Going Viral
To the best of my knowledge, this was the first anything that ever went viral on social media for me. Last time I checked, it had 48 million views.
I started getting notes from friends…”Geez, it looks like someone took your name off of one of your photos and put it on their site…check it out.” I did. They did. Not only did they remove my name, the re-edited it horribly and posted it as a photo taken on a specific Hawaiian Beach.
I got mad…as in really mad. I then noticed that it had millions of views…and it was going up all the time. I wrote to the Facebook site, let them know it was my copyrighted shot. I then said…let me edit it back to the original, put my watermark on it and you can re-post it. They agreed and it went through the roof. Sad to say, that site is now down and I have no idea how many views it eventually got, but I know it was at least 48 million. Wow!
Last week I heard a disturbance out front of my house. We had a bad night of storms and things were a bit wild on the island that morning. I went out to see what was going on. A half dozen or so cattle got loose from a pin nearby and they were doing a cattle round up right in front of my house. You don’t see that very often in Kona.
I did a 30 second iPhone video and posted it on Facebook. Next time I looked, it had way over a million views…and still growing. Why? I have no idea.
I’m 79 years old. I am not very smart about social media. However, I intend to become smarter. Looks like the right content can go all over the world in a very short time, under the right circumstances. I am determined to learn how that is done…other than by just plain luck.
Here is the link to the round up video.
Aloha,
Don Hurzeler