Dive into the archives.
- Link Attraction Factors: Report, Tools, API and Plugin
A few weeks ago I published my Link Attraction Factors report over on Read/WriteWeb and the response was awesome. I also made two tools: a keyword checking tool and a title checking tool.
The keyword checking tool
Enter a keyword and the tool will return data on popular stories on Digg that mentioned that keyword. The average story in my database got 299 links and this tool displays the difference between that average and the average number…
- Sneak Peak of Digg Link Acquisition Report
Above is a little sneak preview of data from a report I’m finishing up now and has been the reason my blog has been so quiet recently. (Click for a larger view).I’ve compiled a database of over 32,000 links that made Digg’s homepage in 2007 (a little over 37,000 total went popular last year) and the number of incoming links each page has. Then I dug into the data and discovered which factors (like time and day of submission, popularity…
- Votrs.com Private Beta Invites
I just launched the new member’s system of Votrs.com which allows you to upload your own avatar and background, and edit your previously shortened links. It also allows you to have a shortened user page that shows all the links you’ve posted to Votrs and their social media voting buttons.
Right now the member’s system is still sorta rough around the edges but I’m opening up an invite only beta to start testing it out and figuring out what…
- 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…
- 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.
- Viral Seeding Services
One of the hardest parts of creating a viral strategy is seeding the campaign in such a way that it spreads father and faster than traditional transmission rates would allow it.
Since the average viewer of a viral will “infect” less than one person, most completely organic viral ads will die out after a few generations of spread.
Viral seeding techniques can be used however, to compensate for low transmission rates by either ensuring a…
- Viral Assimilation: How Memes Encode Themeselves on our Brains
Heylighen details four stages of a meme’s infection cycle: assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. The first step, assimilation, is where a meme imprints its code onto the subject’s short term memory.
Short term memory is encoded by humans via auditory means (rather than semantic understanding like long term memory) by route of the phonological loop. When we read words, or see an object we silently articulate the words or the…
- The Science of Viral Marketing: Applied Memetics
Wikipedia says:
Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.
Applied memetics is the science of understanding what makes a meme successful, which is the core “problem” of viral marketing. The most prolific researcher of applied memetics is Francis Heylighen who, in 1998, published a paper titled What makes a…
- Examples of Viral Marketing Campaigns
The best viral marketing campaigns (when a marketer intends to make something viral) are one of those things that you have to see to recognize, so here are a few of my favorite viral marketing examples:
Hotmail
When Hotmail launched, much of its early success was due to the virality of the sigline that it attached to every outgoing email inviting the recipient to join. One of the earliest examples of viral marketing on the internet.
