How does ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Achieve its Viral Outcome through Marketing via Social Media?

Abstract

In this digital era, anything catchy and amusing can turn into a trend or viral phenomenon with the help of social media, reaching out and impacting a large number of people. For example, Harlem Shake meme, Gangnam Style song by Psy, The Fox song by Ylvis and ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The main focus of this paper is to study how the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge can turn from simply a dare game among a group of friends into fundraising campaign that succeed overnight through social media. It is vital to identify the success factors of this icy campaign so that it can turn into strategies which can be applied in other campaigns to produce similar remarkable result of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. For this review, related journal articles which were found through electronic databases were studied and linked to the topic of this paper. The findings from the review of these journal articles suggested five aspects; namely social media marketing, celebrities' influence, online word-of-mouth phenomenon, viral marketing, and right-timing marketing had contributed to the outstanding result of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.