Meet the Rutgers students behind the ‘Making Strangers Smile’ video that went viral

‘We want to encourage other people to spread positivity’

If you’ve been spending your days on Facebook or Reddit instead of studying, you may have come across a video called “Making Strangers Smile (Guaranteed to Make You Smile),” where two guys hand out Hershey bars with encouraging notes taped onto them to random people around the College Avenue Student Center.

The video has since gone viral and has amassed over 50,000 views on the original YouTube video, 48,000 views on the official Facebook video, and over 11 million views on UNILAD, which reposted the video to its Facebook page. We sat down with the creators Mustafa Hussain and Ahmad Atieh to talk about the impact the video’s popularity has had on them since posting it.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a little about yourselves.

Mustafa: So, I’m Mustafa Hussain, I’m a student here at Rutgers and I’m a junior studying civil engineering. I know this kid [Ahmad] from high school, we both went to Old Bridge High School, he’s the same major as me as well.

Ahmad: I’m Ahmad Atieh, I’ve known this kid [Mustafa] for I don’t even know how long, we went to the same high school and everything, we’re in the same major so I see his face every single day. When we first started, we had the same sets of classes so we started doing these projects together as best friends.

How did you start making these videos?

Mustafa: A year and a half ago we started making these videos, and it was just out of a passion. We put out a couple videos – we have like six or seven videos before this video [“Making Strangers Smile”], and this video is only the second one we’ve posted this year but it got super popular and I think that’s because it had a really good message to it.

How do you feel after this one getting so popular?

Mustafa: It’s crazy because a lot of people have contacted us – German news stations, China, Japan, Taiwan, they all wanna put it on TV. Hershey actually contacted us, and they were like, ‘We love the video, we wanna send you something’ so I gave them my address and they’re sending me something.

Ahmad: They also posted the video on their Twitter page, where they also did the same concept, so they actually did a personal video themselves, and it was nice that they acknowledged it also, so it spread the word on there. One of my friends in Lebanon was also telling us the video was on like three different news stations and this and that.

Mustafa: They were like, ‘you were on the radio in Lebanon!’ And the reason I think it got so popular is because there’s so much negativity in the world right now with what’s going on that’s politics-related, and just to see a video that’s spreading positivity is something people wanna see. And if you watch the video, you smile. It’s just a positive message.

Ahmad: The other thing with this video is that we created it to see people smile. When you see a person smile, it makes you smile, but also, a smile goes a long way. It makes someone’s day, whether they’re having a bad day, a good day, it’s always going to make someone’s day.

Ahmad (left) and Mustafa (right)

How has the response been from the Rutgers community?

Mustafa: It’s been pretty crazy, actually. I created a Facebook page, it had no likes, no nothing on it. It was just me, a random user posting a video, and overnight it went crazy. Everyone is tagging themselves in the video, it reached the front page of Reddit, and everyone’s been going ‘Yo, that’s my college, that’s Rutgers, representing Rutgers.’

Ahmad: It got popular on different sites. It got on the front page of Reddit, the front page of Imgur, and it just kept going from site to site. People in different countries and everything have been sharing the video. When we were creating it, we didn’t tell anyone after. No one knew they were being filmed because if we told them before that we were gonna give them a chocolate bar, it’s not the same, they’re not gonna have the same reaction or feel special.

Was there a method that you guys thought of in terms of planning?

Mustafa: This video took a while. If you watch it, the video looks very neat and clean but it took us maybe a month to film. We were here in this area [RSC] probably every day just to get maybe one or two reactions. We probably gave out 100 chocolate bars because we wanted to really make the video good. Some people’s reactions weren’t as apparent.

Ahmad: And both of us have an eye for detail, we wanted to make the video great. This is going to be the video that a lot of people see, and we have to make it one of our greatest videos. It was one that we wanted to be seen not only for the people on campus but worldwide. We had the idea and the mindset that this was gonna be the video, so we wanted to make sure it was perfect.

Do you guys wanna make more videos like that in the future?

Mustafa: We’re already working on new projects, there’s definitely more to come in the future.

Ahmad: We’re just trying to get more people to our channel first because we went viral off of other sites. We got a lot of views on YouTube, but not as much compared to the 20 million views on other sites.

Looking through your other videos, it seems like one of your goals is to educate people. Is this the case? 

Ahmad: Yeah, it’s more like you’re educating but doing it in a different way. You’re making people smile in some videos, educating them in another.

Mustafa: The reason we posted these videos is because we want people to go out and try it themselves. We wanna encourage people – and if you read some of the comments on the video, people were like ‘I wanna go and try this at my school,’ and we wanna encourage other people to spread positivity, and to have a positive message to what they’re doing. That’s the reason behind a lot of our videos, we want to spread positivity.

Is there anything you want to say about the response you’ve gotten?

Mustafa: We’re extremely grateful to everyone who watched the video. We knew this would be the one to go viral, and just to see the positive reactions from everyone is really overwhelming. It’s really cool. I get so many emails now every single day from people who are like, ‘Your video made my day.’ And it’s just crazy to read that. We filmed that video here [in the student center], right where you’re standing, this is where it happened. It’s crazy that just from what we did, so many people are affected, and just got so happy from watching it.

Ahmad: It’s just a good thing in the end. We’re thankful that everyone’s been seeing it and making it go viral, but we’re also thankful because we see certain kinds of changes being done like people are smiling and are more positive, and we thank everyone [the viewers] for that.

Would you say all your past work has been leading up to this moment?

Mustafa: Yeah. We worked hard to get up to this moment. As long as it took to make, we enjoyed doing it. We’re engineering majors so we have a lot of classes. And the month that we filmed this video, we would finish a class, then meet and film in between breaks, so there’d really be no breaks at all.

Ahmad: We’d finish class and then go straight to filming. All our friends were like ‘Where’d you go?’ No one knew about the video at that point in time.

Mustafa: Friends would see us here with a bunch of chocolate bars and ask us what we were doing and we’d be like ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’

Ahmad: When our friends finally saw the video, they were all like, ‘So THAT’S what you were doing that whole time!’ But throughout making all of our videos, our passion has grown more and more, and it grows every single day.

You can subscribe to Mustafa and Ahmad’s YouTube channel here, and don’t forget to like them on Facebook.

 

More
Rutgers University