Dive into the archives.
- 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 Viral Marketing
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…
- 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…
- Going to Social Media for Big Business
I’m headed over to Newton tonight for the Social Media Club’s “Social Media Lessons for Big Businesses”. Two of the speakers have great in-the-trenches experience with this stuff, one is from Walmart and one is “Fake Steve Jobs”.
Steve Restivo, Wal-Mart’s director of corporate affairs for the northeast, Dan Lyons, senior editor at Forbes (perhaps better known as the “Fake Steve Jobs”), and Forrester’s Josh Bernoff will share lessons learned…
