A combination of much of the research I’ve been doing for the past 3 years, my “Science of Social Media Marketing” presentation is one of my favorite to give. It combines statistics, marketing, history, math, social psychology, memetics, epidemiology, steampunk, zombies and absinthe. I talk apply lessons from sources including urban legends, rumors, homeric poems and proverbs.
The first time I did it, was for a record-breaking 12,000 plus registrant HubSpot webinar and the most recent time was for O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly was able to get the whole, one-hour talk, (my slides and my narration) up on YouTube, so if you haven’t been able to attend a live version of it, you can now watch the recording.
Please do, and let me know…
If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.
Following up on my last post using TweetPsych Data, I looked at a metric opposing social behavior: self-reference. This time the dataset is well over 60,000 Twitter accounts.
What I found here is pretty clear, accounts that have more followers do not tend to talk about themselves much. Want more followers? Stop talking about yourself.
If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.
If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.
The linguistic analysis engine behind TweetPsych has given me a bunch of cool data points to analyze, so I’ve begun to look at various factors and their relationship with follower counts. Using a database of over 30,000 accounts that have been analyzed with TweetPsych, the first dimension I’ve looked at is “Social Behavior”.
The “Social Behavior” category includes inclusive language like “we” and “you”, as well as language that describes relationships and communication. As it turns out, accounts with more followers, tended to be using more social language.
Over the next week or two, I’ll be posting about the rest of the dimensions TweetPsych analyzes and how…
In the research I’ve been doing over the past few years into why ideas spread, I’ve found a few common characteristics of contagious ideas across mediums and centuries. The list below contains those characteristics, and while its still an evolving set, the vast majority of successful memes I’ve studied have had some (or all) of them present. I’ve also tried to include takeaways, tactics you, as a marketer can use to apply these concepts to your viral campaigns.
If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.
Seeding
The first group of people exposed to your meme are your seeds. They’ll form the initial “generation” and the size and influence of this group will determine…
If you like my stuff (or zombies) please, nominate me for a Shorty Award, thanks.
I’ve given my science of social media marketing presentation a few times now, and one of the points that has stood out as an audience favorite has been a tactic I call combined relevance.
I did a survey a little over a year ago where I asked people why they shared content online, both one-to-one (as emailing or IM’ing a link to a single person) and broadcast (like Tweeting a link to thousands of followers). In both cases the faraway most common answer was relevance. Respondents often said things like “I saw something and it made me think of one of my friends,” or “It seemed right up…
After I first launched the Twitter psychological profiling tool TweetPsych, some of the most common feedback I got was that it was hard to understand the results. So I designed a new reporting mechanism and design to solve that problem. The new TweetPsych uses “meta dimensions” which are combination of related factors from the two linguistic algorithms (RID and LIWC) the application uses. Each of these comes with a description and is represented on a bar graph. Each user’s profile is compared against the average user and the report explains which dimensions occur more or less frequently than the average.
I also launched a new feature for the site. TweetPsych for Lists allows you to do the same kind of psychological profiling, but of…
IRL
One of the most powerful potentials of social media is for it to not only connect people online, but facilitate connections offline as well. 2010 will see an increase in location aware apps and games that blur the line between the web and the real work with technologies like Four Square and augmented reality. Driving this will be continued interest in and improvement of mobile web technologies like smart phones and netbooks. The real world will be important again.
Micro-Targeting and Personalization
Everyone actively engaging in social networking is sharing a ton of data about themselves and in 2010 companies will leverage this information in increasingly sophisticated ways. Micro-targeting and personalization will take advantage of information on individual people to deliver highly…
