Every client will at some point ask us to help them get “buzz” or to make something go viral. We always say that we can’t make something go viral, but we can study things that have and figure out what nerve it hit or wave it rode to go viral. Medline, a medical supply company, did that two years ago with their “Pink Glove Dance” promoting breast cancer awareness month. Since then, the video has received over 13 million views on YouTube and blossomed into a full blown national contest that is a big part of October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month activities. This is a great example of the organic way something went from being viral to becoming a funded marketing campaign.

Here’s the video that started it all in 2009

The top three winners will receive donations to a breast cancer charity of their choice.  The amounts of the donations are $10,000 for first place, $5,000 for second place and $2,000 for third place.

They hit a nerve. The Susan G. Komen Foundation is helping raise awareness about breast cancer and the pink ribbon campaign, first launched in 1991, is wildly successful. Having worked in the healthcare industry for years, I carry around a bag of pink ribbons every October and hand them out while reminding everyone I talk to–airport ticket counter staff, waitstaff, grocery store clerks and clients, to get your routine mammograms!

More than half a million votes have been cast so far for the 139 videos competing in the “Pink Glove Dance” national contest. The competition features more than 17,000 people from across the country — from hospital CEOs showing “moves like Jagger” and a fire chief bringing new meaning to fireworks by shaking his groove thing to Katy Perry’s hit song — all dancing in pink gloves in the name of breast cancer awareness.

The videos are popular on YouTube and being shared across facebook pages. This online activism is helping to both raise awareness for women to get their routine mammograms and raising money to find treatment and a cure for breast cancer.

Social media has made it easy for people to just share a video on their facebook wall or tweet about a video or message relating to a cause. These online messages are a powerful part of a campaign and are not “just” status updates of “likes” or even votes for videos. A 2010 study shows that online activists are just as likely to donate money to a cause as those appearing in these videos.

The campaign combines the unexpected–doctors and nurses dancing–with humor (doctors and nurses dancing and lip-synching) with the emotional (videos including breast cancer survivors) and an uplifting message of hope through these videos. It is a perfect example of how the seed of one moment online can become a movement that creates a “sharable” event online.

Two years later, the sequel video shows 4,000 healthcare workers and breast cancer survivors from all over the United States and Canada.