Lawyer beats Coca-Cola hands down not in a courtroom, but on a waterslide

By Enrique J. Gonzales

One San Diego lawyer had more buzz on Facebook last week than all of Coca-a-Cola – one of the largest consumer product brands on the planet.

Immigration lawyer Jacob J. Sapochnick trumped the fizzy sugary soda in people talking about him – PTAT or “people talking about this” in the past seven days.

Mr. Sapochnick had 718K unique users liking, commenting or sharing his posts – the definition of “PTAT.”  He achieved this level of engagement despite having a total fan base of only 110K.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola had only 611K unique folks during the same time frame doing the same – talking about its posts or PTAT, a fraction of its much larger fan base of 81.3M.

How did a lawyer from a small office in Southern California do better than the behemoth beverage giant based in Atlanta, Ga.?

Content.  Crazy popular content.  Insanely viral content.  Emotionally responsive content.  Unfortunately, it was totally irrelevant content.

Mr. Sapochnick posted the following simple call to action about a massive water slide, possibly a picture of one of the Schlitterbahn water park slides in Texas: “Would you go on this?”

The results were massive: the post on Wednesday April 9th received 466,155 likes, and 39,533 shares as of Monday April 14th. Most on the engagement came on Friday April 11th with 446K users talking about his page.  In the three days prior to the post, he averaged only 628 users in PTAT.  In the three days starting April 9th, he averaged 179K users in PTAT.

The post, however, does little to support the lawyer in his work.

“It’s not on brand,” said Dennis Yu, chief technology officer of social media analytics firm Content Factory.  “It’s not about a H1 visa or green card, or anything at all.”

Yu added viral content such as the water slide goes viral no matter where it is posted. “It’s sort of independent of where it lives.”

Lawyer's viral post; Is it Schlitterbahn?

San Diego lawyer’s post goes viral.

 “It’s not on brand,” said Dennis Yu, chief technology officer of social media analytics firm Content Factory.  “It’s not about a H1 visa or green card, or anything at all.”

Enrique Gonzales

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Enrique Gonzales