I’ve done a bunch of research into the characteristics of ReTweets in an effort to understand what makes them viral. ReTweets are the first entirely observable and analyzable viral content spreading mechanism in the history of mankind and as such they offer an unparalleled window into what makes humans spread ideas.

Over the past few weeks I’ve begun delving into much deeper analysis than I have in the past with more advanced tools and a much…

I think the most powerful potential feature of a system like TweetPsych is its ability to match people based on their cognitive processes, so I’ve added two features to the still beta TweetPsych.

People That Think Like You

When you generate a profile for yourself or someone else, TweetPsych will also show you a list of 5 users who it believes share similar psychological characteristics. This matching is not done topically, therefore…

This weekend I was playing with a bunch of different linguistic analysis methods to better understand ReTweets, and while I uncovered a ton of cool new data which I’ll be sharing a little later this week, I also came upon an idea I think is pretty awesome, probably groundbreaking, and definitely worth Twittering about.

Communication is a window into a person’s mind, and the way a person talks can tell you a lot about how they think. Linguists…

The internet has accelerated social communications and memetics more than it has fundamentally changed it (though it has altered some of the selection pressures on individual memes, namely around memory retention and expression). It has also, through mechanisms like Twitter and specifically ReTweets, made the exchange of cultural units much more open to quantitative analysis and testing. Through the keyhole of ReTweeting I believe it is possible…

I spoke at the 140 Twitter Conference this week and during my panel Robert Scoble asked me if I had any ReTweets-per-Follower (RTpF) data on users listed on Twitter’s official suggested users list. I didn’t but I realized it would be a very interesting data point to look at.

I looked at the roughly 200 suggested users and compared them to the 200 most followed users not on the list. Since many of the suggested users are the most followed…

Some time ago, I started a survey about viral Twitter usage. I gathered a bunch of responses and then got crazy busy with some cool projects and speaking gigs. Over last weekend I finally got the data pulled into a database and started analyzing it. Here’s a sneak peek of what I think is one of the most interesting and useful data points in my results.

Some users blog about ideas and links they first saw on Twitter and for marketers this…

The name viral marketing stems from the theory that ideas spread like viruses, making epidemiological metaphors and models useful when attempting to understand the spread of memes. Since the goal of any viral marketer is to create a pandemic with their campaign, we can learn a lot from the early spread of Swine Flu. Here are 7 valuable lessons to take away from this virus.

1 Seed Selection

First emerging near the very densely populated…