“When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.” -Albert Einstein

You can’t predict viral marketing. You also can’t guarantee something will “go viral,” then again, neither can you promise organic SEO results to a client. With search marketing there are best practices and analysis methods and tools. On the other hand, viral marketing doesn’t (yet) have these sort of guidelines to produce repeatable and sustainable results.

What we can do however, is to model our viral marketing ideas and campaigns from prototypical characteristics of historically contagious content. In biological…

Just another quick post to let everyone know about the new button I’ve released for TweetBacks, you can see it on an older post, as well as on this one.

This buttons was graciously designed by Jeff at GoMedia who also did the bigger TweetBacks logo.

To use the number-of-TweetBacks feature you’ll need to turn on the TweetStats feature of TweetBacks, otherwise it’ll just say “Tweet”.

To use just copy and paste the code below like you would with a Digg button.

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/rtjs.php?from=danzarrella&title=New+TweetBack+This+Button"></script>

You can also optionally provide your Twitter username after ‘from=’ and the text you’d like the TweetBacks to contain after ‘title=’. If you don’t include these parameters, the TweetBack will just include a shortened link to your post and your…

I’ve been working on a ReTweet mapping system for a while, in fact, I’ve already published some data I accumulated while building it. The idea is to index all ReTweets and map them to each other so that visual display and programmatic analysis can be done on the structure of viral messaging on Twitter.

Now, I can finally publish a rough beta version of the mapping system. Click on the images to use the features. Please keep in mind: this all very beta still, and rough around the edges.

The ReTweet mapper is the core of the system, it indexes ReTweet streams into hierarchical structures that can be displayed visually as they are here. It also allows for further analysis as seen below.

The…

In man’s brain the impressions from outside are not merely registered; they produce concepts and ideas. They are the imprint of the external world upon the human brain.
-Victor Frederick Weisskopf

The premotor cortex is a part of the frontal lobe of your brain. It is responsible for mental planning of movement and sensory guidance of motion. When you hook up a test subject to a brain scanning machine (like an fMRI, EEG, or TMS system) you’ll see this region of the brain activates when the subject performs some sort of action.

Scientists (including Giacomo Rizzolatti) studying monkeys in the 80’s and 90’s found that a percentage of the neurons in that premotor cortex also lit up when the monkeys watched another monkey…

Blogs are my favorite CMS for “going viral.” Cheap, easy, expandable, everything you could want. But when you’re launching a blog and your goal is going to be lots of social media and viral traffic, you’ll need to make sure you pick the right theme. Here are a list of 10 things your theme must have to “go viral.”

1. Social Buttons

Most blogs these days have the sociable plugin, so that there is a list of social sites at the bottom of every post that allow readers to submit and vote on the post. For real traction, you need to do better than these teeny little buttons. Put big, honkin’ voting buttons on every post on your site. For…

While working on NoInternetTaxation.org, I realized the flexible power of the online petition model for political campaigns and advocacy groups. It is low a lost cost tactic that can be used not only to create viral policy-affecting petitions, as well as to start or build on lists and communities for fundraising and awareness efforts.

So I took the code I used for No Internet Petitions, including the Facebook app and the and packaged it up. This way I can offer the full functionality in a custom-designed microsite for other individuals or groups who may want to leverage this powerful model.

If you’d like to discuss how I can implement this package for your campaign, or suggest something I should add to it, email…

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 of links accumulated by stories using the word.

The title checking tool
Enter a title and the tool will breakdown the words and display the effect they had on the link accumulation of popular Digg stories. This tool is good for copywriters looking to find “words that word”.…