Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange. (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.) I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.
This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful. I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger. Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed. The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.
Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead
I caught up with my former colleague Shiv Singh last week in new York. Shiv is now leading Razorfish's social media practice initiative.
We got to talking about Duncan Watts' research on how trends spread through social networks. Watts argues that they spread randomly, and that it's the predisposition of the network to "catch" the trend that matters most. This, of course, flies in the face of conventional thinking on the topic, starting with some of the conclusions that flow out of Stanley ("Six Degrees") Milgram's work, and more recent books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Keller and Berry's The Influentials. These latter two argue that some people matter lots more than others in propagating ideas, and that these people can be pre-identified.
Watts' credibility stems from analysis he's done, both of large email archive data sets and through large-scale simulations in virtual world social networks. And his conclusion, if you agree, would of course be a bummer for the budding industry of folks trying to help marketers influence social media.
A great article on the topic runs in this month's Fast Company.
My take is that as a practical matter, both sides have a point. I do believe some people, even if just through more numerous interactions, are likelier to spread ideas (though not necessarily yours), and Watts does not completely discount the role of influencers. And, as I wrote earlier in this post, simply spreading your message through an influencer will be futile if it doesn't "tune in" and extend in a useful way what's already going on in the "conversations" a particular network is having.
(See also Shiv's article in Boxes and Arrows, and this earlier post I wrote on Marketspace Advisor summarizing some of the research on social networks.)
Many of us have been wondering for a while when LinkedIn would get around to opening up its API so others could take advantage of its networks of registered users to build applications that could be spread virally through those networks. Facebook has stolen a march on LinkedIn, first by allowing anyone to create a group, and most recently by exposing an API to allow others to develop applications that use its registered user base and networks -- or what they call the "social graph".
Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire, and with this initiative Facebook has raised the "platform ante" beyond where Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had it (i.e., rich APIs and data sets to query through them, but limited networks of users) for anyone aspiring to build a large-scale web presence. My favorite Facebook app, which I think best (most simply) demonstrates what Facebook has made possible, is the "Friend Wheel". When I look at mine, I realize how many friends I still have to introduce to each other! (Maybe what I need is a Facebook app that implements "graphic friendship" ideas...)
Now there's speculation about LinkedIn getting with the program. Folks fret about whether the LinkedIn UI could handle the weight of a bunch of apps. That's a red herring, IMHO. Based on the relative rate of connection requests I've been getting in the last few days (4 or 5 to one in FB's favor), it would seem LinkedIn has no choice.
But what's even more compelling about what Facebook's done, and why the imperative for LinkedIn is even more urgent, is the economic opportunity it creates. Everyone in the network can now make informed choices of apps to place on their profile pages, and a smart platform player will ultimately do a three-way rev share -- some for the member, some for the app developer, and some (ok most) for itself. It will be interesting to see how soon Facebook gets around to this.
Ad networks are hot, and in many cases highly-profitable businesses right now. On the heels of Google's snapping up DoubleClick for $3 billion, Yahoo! bought (the 80% it didn't already own of) 4 year old online display ad exchange Right Media last week for $680 million. So, a logical question to ask is, who buys whom next?
Last Thursday morning I attended a MITX Digital Marketing Series presentation titled "Dissecting Numa Numa: A Critical Analysis of Viral Video Content", given by Jeremi Karnell of One to One Interactive, Professor Jeffrey Bardzell of Indiana University's School of Informatics, and Dr. Carl Marci, Chief Science Officer at Innerscope Research. The questions considered (my version): why did this amateur work go as "viral" as it did, and how (well) can neuroscience help us predict viral media propagation?
Continue reading "Think Viral, Act Tribal Part III: "Dissecting Numa Numa"" »
A while back I wrote down some ideas about viral marketing prompted by a meeting with an entrepreneur who was having some trouble executing a campaign. Today, I came across a really interesting research paper, "Memes and affinities: cultural replication and literacy education", by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, presented in November 2005 at the National Reading Conference annual meeting. The paper is here: http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/memes2.pdf.
Continue reading "Think Viral, Act Tribal, Part II: What, Why, and How Memes Propagate" »
