With this newfound wisdom, Food Shelter Public Relations has made the conscious decision to change its pitching strategy drastically.

Say goodbye to boring emails and hello to hilarious viral videos laced with subliminal messaging about our clients.