The Force is strong in this Content.

I, like many of my friends, linked to, and shared, the video below today on our various Social Network accounts. I guess we did it for a few reasons:

1. It's funny.
2. The kid is cute.
3. It leverages a shared pop-culture reference that we all (well at least my friends) can immediately relate to.

But later in the day I started to think about this video in terms of content strategy and marketing.

Just before I wrote this post I checked some numbers on YouTube.

This video was posted on February, 2nd - just one day ago. It has already posted some impressive numbers:

• 2.3 Million views
• 605,000 posts on Facebook
• 29,600 links from Twitter
• 23,705 "likes"
• over 3,500 user comments.

Why?

Partly for the reasons I mentioned above. In short it's great content that people enjoy and want to share. And that's the key to a marketing message like this going viral - you need good content that the community is happy to recommend and share.

But also it plays across markets, and across language barriers. Of the 1 minute 2 seconds running time only, 8 seconds uses text that would need translating. There is no voice over to be translated or actors to be dubbed. It's all done through the power of images and music.

Using different media types in this way can be (if you will excuse the pun) an effective force for making your content connect with your audience.