Are you a “viral star”? Conceptualizing and modeling inter-media virality

The spread of social media has meant that user-generated content (UGC) has become an important form of communication. Most of the previous research in social media has concentrated on analyzing message virality, or the causes of why certain messages go viral. We posit that accounting for media virality, a phenomenon where messages are transferred beyond the original media they were carried in, has become imperative. In this article, we argue that media virality is a function of product characteristics and propose a framework for capturing this type of virality using just two dimensions, the inter-media elasticity and inter-media duration, together referred to as an entity’s inter-media reactivity (IMR). We illustrate the application of our concept using data on movie stars across several media. We calculate the IMR for each star and demonstrate how media virality differs across each; we also analyze the star-specific characteristics that drive media virality. Subsequently, we use the IMR of individual stars as a predictive variable to forecast the performance of their movies. Our research thus provides a theoretical contribution to the literature by exploring media virality while also providing several managerially relevant substantive insights about the motion picture industry.