Gretchen, stop trying to make #nocializing happen!

I am trying to make #nocializing happen. And fortunately, I don't have a posse of Mean Girls squashing all of my ideas.  But before I introduce the term "nocializing" and why I think it has potential to make it big, let me talk about what I think makes something go viral in the first place.

In my opinion, the two single most important elements to make something go viral are timeliness and humor. Take for example when the refs called a technical foul against Coach K in the ACC tournament finals (Did Duke win?) after he threw his Expo marker onto the court in frustration. Tons of people were tuning into the game, and it was kind of an absurd foul to call (as much as I welcome any personal foul called against Coach K, however unwarranted). Within minutes, some clever, quick-thinking person created a Twitter handle called "Coach K's Expo Marker." The marker tweeted things like, "I don't deserve to be treated this way. Please retweet for all of the abused markers out there." It was an instant hit and garnered thousands of followers by the end of the first half. And then we all know the pioneer of well-timed viral content: Oreo. Its "You can still dunk in the dark" tweet during last year's Superbowl power outage has easily become one of the most-talked-about cases of a brand successfully leveraging social media.

Now on to my idea for something that could go viral. First of all, I can't take credit for the term "nocializing." One of my friends coined it when he took a photo of me and a few others fishing by the pond, only to discover the photo revealed all of us staring down at our phones. "You guys are nocializing hard," he joked. And then I realized how perfect it was.

It's timely. It seems like everybody (or at least our class) is talking about how the iPhone has taken over our lives and rendered us all incapable of living in the moment. I don't entirely agree with that, but I know we've all been in situations with a big group in which you suddenly look up and realize you've all been sitting in silence typing on your phones. It happens pretty often, and its frequency coincides with my generation's reevaluation of the role technology should play in our lives.

It's humorous. The larger the group, the more amusing. Extra points for the more absurd locations, like when we were all caught "fishing" by the pond. Here's a photo I took of my friends nocializing on a roof during last week's burst of warm weather:

#nocializing

See how fun it can be? Nobody's safe. Start targeting the antisocial and let's make #nocializing happen!