If you’ve seen me speak, or read my blog you’ve probably heard me rail against unicorns and rainbows advice. Going to lots of social media conferences, and reading a lot written about it, I’m noticing a disturbing lack of healthy debate, nobody disagrees with anyone else (at least not by name, in public).
Taking an idea from hip hop culture, I’m organizing a new kind of Tweetup: Social Media Battles.
Each battle will be composed of 2 people representing opposing viewpoints on a social media topic. They’ll each be given 2 minutes to make their case, and 1 minute rebuttals to their opponents, then the audience will decide the winner. Fast, simple and honest. We’ll do…
I’ve done a bunch of research about The Most ReTweetable Words and people seem to like it, but the overall top 20 is a bit too generic for many niches. So I made a tool that will allow you to find the most ReTweetable words about your specific topic.
This tool will show you the 20 most ReTweetable words about any given topic. Simply enter a keyword (like “marketing”) and click analyze. The tool will return a list of words that were found to be related to that word and highly ReTweetable. It will also display the number of Tweets and ReTweets analyzed to generate the list.
Each word is recalculated after 24 hours, and the tool analyzes…
In a lot of my presentations and research, I’ve talked about social proof, and I’ve hypothesized that it has an effect on social and viral behavior online, but I had never actually proven it. So a few weeks ago, I began a series of experiments designed to test the assumption that the effects of social proof and social conformity can be exploited on the web.
In the first two experiments, I split tested ReTweet buttons with different ReTweet counts shown on blog posts. First I compared “0 Tweets” with “776 Tweets.” The results were exactly the opposite of what I expected. After 36 hours, the button showing no Tweets had been clicked more than double the times…
For over a hundred years people from charlatans to respected academics have been studying the power and uses of hypnosis. Two forms have emerged recently as the most well-researched and effective: clinical hypno-therapy and stage hypnosis, in fact there are many therapists who dabble in entertaining stage hypnosis. As social media marketers, there are many lessons we can learn from the field of trance and suggestion, below are 7 of my favorite.
1. Suggestibility
Suggestibility is a measure of how inclined a person is to act on the suggestions of other people. Research has shown that there is a correlation between how suggestible a person is and how hypnotizeable a person is.
Stage hypnotists…
Every time I’ve looked at the contagiousness of ideas, be it online or off, one of the most frequent characteristics I come across is novelty. I’ve found that ReTweets tend to contain less common words than normal Tweets, and I’ve found that survey-takers highlight “news” as the most common type of content they share.
In 2007, researchers at the Hewlett-Packard’ s Information Dynamics Laboratory in Palo Alto studied social news site Digg and found that “novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.”
And Free University of Brussels research professor Francis Heylighen lists “novelty” as a criteria for a successful meme, saying “New, unusual…
