I'm seeing more and more "spontaneous" displays of grass roots virals, of course spontaneity requires planning. It’s clear that these examples weren’t truly improvised, but they do show how creativity can be sparked to encourage folks to do great work. The first example was produced by the staff at Gap Store 1604, Roseville, MN. It’s a really clever, car crash of a music video. It’s a hot tranny mess that was instigated by a contest promoted by CP+B and Cheer Factory. It’s quirky, weird and entertaining; and it show’s a very human side to the Gap brand. From an execution standpoint it’s probably twice as long as it should be, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch.

On the other hand the video of a spontaneous group dance routine (is such a thing possible?) at a Micrsoft store felt staged and a bit stagnant. In fairness to the Microsoft folks, the Gap has a much larger collection of stores. This increased the chance that at least one of the routines could break out of the mold of predictable line dances . I’m also glad that they allowed comments and responses (including a fun video produced by a kid in an Apple Store) Good viral crowd-sourced experiences require planning and an understanding of human psychology. They also require a Johnny Appleseed like approach to cultivating great content. Create frameworks for inspiration, resources (The Gap sent cameras to stores as part of their contest) and encourage as many people as possible to participate. For every 100 (or perhaps 1000) attempts you may only find a single truly brilliant result, but the relatively low cost for these efforts should be leveraged to generate multiple attempts. While I don’t necessarily believe in the one million monkeys with typewriters producing Shakespeare approach, but perhaps it's possible produce a Steven King novel this way.