3 Viral Video Trends Creators Can Shamelessly Steal for Faster Growth

From “getting rejected on purpose” to comment-bait that actually converts, this episode breaks down why messy, participatory content is winning right now and how to use it to build trust, reach, and sales.

What You’ll Learn:
How challenge-style content pulls audiences into long-term stories instead of one-off posts
Why comment-driven formats outperform “educational” content and how to apply them to your niche
How community-led, slightly unhinged ideas create outsized reach and real revenue

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Michelle Pualani:   / themichellepualani  
Joanna Newton:   / joanna_atwork  

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Work with Michelle: https://michellepualani.com/work-with-me
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*10-Day Course Creation Challenge: https://www.millennialmktr.com/a/2147...
Gabriella Carr TikTok Video: https://www.tiktok.com/@gabbies1000nos/video/7590947570210409742?_r=1&_t=ZT-932qIBRx4PX
Videos 2: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThjttvNB/
CBS News Segment: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThjtp2xB/

Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
01:10 – The “Get Rejected” challenge and why process beats polish
03:00 – Turning short-form content into long-term audience investment
07:00 – Real-time case study: growing from zero with challenge hooks
10:30 – Comment bait, drama prompts, and making your audience the star
16:30 – In-person stunts, community virality, and why silly sells
24:00 – Why bold, unconventional marketing outperforms bland consistency

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Transcript

Michelle Pualani: Hello and welcome back to the Click Tease podcast, where every single week we give you marketing updates, relatable content creation tools you can use in your business and ways to grow your personal brand. Today we are talking about some specific content piece. Is that we are seeing is more like your viral trends, but ways that you can apply them to your business to garner engagement, create more educational content that people actually want to participate in, and how you can continue to kind of grow your brand in the way that we're seeing a huge shift in marketing virality, and tapping in and tuning into the audience that is ready and waiting for you.

Hi, I'm Michelle Pulani Houston, founder of To Be Honest's Beverage Company. We're a non-alcoholic beverage spirit brand, as well as business and marketing mentor.

Joanna Newton: Joanna Newin, co-founder of Millennial Marketer and Agency that helps entrepreneurs create their own digital products. Let's dive in. 

Michelle Pualani: so our first piece of content is by the [00:01:00] creator. Gabriela Carr. So we're gonna give a little watch really quickly to this and respond accordingly. I'm about trying to get, answering all the questions I've gotten about trying to get rejected 

Joanna Newton: turning.

Michelle Pualani: Thoughts. First, do I have all my notes of rejected already written that No, I do not have a pre-written list of the thoughts of things I wanna get rejected from because that is insane to come up with that many ideas.

So when I come up with ideas, I just go after them too. A bunch of people are asking me where I find these ideas to get rejected from. This is a little hard for me to answer because unless you're trying to become an actor, a books actor, content creator, a drug pilot, a travel content creator, and an entrepreneur, we're kind of going after different things.

So the things that I'm gonna try and get rejected from are gonna be different from the things that you're trying to get rejected from. I would say choose areas that you wanna improve and whether there's the goals that you have, dreams that you wanna follow, career or job that you want. Pick that. Find things that you can do in that area to get rejected from.

Three one. Okay. I feel like that's good. So the idea behind this particular piece of content is to be able to pull in [00:02:00] your audience and get them invested in a process. So her entire directive, and now this is not a new directive, this is not her original idea, but she is taking it on this year. So she's trying to get rejected a thousand times or essentially get a thousand nos.

So what this does for her is allow her to ask for more opportunities. See what's out there. Practice being okay with rejection so that you take different risks and better risks in other places. There's a lot of positive psychology behind what she's doing in the actual challenge, but what we're gonna talk about is the look at how you can approach a challenge type of piece, piece of content to engage people, get them to come along with you in your story and what it is that you're doing, and how you can either demonstrate your expertise.

Or how you're dedicated to learning, evolving, and growing within your area of authority through this process.

Joanna Newton: Challenges and [00:03:00] ways to engage with your audience are really huge right now. And I think one of the things that it really helps do is get people to buy into your story, right? They're like invested. They wanna see how it goes for you. So instead of just, oh, here's a tip, or here's how I got rejected, you were saying like, come along with me. While I do this thing and I'm gonna show up every day or every couple of days and give you an update, but you get to be a part of what I'm doing. And I think one of the reasons it works so well is people have such like short attention spans, partly because of short form content being a thing. And I think that this gets them invested in your long-term story. Short you're sharing you, you're saying, I'm doing this thing, but you're just sharing little pieces of it at a long at a time. So it lets you tell a long story in short bursts, in short clips, and gets people invested in what you are actually doing. 

Michelle Pualani: [00:04:00] so a lot of examples of this particular type can be you're doing a challenge for a certain period of time. You have certain days, day one of opening a c, a coffee shop, day two of opening a coffee shop. Or you can do it in parts, right? Part one, part two, part two, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's some really great things about the.

Technical side of this is that not only are you getting people invested in you and now they wanna follow you and see what's coming beforehand, but they might also want to go back in time and re-watch your videos. So if they come in and they see a video that you've released as part 10, which is this example, uh, for Gabriela is.

Part 10. They wanna go back and see, okay, where did she start? Now I wanna go see part one, part two, part three. They, they go back and consume that content. So now you're getting them to spend more time with you, which is really the goal. If you're creating a single content piece in isolation, they might really enjoy that piece of content, but then they go back to another piece of content.

And maybe it's not related to [00:05:00] the topic that you were actually talking about here, or it's a totally different take, or, you know, it just is maybe not what they're looking for. They're not gonna continue to engage with all the rest of your pieces of content. The other thing that I really love about this is because we are in an age where our marketing is more transparent now than ever, or theoretically transparent, like some of it is still really staged, but.

People want raw, they want honest, they want to see the building process. They don't want ju, they don't just want the finished product anymore, right? It's not, we're not in a world where it's like, Hey, I'm at the top of the mountain. I've done all the things. These are all of my successes and my accolades, and you should follow me and pay attention to me because I've been this successful and I'm so perfect.

We are in the age of. Messy, raw, unfiltered, like people want that. And if people can, it's like you love the underdog. You know what I mean? When it comes to sports or the storyline, you love the underdog. [00:06:00] And so when people can get to know you as you're building, as you're growing, as you're moving through that process, you're building more trust, you're building more connection, you're building more relatability, and that's the type of brand and personal.

Side of things that people are just really wanting, that they're gonna engage with and it's gonna help you in the long run, monetize, be able to invest in and be able to grow, build whatever it is that you're selling or wanting to sell in the future.

Joanna Newton: Yeah.

One of the things I'm doing right now, which is directly related to this content type is that my husband has started releasing music on Spotify. So he has been creating music since he was. I don't know, 15. Um, and is now almost 40 and is finally putting music out into the world. And it's really, really exciting.

And we started working on his social media and my idea for him for an easy, repeatable content type [00:07:00] was to do. one of posting my music until I have a thousand listeners on Spotify. So that's like his little hook thing. And we did that for a couple of days. It did well, did well, did well. And then one video didn't do so well. so he asked Chad, GPT what? Chad GPT thought of this strategy instead of his wife. He shouldn't have done that. He asked Cha Bt and Cha Bt was like, well, you know, that phrase is, it kind of like elicits like not having confidence like you are, know, not fully like owning what you're doing. You're like questioning whether or not like people will listen to you and all of this. And I'm like, Dan, this is like the opposite of what you wanna do.

You wanna bring people along with your journey, like make them part of your success. That might be true if you were. Already huge, but you're not, you have like six subscribers on YouTube, so you're just literally [00:08:00] starting from scratch. So I think despite and Cha pt, we posted two posts without that phrase on the screen.

I just put them in the caption to keep the consistency, but it wasn't on the actual video, and they did terribly. And then I went back to the original strategy. We took off again. Got more viewers, more followers, and more Spotify streams. And so, you know, this really works, I think especially for if you're just starting out, right?

We're growing from literally zero, right? And

Michelle Pualani: Yeah.

Joanna Newton: in like a zero stage of just like putting songs out on the internet, building an initial following. But you can see the followers come in ones and twos and all of that. And you know. It's because of that consistency in that story and bringing people in.

So I'll keep reporting back on that as just like a real time case study that we can see how that does and how that helps to grow an account. 

Michelle Pualani: [00:09:00] Yeah, and it is positive. People start to get invested, then they're, they're wanting you to win. It's why that girl who did the smash, it's Ma now smashed, I don't actually remember the name of the brand beforehand, but it was a beverage brand and she. Had to get to X number of followers as an intern for this beverage brand company.

And then she, all of her content was smashing these cans of the beverage and it became this huge viral marketing ploy that was incredibly successful because people wanted her to win. There was a villain who was her boss. There was the hero, which. Her, she had this challenge. There was a timeline. It had all the good makings of like what people invest in and how to payout.

It was, it was, it was beautiful in all those ways. I listened to the song that you sent me, Joanna, and I love that. May is in the end, so flippant, cute. 

Joanna Newton: We recorded that 

Michelle Pualani: It.

Joanna Newton: over a year ago, so it's like little man. She's older now, but it's really sweet. 

Michelle Pualani: That's really [00:10:00] sweet. I love, love, love that. I hope you keep it up. Okay, cool. So we'll see where that challenge goes, but knowing that, that's also a good lesson. You're, you may do 10 of them and then maybe one doesn't do as well. That doesn't mean you pivot right away. You can continue on and keep going, and you never know when part 38 freaking goes viral.

And now everything else does too, because now it's associated with that. So don't give up on the strategy. Okay. Our next piece of content that we're going to watch is from the creator, la la, la. And this is more like, I think, a personal thing, but we're gonna talk about how it can relate to you. So describe your ex as a store.

We wanna laugh and it's just a, it's just a kind of a visual thing of them, like covering their mouths. Right. Um. But if you look at it, there's 2.1 million likes, 71,600 comments. 172,000 saves. [00:11:00] 303,000 shares. Okay? Now, this isn't necessarily from a business perspective, this is again, more of a personal account, but this style of content is really popular right now.

And I don't know if you've seen, but TikTok has a text. Feature that's become, I, I don't know if I missed that at some point, or I'm just seeing it now, but just doing the text on screen. I'm seeing as more and more popular as well with a question, a statement, something that people are paying attention to, or if people are choosing photo drops and putting text on screen, which is also very popular right now as far as carousels go, instead of doing like, uh, Canva created carousels, it's more like.

A picture dump with just like text on screen that's created in app and these particular pieces are. Asking people to engage in something that they almost can't ignore is like, that's what I've seen is that people [00:12:00] want to talk. People want to share things. They want to be able to contribute in some way.

So if you can ask a question that is adjacent to what it is that you do, but can be somewhat controversial or share a particular type of story that's kind of like the tea or drama or anything else, people are on board with that.

Joanna Newton: This does a couple of really, really key things that I think business owners can do. Um, one is it creates a conversation in the comments. So even for people who don't wanna write something they want to read and they want to see the drama and the thoughts and all of the things, right? And when someone's reading all of those 71,000 comments. That video is looping over and over and over and over and over again, and your watch time is what goes into your video getting pushed out. And I know we've talked about this before. People are like, oh, the algorithm hates me. Like, no, you're not making [00:13:00] something someone wants to watch. If the watch time is there, will see success with the algorithm. So like it's creating this thing that people want. It's also making your viewer the star. Of your content and I think so many times, and I fall into this trap too myself, is like so many times I think I need to create something that makes people think I'm amazing. But like, actually I need to create something that makes people think they are amazing or thinks it will help them be amazing, right?

So when you make your, your viewer, when you make your audience the star of the content, they wanna be part of it and they wanna engage it. And then people are commenting on their comment of what they said and making them the center. So now this is just for personal reasons, but there's lots of ways you can use this.

In your business, like maybe you, you do health and fitness, right? If you're a health and fitness creator and you ask people to name the [00:14:00] bad advice fitness creators gave you. Everybody has some horrible story of some stupid fad diet they did where they fainted because they were living off juice, right?

Like people have bad stories, so, and people wanna talk bad about people. So like, if you ask that and you get that, it gives you actually one, the engagement, right? The reach, the engagement. also gives you, uh. Way to respond with good advice, right? Oh my gosh, that's horrible. I can't believe someone said that.

Now I'm 

Michelle Pualani: Yeah.

Joanna Newton: my expertise with you in a way that's natural and organic. 

Michelle Pualani: Yeah, it's creating conversations like you are creating conversations and you're just giving yourself, when you actually speak to your audience and your audience can respond to you, you are giving yourself all the fodder for all of the content creation that you're able to create. From then on, like it's just.

It's a beautiful synergy of what social media is [00:15:00] designed to do. Like you're not talking at someone, you're talking with them, and the more that you can do that, again, the more trust, the more authority, the more relatability, the more that people are gonna be willing to invest and buy from you or follow you or share your content like.

You know, we think about purchasing and conversion as the ultimate goal, right? We wanna make the sale, we wanna bring on that client, we wanna have that student. But all of those little micro yeses along the way are also important. The follow the share, the like, the comment, the clicking through to your landing page, like all of those little pieces are also important.

And hopefully we'll eventually nudge them to that decision making process, right? So. I think this is a beautiful way to be able to ask questions that are related to your niche that might be a little more drama inducing and able to continue that conversation. All right, next and last one we're gonna take a look at is.

I thought this was hilarious. [00:16:00] I laughed out loud. So this was actually on C-S-B-C-B-S evening news. Um, and let's just watch it. We'll watch a little bit of it real quick

Joanna Newton: guy tonight.

Michelle Pualani: Or may not want to steal for your own town. What happened last winter? Lakeview, Oregon couldn't afford that. Clear from all the roads. Hey, higher taxes. Community leaders found 12 local volunteers to for, yes, it's called Bacon. Yours for a 25 donation to the town, and no worry. As you can see, that placed power calls and flower pods and the like, the mostly middle aged and elderly models are still safe for your television. 

[00:17:00] Okay, now, so much to break down here. The main thing that I wanna share and communicate with you is that in-person opportunities are what we see being really successful as we move on these gorilla style, showing up at people's businesses, taking to the streets, doing something in person, silly, goofy, whatever.

And then. Capturing it and sharing it on social media again, is kind of like what we talked in another episode. And if you're not hit subscribe to click tease for these weekly updates. But in another episode we talked about the fact that like that third party content is really, really popular now while you're watching someone do something or talking in the third person about somebody else, even though it's in the context of your brand or your business.

And this is an in-person thing that happened in a town. I think it's freaking hilarious because these are not great photos. [00:18:00] These are not like your sexy fireman type calendar things. This is not something that is like super polished or anything, but people are doing it like. Just having fun with it, making it a silly thing, enjoying the process, um, and having a directive for it.

And then it gets picked up by the news and now it's shared on social media and now the reach is that much higher. And you take a $25 calendar, you've made over $13,000. It's amazing how much people want to support things like this. And I think this is one of the things that I get in my head about, especially about our physical product business, to be honest, is that.

I think I have that sense of like, oh, people, people don't care that much. Or like, this isn't that big of a deal. Or you know, like, oh, well I don't really want to market in this way, or, oh, I don't really wanna be come off in this way. And I just like [00:19:00] want to remind myself. And I wanna remind you as you're listening, is that like.

This is a silly life that we lead. Like do not take yourself too seriously. Yeah, there's a bunch of shit happening out there, but in your business, in your brand, in what you're doing, like you can show up with humor, with fun, with just silly, doesn't matter like. Let yourself be embarrassed. You know what I mean?

Let yourself put yourself out there. Know that you have a brand and a business and you're trying to make money with it, and it's okay to do that in unique, interesting, engaging ways. And if you have commitment to something like these people clearly have a serious commitment to this thing. It doesn't matter what it's, and yeah, some people might look at it and be like, oh, that's stupid, or that's dumb, or, oh, I can't believe that happened.

And there are gonna be trolls and there are gonna be haters. But really at the end of the day, like this is your life. This is your business, this is your brand, and you get to decide how you're showing up [00:20:00] and, and let yourself enjoy what that looks like. You know?

Joanna Newton: trolls or haters, did they raise $13,000 for charity in their community? Like no. Like if you are putting yourself out there in your content and you get 500 views of posts and someone's like, oh, that girl's just like pushing her stuff all at the time. Well, they didn't get 500 views on their post.

Or a new client or a new lead or a new person. Like it's just, it's just silly. And one thing I also love about this is they involved the community, which gives such natural. Exposure, right? Because there's 12 months, there's 12 naked people, and those 12 naked people are gonna be like, oh my gosh, you have to see me naked. Here's by the calendar. And then other people will be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe Fred isn't that calendar. I have to get it. Like, that's crazy that Fred did that. The guy who bags mine groceries, right? Like it just. [00:21:00] Is that intrigue and that those ambassadors. Realizing your audience is your star and not you, right? Because I think sometimes we're so afraid to collaborate or work with other people. Or involve other people because that makes them the star, but like then that makes 'em want to share and be a part of it and engage and like grow that reach. And what we know about algorithms is shares and saves and watch time and comments.

Those things matter. So when you do something that increases that you are going to. Get that reach. 

Michelle Pualani: and the thing is, is like we see businesses close all the time, and it makes me sad to think that. A lot of people operate their business and their brand in isolation, and they just think like, oh, you know, I tried to create a good product and maybe I put an ad in the [00:22:00] newspaper, or maybe like, I'm on Yelp.

I'm on Google. I'm in these places. I've tried. But this is a really unique and like it's for paying taxes, you guys. It's a town who came together to do this. They put out a somewhat nude, ridiculous calendar. The opportunities for what you're able to do in creative and unique ways. Is endless. Like you can really try so much and if you want to have a thriving business, like put yourself out there, do something fun, do something silly.

It's try 10 different things. Maybe nine of them don't work, but one of them does. You know, it's, I think we just think like. I'm a business owner. The way that I do that is I create this traditional content, or I send out these emails and I do this type of newsletter, and I show up to my chamber, or I'm online in these spaces or [00:23:00] whatever it is that you've been told to do for your business in order to market and to brand yourself.

And we get stuck in those silos and we think like, okay, well I'm checking all of the boxes. I've done all the things, but really you haven't, because there is. Everything outside of the box, there's everything that is the potential of like, you know, when we look at content and we, Joanne and I study a lot of content to just see like the uniqueness and the creativity or the wild things.

You know, we've talked about some car places and what they're doing with their content and it's just, it's not related to cars. It's completely over the top, but you have to just appreciate the way that. The landscape has changed and that there is opportunity to do these really cool, fun and unique things.

1, 1, 1 totally random story to share before we start to kind of wrap up this conversation. Is when thinks was coming out, thinks is a really [00:24:00] popular period. Panty brand. And I was reading a story about their farm founder or CMO or somebody who was in charge of, um, they had secured during fashion week in New York, they had secured, uh, a.

An opportunity to basically participate and release and announce and everything else. And so they had to think to themselves like, okay, how are we gonna make this memorable? Also, how are we gonna get publicists, reporters, high influential people? Like how are we gonna get people to. A period panty brand during fashion week in New York.

And so they sent like a ca a casted mold. The invitation was put into this casted mold. They included like a hammer and mallet, and it was wrapped up in like newspaper. I forget the, there was a whole theme to it, like the actual. Like runway type deal. And what they ended up doing was super cool, but the invitation itself, just to be able to stand [00:25:00] out in the first place was this weird casted mold thing that they had to break open over the newspaper in their office in order to get to in the first place.

They could have just sent a random. Or a piece of paper in an envelope. A, they could have done a traditional invitation, but they didn't. And so more and more and more, you'll see the businesses and the brands who stand out because they do something innovative, unique. Maybe it takes a little bit more time, energy, maybe there's some resources involved, but at the end of the day, it's like a hundred generic outreach will never compare to your very 10 specific, unique.

Overly interesting ones, you know, so try stop trying to be bland and apply to the masses and be traditional and like focus on what is that unique, interesting, innovative thing and approach that you can take in sharing about your business, about your brand, about your product, about your [00:26:00] offers.

Joanna Newton: only thing that this makes me think of, Michelle, is will you be making a scantily clad recipe Mocktail book to go with your products? 

Michelle Pualani: The things that I would do if I could. Yes, 100%. I actually, I actually wanna have TBH linger like I wanna have. Oh yeah, I've thought about it. And now you're totally right. Like we should have a mocktail recipe book because that's like, that's, that's the entity of our brand, right, is making mocktails non-alcoholic options, like just as sexy, just as sophisticated, just as elevated and enjoyable.

And so yeah, you're definitely 

Joanna Newton: I figured it 

Michelle Pualani: here.

Joanna Newton: I figured it out for you. So your very creative recipe, mocktail book, be romantic themed. 

Michelle Pualani: Love it. 

Joanna Newton: you're into all of 

Michelle Pualani: Anything

Joanna Newton: many people are into that, [00:27:00] and so they can all be like like friends to lovers. 

Michelle Pualani: come up with, see ideas and how to like. Get them into my business and brand like it is. It's been a thing on my mind. I'm like, Ooh, how could I incorporate this? Ooh, how could I do this? It is very me. It's very on Brandand. 

Joanna Newton: Awesome. 

Michelle Pualani: Love it. Well, thank you so much for tuning in today to the Click Tease podcast.

We like to review this type of content 'cause it's important to stay topical. Now, Joanna and I will never tell you a trend is better than your tried and true marketing principles. That is for sure. But we like to stay up to date on what's changing, whether that's in the algorithm or whether that's in culture and society, and how we can stay attuned to those things so that we can evolve, we can grow, we can pivot in our businesses, in our brands, with our products, and with our offers to match what that looks like.

Thank you so much again, and we'll see you next week.