Dive into the archives.
- The Freebie Niche: A Secret and Powerful Vector for Social and Viral Marketing?
This past Friday I noticed one of my sites was getting a lot more traffic than usual, after digging into the referring sites report in Google Analytics I saw the site had been posted to a large number of “freebie” websites and forums. As of this writing, just under 72-hours after it began the freebie niche has sent over 10k visits to my site. This is digg and stumbleupon amounts of social media traffic here, but what differentiates it is that…
- Another Guest Post
Yep, thats right, I’ve done yet another guest post. This time its over at Jonathan Bailey’s seminal PlagiarismToday blog and its about the futility of resisting communal recreation, and the value in embracing it.
- McLuhan’s Tetrad in Social Media
I found this on sphinn and I wanted to respond to a few points. Its about applying a method of discussing the effects of media change on society by Marshal McLuhan called a Tetrad.
What is enhanced? - The idea of an authority for the collective. When we have lots of people speaking it is the voice of authority and experience that commands attention.
I think there is a subtle difference between what you are saying (the power wielded by…
- Desire vs Commitment: The Viral Quadrant Graph
After writing a guest post on desire in social media, my mind began to wander and out came this:
Memetics teaches us that ideas can be like organisms and evolve, and for these memes, reproduction is attention and longevity is host engagement. The more attention and desire an idea stirs, the more people it is able to infect, thereby reproducing itself and introducing variations. Additionally if a meme, once assimilated into a person,…
- Votrs
I was bored earlier this week so I made Votrs.com. Its like TinyURL meets SocialURL. I’d love to hear what you guys think.
Oh and Stephanie Weingart and Andrew Girdwood have blogged about it.
- The Goliath Effect
The Goliath effect can be found in prototypical forms in both gossip and urban legends.I first found out about the Goliath effect while reading Jan Harold Brunvand’s study of urban legends, a specific brand of folklorology. Brunvand refers to Gary Alan Fine who writes in The Journal of American Folklore in 1985 that “a larger percentage of American legends than predicted by chance refer to the most dominant corporation or product in a…
- What Gossip Teaches Us About Social Media
In the book The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader an article by Deborah Jones explores the female-only oral tradition of gossip. She finds that there are four functional types of gossip, house-talk, scandal, bitching and chatting.
House-Talk
House-talk is the female equivalent of man’s shop-talk: the discussion of work of being a housewife, tips, tricks and new products are common topics. Where men would discuss cars or business,…
- What the Homeric Poems and Oral Tradition Can Teach Us About Social Marketing
When Homer composed his poems his society did not have written language, the poems were first written down about 500 years after their creation. The Homeric poems represent a great example of oral tradition, the body of culture that is transmitted without written language. In this type of environment, ideas and stories fight for awareness, retention and repetition as resources in an evolutionary struggle, the characteristics of the successful…
- What Urban Legends Can Teach Us About Social Media Marketing
The study of urban legends is a branch of folklorology and for social marketers it represents a vast and largely untapped bank of knowledge into the processes of information transmission. Here’s a list of just a few of the extremely useful concepts urban legend science brings to the table.
Communal Recreation
Historically urban legends were passed on from person to person in what amounted to a giant game of telephone with each person changing…
- What is Viral Marketing?
Since its become such a buzz word these days I rarely hear anyone ask “What is Viral Marketing?”, but the basics are always good ground to cover.
Probably the most common definition of viral marketing goes something like this:
Viral marketing is a strategy by which a marketer creates a campaign focused around the goal of causing viewers of that promotion to spontaneously spread it by sending it to friends.
Email was the original…
