More new Facebook data, continuing this series.

The next Facebook sharing data point I analyzed is the presence of numbers (in digit form, 1 through 9) in titles. In a wide range of marketing arenas digits have been shown to perform very well. They tend to help conversion rates in the form of prices and on social news sites like Digg “Top 10″ style posts have always done well.

The difference isn’t huge but according to my data, articles with digits in their titles tend to be shared more on Facebook than stories without digits. I found that most articles in my data set didn’t use numbers in their titles, and you can see the scale of difference in volumes in the gray bars at the bottom of the chart.

For details on my methodology start with this post, then read the bottom of this post.

And if you’re going to be at SXSW this weekend, make sure you find me and say hello, I’ll have a few copies of my book to giveaway and a couple of ways for you to win an iPad.

Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

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When I started posting my new series of Facebook data points, one of the most requested graphs was the days of the week (and times of day, which is coming soon) that are best to publish on to get lots of Facebook shares. What I found when I looked at days of the week is at first a little unexpected, but upon further thought fairly logical.

While I found less articles posted on the weekends (notice the gray bars at the bottom of the graph which indicate volume of URLs analyzed for each day), those stories that were published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook more, on average, than stories that were published during the week. The reasons for this probably include the fact that more than half of companies in the US block Facebook, so people can only use the social network at home, on the weekends. Additionally, the mainstream Facebook audience does not use Facebook for work.

The takeaway? If you want your article to be shared on Facebook by your readers, try posting it over the weekend.

For information on my methodology, start with this post. For this data point I’m using over 5000 stories and “average” is the interquartile mean which is less sensitive to outliers. The 0% line indicates the average number of “shares” stories from each site in my study get, when the line is above 0% it means that stories on that day are shared more than the average, and when it is below, they’re shared less. If you’re curious why it appears most of the stories in the data set are above average, this is because of the difference in the volume of published stories on various days.

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Continuing my series of Facebook sharing data (if you’re curious about my methodology, read the first post), I looked at articles that had the word “video” in their titles.

It turns out that those stories that indicated they contained videos were shared more than the average story on Facebook, while they were actually shared less than the average story on Twitter. This is likely because the Facebook platform makes it easy to embed multimedia content into updates while Twitter does not.

The takeaway here? Facebook may be a better platform for your videos to go viral than Twitter.

And again, if you have any other datapoints you’d like to see, please let me know. I’m really excited about my new Facebook analysis capabilities and I’ve got a ton more stuff planned for you.

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A couple of weeks ago, I started collecting a new dataset and I’m really excited about it because it’s the first time I’m collecting data from the mother-of-all social media sites: Facebook.

I’ve begun by capturing links posted to social media sites from 10 extremely popular news outlets. Some of the top blogs, both mainstream and geeky, as well as a handful of the most web-enabled newspapers of record. Then I’m counting the number of times those links are shared on Facebook (in three different ways) and on Twitter (through good old ReTweets). I then find the average number of “shares” for links posted to each site and compare the individual stories to the average in percent form and then combine those numbers to get a percent “effect” as a positive or negative number away from the average.

At this point I’ve got well over a thousand links and counting with full information stored. I’m also getting better at retrieving the data I want faster and more reliably.

I’ve already got a bunch awesome of things to show you, so keep your eyes out for more, but first lets talk about “meta mentions.” A meta mention is when someone on a given site, say Facebook talks about Facebook, or when someone Tweets about Twitter. Typically with ReTweet data I’ve seen that talking about Twitter gets you a lot of ReTweets, and this is to be expected since most people on Twitter are into talking about Twitter. Of course with older technologies like email, people aren’t really “into” email so much as they just use it to get stuff done.

So far my data shows that while articles that use the word “Facebook” in their title get shared more often than the average story on both Facebook and Twitter, stories that mention “Twitter” actually get shared less on Facebook. My assumption here is that Facebook is less of the early adopter crowd that wants to sit around all day and talk about Twitter, while Twitter users are more likely to be social media geeks.

The key takeaway is to know your audience. If you want to go viral on Facebook, don’t talk about Twitter.

And since I’m just starting to get into Facebook data like this, what kind of stuff would you guys like to see?

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If you’ve read about social media or been to social media conferences, you’ve probably heard tons of advice like “love your customers,” “engage in the conversation,” “be yourself” and “make friends.”

I like to call this kind of stuff “unicorns and rainbows.” Sure, it sounds good and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, but it’s not actually based on anything other than “truthiness” and guesswork.

It’s the modern day equivalent of the witchdoctor or snake oil salesman. A couple of time-honored adages repeated ad nauseum, coupled with the unquestioning awe of an unaware audience, and pretty soon you’ve got an entire industry made of easy-to-agree with smoke and mirrors.

Problem is, bleeding with leeches and magical tonics don’t actually work. In fact, a lot of the time they do more harm than good.

And then along comes real science–real medicine and real data about what works and what doesn’t. Curing disease moved out of the dark ages and started making progress; now it’s time for social media to move past the unicorns and rainbows.

The great thing about the web is that nearly every interaction can be measured and observed in aggregates of tens and hundreds of millions. We can gather more qualitative and quantitative data about human behavior than at any other time in history. Yet the future of marketing, the very industry that is trying to push communications, business and public relations forward, is built on advice that comes from nothing more meaningful than soft-focus fantasies.

To the snake-oil salespeople, social media success isn’t something repeatable. It’s not the outcome of a process; it is black magic, guessing and praying.

Those of us who are a part of this social media thing now will be the forefathers of the next generation of marketing. We’re going to be the ones who decide how it plays out. Of course, there aren’t any formal degrees in this yet, and most of us don’t wear labs coats. But we need to decide if we are going to leave the future of social media to magical tonics, or if we are going to use science and data to discover what really works to motivate people.

To the scientists, social media success is something you can iterate on, plan for and learn from. Things that work can be analyzed to produce repeatable, dependable results.

The next time you see or read or hear someone giving superstitious, feel-good social media advice, question them. Ask what data it is based on, what science? Ask them to prove what they’re saying.

Most importantly ask yourself: are you a snake-oil salesman or are you a scientist?

And if you look around hard enough, I’m sure you’ll see that social media science is catching on. Its encouraging to see that there are at least 7 people on Twitter with “social media scientist” in their bios, lets blow that number up.

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Us vs them is one of the oldest, and most powerful marketing ideas. Apple is a quintessential example: from their beginnings they’ve portrayed themselves as the small guy against the big powerful bully. In 1983 it was IBM and more recently its been Microsoft. The company turns customers into evangelists who are more than happy to spread the word about the good fight, but how exactly does it work?

In a 1983 article titled “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures” the author, Douglas R. Hofstadter recounts a letter he was sent in response to a previous peice. This letter describes self replicating (viral) sentences, beginning with the rudimentary:

It is your duty to convince others that this is true.

The letter writer notes the obvious: unless the listener believes the statement above, it won’t spread. (Tweet this and see what happens.) He then moves on to a more sophisticated structure where the above sentance occurs at the end of a set of beliefs:

If the listener accepts statements S1 through S99 they will act on S100.This is how many religions work, the belief system is the bait and attached to it is an evangelism hook.

The letter then explores a more subtle variation based on a simple structure:

The villain is wronging the victim.

If the listener believes this statement, and believes that the victim deserves to be saved and if the villain is bigger or more powerful than them they will realize that the only way to effectively challenge the villain is to recruit more people to help. The evangelism hook is implicit, subtle and powerful.

When I looked at urban legends I found a similar phenomenon that occurs with striking regularity online called the Goliath effect. Simply put, people love to communicate about abuses of power against the underdog. Microsoft and the RIAA are favorite Goliaths of the web.

If we want to design a viral idea based on this structure, we have 3 blanks to fill: “villain,” “victim,” and “wronging.” For example let’s look at the title of one of my most popular blog posts ever:

“Twitter plans to Mangle ReTweets.”

The easiest way to make someone believe that he victim is worth saving is to make them identify with the victim, in this case anyone who ReTweets. ReTweeters were the target of this sentence, and given their contagious behavior, they make a wonderful audience.

The villain of this sentence is, of course, Twitter. They may not be a huge company, but they’re larger and more powerful in this area than any individual user. The only way someone could hope to #saveretweets would be to recruit all of their followers in the fight.

In the post I spent considerable time asserting and proving the “wronging” part. I explained why the proposed changes were going bad and needed to be stopped or at least challenged, this is the “bait” part in the figure above.

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Most marketers know that to get someone to do what you want, you have to ask them to do it, you have to have a call-to-action (CTA) that persuades them to buy your product. With social media marketing, the action we’re aiming for is to get our readers to share our content with their friends and networks, so our CTAs must entice them to do just that. Here’s the 5 most important concepts to think about when you’re constructing your viral calls to action.

Subtly

People like to think that everything they do comes from some logical, un-manipulateable part of their own brain. Doing what you’re told doesn’t feel as good as doing what you want to do, and nobody really wants to believe that what they “want to do” can be easily directed. This is especially true when it comes to sharing ideas and content with friends. Who would share something just because they’ve been told to by some marketer they don’t know?

The point here is that if you want to persuade your readers to spread your content, its not a great idea to whack them over the head with painfully obvious commands (although it will work in special instances, like when you’ve giving something away). You shouldn’t tell them what to do, you should make them want to do it in such a way that it feels like the idea was their own.

Motivation

There are a number of reasons why people spread ideas and content, and when you’re constructing your viral call to action, you should be leveraging one or more of these specifically.

If you get a group of marketers in a room together and ask them how to “make something go viral” one of the first things someone suggests is to give something away for free. And it works. People love free stuff and they’re often willing to do something for a chance to win. A pretty easy, if unimaginative and elementary way to get people to spread an idea or piece of content is to offer them a prize for doing so. This is perhaps the most surefire way to “go viral” and if you’re in a hurry to come up with a contagious idea, this is often your best bet. You’re essentially paying them to spread your content for you. The only concern with this tactic is that high-reach individuals will probably see right through it, and you’re unlikely to bribe someone with a size able audience this way.

When you directly ask people why they share things with their friends, the most common response is “relevance.” Things like “it seemed right up my friend’s alley” or “it made me think of so-and-so.” One fairly obvious CTA that exploits this motivation would be “send this link to your friends who’d be interested in it” or something to that effect. Its simple and obvious, but it might just work to a point.

My favorite, way to encourage this response, is the more subtle “combined relevance” technique that allows you to create content that seems personalized for a lot of people. Of course if you sent every one of your friends links to every piece of content that was relevant to them, that would be all you did. You’re going to need to hit on more powerful motivators than just relevance.

A 1983 article titled “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures” the author, Douglas R. Hofstadter recounts a letter he was sent in response to a previous piece. This letter describes viral sentences beginning with the rudimentary: “It is your duty to convince others that this is true.”

The letter then explores a more subtle variation of that technique based on a simple structure: “The villain is wronging the victim.” If the listener believes this statement, and believes that the victim deserves to be saved and if the villain is bigger or more powerful than them they will realize that the only way to effectively challenge the villain is to recruit more people to help. Thus the motivation is powerful and the call-to-action itself is subtle.

For example let’s look at the title of one of my most popular blog posts ever:

“Twitter plans to Mangle ReTweets.”

The easiest way to make someone believe that he victim is worth saving is to make them identify with the victim, in this case anyone who ReTweets. ReTweeters were the target of this sentence, and given their contagious behavior, they make a wonderful audience. The villain of this sentence is, of course, Twitter. They may not be a huge company, but they’re larger and more powerful in this area than any individual user. The only way someone could hope to #saveretweets would be to recruit all of their followers in the fight.

I’ve written and talked about a bunch of different motivations and rather than detail each one of them here, I’ll list some of the best and link to more indepth studies of them.

• Social Proof and Cascades
• The Goliath Effect
• Combined Relevance
• Information Scarcity
• Social Exchange
• Warnings
• They-Might-Miss-It

Friction Reduction

As with any good call to action, you should have a very clear idea of the specific action you want your readers to take. Is it to share the blog post on Facebook? Is it to ReTweet you? Is it to email your YouTube video to all their friends? The most effective calls will likewise have a very specific aim.

Since you know precisely what you’re trying to persuade people to do, you should also be ale to understand how much time and effort it will take for them to do it. This time and effort is friction and the more friction presented to your potential spreaders, the less likely they’re going to be to share your content.

You can overcome a high friction action with a lot of motivation. If you want people to compose customized 500 word emails to 20 of their best friends with your link at the bottom, you’d better be offering them a very good reason for wanting to do so.

The other side of this problem is to reduce the amount of friction present. Asking people to click a single link to ReTweet or Digg something is asking very little of them. Creating a one-click sharing action is the holy grail of frictionless viral calls to action. But if you want them to do something that requires a bit more effort, like sending lots of emails, consider offering them some cut-and-paste text to use.

Timing & Placement

Consider for a moment, the tiresome marketing/dating analogy: if you go out on a first date, you wouldn’t propose marriage, so you shouldn’t ask someone to do something for you before you’ve provided them any value or built a relationship with them.

When we’re talking about viral calls to action there are two issues at play. One is that you want your calls above the fold in as prominent a location as possible, and the other is that you want to present your readers with the call to action exactly when they’re most likely to want to use it and share your content (which is typically after they’ve read it). The easiest solution is to put your buttons, links, whatever form your CTAs take in both places, that is at the beginning of your content and at the end.

In the case of a button, like the ReTweet or Digg buttons, the mere site of them becomes a form of social proof motivation. If a visitor sees that hundreds of people have already liked this content, they’re much more likely to percieve it as more valuable as well. With these types of calls to action you should place them where a visitor will see them upon first viewing your content.

There is also much to be said about the colors and look and feel of the CTA, especially if it is a button. I’ve written about that in more depth elsewhere, so I won’t go into it in this post.

Self-Replication

In many forms of social media, the element of a piece of content that is actually being shared by users is the title. On Twitter, ReTweets of an article typically contain its title, the same with social news sites, social networks and often email and IM. This means that when an individual spreads your content for you, they’re likely to be using the headline as if it were their own words, anything you say in the title borrows the authority of the sharer.

When we construct content we wish to spread, if we can bake in the viral call to action in such a way that it is contained in the title itself, we can make the act of sharing it self-replicating. A simple example is the blog post with the title “ReTweet this to win.” Again, while giveaways and less subtle calls-to-action like this can be effective there are drawbacks. A more sophisticated example would be the “the villian is wronging the victim” model from above.

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Continuing my series of TweetPsych based data points, this is based on analysis of over 100,000 accounts and looks at the “Negative Remarks” category. Negative remarks include things like sadness, aggression, negative emotions and feelings, and morbid comments.

As it turns out, nobody likes to follow a Debbie Downer accounts with lots of followers don’t tend to make many negative remarks. If you want more followers, cheer up!

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A combination of much of the research I’ve been doing for the past 3 years, my “Science of Social Media Marketing” presentation is one of my favorite to give. It combines statistics, marketing, history, math, social psychology, memetics, epidemiology, steampunk, zombies and absinthe. I talk apply lessons from sources including urban legends, rumors, homeric poems and proverbs.

The first time I did it, was for a record-breaking 12,000 plus registrant HubSpot webinar back in December of ‘09 and the most recent time was for O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly was able to get the whole, one-hour talk, (my slides and my narration) up on YouTube, so if you haven’t been able to attend a live version of it, you can now watch the recording.

Please do, and let me know what you think.

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If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.

Following up on my last post using TweetPsych Data, I looked at a metric opposing social behavior: self-reference. This time the dataset is well over 60,000 Twitter accounts.

What I found here is pretty clear, accounts that have more followers do not tend to talk about themselves much. Want more followers? Stop talking about yourself.

If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.

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If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.

The linguistic analysis engine behind TweetPsych has given me a bunch of cool data points to analyze, so I’ve begun to look at various factors and their relationship with follower counts. Using a database of over 30,000 accounts that have been analyzed with TweetPsych, the first dimension I’ve looked at is “Social Behavior”.

The “Social Behavior” category includes inclusive language like “we” and “you”, as well as language that describes relationships and communication. As it turns out, accounts with more followers, tended to be using more social language.

Over the next week or two, I’ll be posting about the rest of the dimensions TweetPsych analyzes and how they’re related to follower numbers, so stay tuned.

If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.

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In the research I’ve been doing over the past few years into why ideas spread, I’ve found a few common characteristics of contagious ideas across mediums and centuries. The list below contains those characteristics, and while its still an evolving set, the vast majority of successful memes I’ve studied have had some (or all) of them present. I’ve also tried to include takeaways, tactics you, as a marketer can use to apply these concepts to your viral campaigns.

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Seeding

The first group of people exposed to your meme are your seeds. They’ll form the initial “generation” and the size and influence of this group will determine how many people will see your content in the second generation. Academic Duncan Watts’ research indicates (somewhat expectedly) that seeding to as many people as possible is the best way to ensure your content is seen by the most people. His experiment involved creating viral messages that were launched initially through large banner ad buys and compared the results to campaigns that were not seeded in this way. He found that the big seed banners performed much better.

Its easy and obvious to say that you should work to build your reach–your Twitter followers, your blog subscribers–but its harder to do than to prescribe. Sure, we can (and should) be working to get more followers, but another tactic is to target especially influential people to seed your campaigns to. Influential users are people who share content more frequently and with more people than the average user, and my research has shown that savvy social media users do exactly that. So even if your old-school niche doesn’t seem like a hotbed of social media activity, those individuals in your industry who are using social media are, by definition, influential.

Especially in less early adopter categories, find those users who are using the bleeding edge social media technologies in that space and seed your ideas to them.

Novelty

There’s very little chance that I’m going to email a link to a friend if its a story that everyone’s heard, new information is what gets shared. Francis Heylighen’s work on applied memetics specifically lists distinctiveness as a criteria required for an idea to be contagious, and research into attention and advertising shows that unique ads tend to elicit the highest attention-grabbing rates. My research has shown that news is the type of content shared most often online, and what is news, but literally new, novel information? Humans are being bombarded with accelerating torrents of information every waking moment and we’re getting pretty good at filtering out the boring stuff.

“Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.”

Intuitiveness

The flip side of the novelty coin is the simple fact that if someone doesn’t understand an idea, they’re not very likely to pass it on. Even the newest information has to be easy to grasp. The Homeric poems were authored and recited for centuries before they were ever recorded in written word. These contagious epics were constructed with cliched phrases and mnemonic devices that made it easy for the average listener to understand, remember and re-tell.

The best way to incorporate both novelty and intuitiveness into a single piece of content is to use the “New/Old” tactic. Take an old piece of content and fit it into a new structure–think the newest Romeo and Juliet movie with Leonardo DeCaprio–or put some new idea into an old form–think steampunk, fantasy laser guns made out steam age era technology.

“…advertisements that were both original and familiar attracted the largest amount of attention to the advertised brand …” -Breaking Through the Clutter: Benefits of Advertisement Originality and Familiarity for Brand Attention and Memory Rik Pieters, Luk Warlop and Michel Wedel 2002

Relevance

Ever been to a party so loud its hard to listen to the person standing two feet in front of you? But the instant someone across the room says your name your ears perk up. Its called selective attention. Our senses take in far more information that we could ever hope to process, so our minds have sophisticated filtering mechanisms that strain out only the most important bits. When I ask people why they share content online, the number one motivation cited is “relevance”. People say things like “this story seemed right up my friend’s alley” or “this article reminded me of such-and-such.”

Ideas that seem personalized to us get our attention and when we see something that appears to have been created with one of our friends in mind, we’re very likely to send it to them. Use a tactic like combined relevance to make large groups of people believe you made something just for them.

Utility

Humans evolved to share information, its our biggest natural advantage. If we found a good foraging spot for the best berries and we shared that information with our tribe, we’d eat better that night. If we learned to make fire and taught our family how, or if we taught our children how to be the best blacksmiths in town we’d have a better life and our genes would thrive.

“…the more valuable the sentiment or activity the members exchange with one another, the greater the average frequency of interaction of the members…” –Social Behavior as Exchange, George C. Homans

Social exchange theory is the idea that most human interactions are an exchange of value, proverbs are a great example of this in action. The more useful you find the information I share with you, the more you’ll value our relationship and the more useful information you’ll share back with me. Teach your readers how to make fire or money, make it easy for them teach their friends and they’ll gladly spread your content for you.

Social Cascades

“One means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct… We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it” -Robert Cialdini

Social proof is a well trodden path of persuasion. When I know that other people have liked a piece of content, or believe in an idea, I’m more likely to accept it as well. But on the web, what happens next is most interesting and useful to marketers.

Imagine a line of people walking down a street. They’re all hungry and have never eaten in this part of town. They see two restaurants: A and B, and need to pick one to eat at. The first person in line knows nothing about either place and makes a random choice to line up outside of restaurant A. The second person in line, sees the first person outside of A, and figures the first person probably knows something, so she lines up behind him. The third person sees the growing line and makes the same choice, because if two other people are already lined up this definitely must be the best place to eat. Each person inline sees an even longer line, and hence a stronger signal about which restaurant to eat at. This is known in economic and game theory as an information cascade.

Think of the last email chain letter you got. It probably had hundreds of forwarded names and addresses on it. Many of us are immune to chain letters now, but lots aren’t and the cascade of social proof those forward headers supply is a big reason why. Or imagine you’re seeing a new blog for the first time, and its got a widget showing that it has tens of thousands of RSS subscribers, how does that change your opinion of the site’s value? Or an individual blog post, with a TweetMeme badge showing that 5,000 other people have ReTweeted it. Or a post with a thousand comments.

Social media allows us to broadcast our choices and opinions in public and create social cascades, take advantage of this and showcase your burgeoning social cascades.

Information Voids

During WWII the organization that would eventually become the CIA (it was called the OSS at the time) teamed up with its British counterpart MI6 and a researcher named Robert Knapp. Knapp had been doing academic work on how rumors spread on college campuses and the two intelligence agencies wanted to study how to weaponize rumors as a psychological force to use against the axis powers. One of the most interesting things they found was that the rumors tended to spread most contagiously in the presence of information voids.

If everyone in a village hears a loud boom, and there are no authoritative reasons for it, bucket fulls of reasons will popup and spread around as to what, exactly had happened. The recent Tiger Woods incident spread like wildfire because he made no official statements at first. Rumors about Apple’s next products are contagious because the company is notoriously tight lipped about them.

As a marketer you should find information voids and fill them.

Proselytism

Perhaps the most complex and successful memes in human history have been religions, and one of the most important elements of the contagiousness of religions ideas is the fact that nearly everyone of them values the duty of believers to spread the word.

A 1983 article titled “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures” the author, Douglas R. Hofstadter recounts a letter he was sent in response to a previous piece. This letter describes viral sentences beginning with the rudimentary: “It is your duty to convince others that this is true.” The letter then explores a more subtle variation based on a simple structure: “The villain is wronging the victim.” If the listener believes this statement, and believes that the victim deserves to be saved and if the villain is bigger or more powerful than them they will realize that the only way to effectively challenge the villain is to recruit more people to help. The evangelism hook is implicit, subtle and powerful.

My study of ReTweets has uncovered this effect in two forms. The first is the fact that Tweets containing the phrase “please ReTweet” do tend to get more ReTweets. The second is that Tweets that mention ReTweeting, either in the content they’re linking to or simply by having been ReTweeted with the signature “RT” also tend to be ReTweeted more.

Most marketers know about the power of calls-to-action. If you want a reader to buy something, or take some action, you have to ask them to. The same is true with contagious content. You must, implicitly or explicitly ask your readers to spread your content for you.

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If you like my stuff (or zombies) please, nominate me for a Shorty Award, thanks.

I’ve given my science of social media marketing presentation a few times now, and one of the points that has stood out as an audience favorite has been a tactic I call combined relevance.

I did a survey a little over a year ago where I asked people why they shared content online, both one-to-one (as emailing or IM’ing a link to a single person) and broadcast (like Tweeting a link to thousands of followers). In both cases the faraway most common answer was relevance. Respondents often said things like “I saw some­thing and it made me think of one of my friends,” or “It seemed right up my friend’s alley.” When talking about broadcast sharing, the answers were similar: “I knew my audience would find it interesting.”

And if you take a second to think about why you send links to people this seems pretty obvious, but how as a marketer can we capitalize on this?

The answer is Combined Relevance.

Way back in early ‘07 when I was doing Digg marketing type stuff, I had a weird little idea in the shower one morning. What if I mashed up a USB device and an absinthe spoon?

Absinthe, of course is a supposedly hallucinogenic alcoholic drink from the turn of the century. Its pretty gross actually (being very potent and anise flavored), and in order to make it more palatable, you have to put sugar in it. Absinthe spoons are these fancy slotted spoons that are placed on top of a glass of the green liquor, you put a sugar cube on the spoon, drip water onto it and the absinthe gets sweeter.

So I whipped up a quick site, USBAbsintheSpoon.com (it was far more sparse back then) and added a photoshopped image of a USB connector attached to an absinthe spoon along with some cryptic text “They said we couldn’t do it, but we did… Tell us why you want one.” Very few details about what the thing even did.

In a couple of hours it was on the front page of Digg and mentioned by a ton of sites, including mega-gadget blogs Gizmodo and Engadget. In under 24 hours there were over 500 comments on the site declaring their love for my creation. I ended up fielding calls from small town TV news stations who wanted to run “weird gadget” segments on it (I politely declined). And months later it was still being mentioned in articles like the world’s dumbest USB gadgets.

Why did it “go viral?”

It combined two seemingly distinct interests, gadgets and Victorian era intoxicants. Picture a Venn diagram. On the face of them you wouldn’t think there was much overlap, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of geeks into absinthe. And everyone who saw it and knew one of those geeks sent it to them, because holy-crap-this-is-right-up-so-and-so’s-alley.

I’m really into zombies, big time zombie nerd. Movies, books and I even used to have a studio where I painted them. I’m also into marketing. So if anyone who knows this ever saw an article about marketing to zombies, you’d better believe I’d be sent the link a hundred times.

By combining two apparently unrelated niches you can create a piece of content likely to go viral with people who just happen to be into both things. Give it a shot and let me know how it works out.

Oh and by the way, you know what the best social media marketing lesson we can learn from zombies is? Friends and family are the most contagious.Digg

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After I first launched the Twitter psychological profiling tool TweetPsych, some of the most common feedback I got was that it was hard to understand the results. So I designed a new reporting mechanism and design to solve that problem. The new TweetPsych uses “meta dimensions” which are combination of related factors from the two linguistic algorithms (RID and LIWC) the application uses. Each of these comes with a description and is represented on a bar graph. Each user’s profile is compared against the average user and the report explains which dimensions occur more or less frequently than the average.

I also launched a new feature for the site. TweetPsych for Lists allows you to do the same kind of psychological profiling, but of entire lists. Curious to know what the inside of Zappo’s employees’ heads looks like? Here you go.

If you have other ideas on how to make TweetPsych even better, let me know.

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IRL

One of the most powerful potentials of social media is for it to not only connect people online, but facilitate connections offline as well. 2010 will see an increase in location aware apps and games that blur the line between the web and the real work with technologies like Four Square and augmented reality. Driving this will be continued interest in and improvement of mobile web technologies like smart phones and netbooks. The real world will be important again.

Micro-Targeting and Personalization

Everyone actively engaging in social networking is sharing a ton of data about themselves and in 2010 companies will leverage this information in increasingly sophisticated ways. Micro-targeting and personalization will take advantage of information on individual people to deliver highly customized messaging and content to small and smaller segments. Opinion mining technologies will begin to mature, allowing researchers to utilize the entire social web as a global focus group for any brand, product, service or idea.

Small Business Social Media Marketing

In 2010 small businesses will continue to realize the high bang-to-buck ratio of social media marketing and will get into it like never before. Social media is a great equalizer in that it allows small companies to compete more effectively with large ones. They’ll take a strong do-it-yourself stance and will demand accountability and effective analytics.

The Real Time Web

We’ve been hearing about the emergence of a real time web for a while now, but 2010 is the year when it will really come into its own bolstered by advances in mobile technology, micro-content production and the recent integration of Twitter with Bing and Google. Traditional link popularity search is too slow so it will be augmented or replaced by instant real time based search. Trend spotting will happen minutes or hours after some new fad starts, rather than days, weeks or months. And you’ll hear about breaking news faster than ever before.

I also contributed my predictions to TrendsSpotting’s 2010 social media influencers predictions. You can see the slideshow of a bunch of great thought leader’s ideas below.

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Tomorrow at 2pm EST I’ll be doing a live, free webinar about the science of social media marketing. I’ll be talking about history, psychology, statistics and memetics and I’m really excited about it. Its free and will be awesome. register here to attend.

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I’ll give a free copy of my book, “The Social Media Marketing Book” to five random people who ReTweet this post today, Monday November 30th. Each time you Tweet a link to this post you’ll be entered. Its as easy as clicking the green ReTweet button.

For winners in the US I’ll send you a printed copy of my book, for international folks, it’ll be an ebook version.

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As you may or may not know, I’ve been working on a book for a while. Well, its finally done and in-stock on Amazon and should be in stores this week. The whole process has been very exciting and a lot of work (I had a ton of help from a great editor, Laurel as well as a whole bunch of other people who are mentioned in the back of the book).

The book is a very tactical, hands-on introduction to a wide range of social media marketing technologies, platforms, sites and opportunities. It’s a little different from the social media science stuff I do here on my blog, but it is based on real data and best practices as much as possible.

I’d like to ask you guys for two favors. One, if you like my work, buy a copy (or a few hundred). But even better, if you have a blog, email me a few questions for an interview post and I promise I’ll get back to you right away.

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One of the most ubiquitous and disruptive websites to emerge in the last 10 years is Craigslist. Impacting industries from real estate, news paper classifieds, careers and auctions the site has for the most part remained entirely free to use. A great example of organic, word-of-mouth spread I’ve always been interested in how the meme of Craigslist spread from city to city to become one of the most popular uses of the web.

I was lucky enough this week to get a chance to ask the site’s founder, Craig Newmark a few questions about exactly that. Here are his answers:

Dan: I think the social web is the great equalizer in terms of marketing. Non-profits don’t have to try to out-spend the big corporations anymore, they can simply out-think them and create contagious, well-intentioned ideas. If you were to give a non-profit just starting out one piece of advice on how they could “spread their meme” that you learned with Craigslist what would it be?

Craig: Anyone should seriously engage with their community about what they’re doing, including serious customer service. That means using email, Facebook, Twitter, any place where people in your community might hang out. Get feedback, and then, do something about it.

Dan: Did you do anything in the early days to help the site spread? Did you tell any “influential” people or send notes about it to any groups?

Craig: Never did any conscious networking, but I connected with lots of people via email and at industry events like launch parties. This was during the bubble years. I’m such a nerd, more so back then.

Dan: Do you remember any “tipping point” in the site’s history when the amount of people talking about it or using it seemed to take off? If yes, what do you attribute this to?

Craig: Never anything that I’d consider a tipping point. Our history is slow, continuous growth. In the race between tortoise and hare, well, we’re the slow guy.

Dan: In terms of the site’s initial spread, what do you think was most important the people who were using and talking about it, or the site’s features and content itself?

Craig: I think both equally important, that from the beginning we were clearly about people working with each other to help each other out. That’s somehow communicated directly between people, and from the look and feel of the site. There’s no fat on the site.

Dan: Of that most important element, what do you think was most key in the site’s early growth? (Ie What characteristic of its fans or what trait of the site?)

Craig: I think it had to do with the obviousness of the collaborative approach and the consistent culture of trust that grew. It has to do with the everyday practice of universal shared values like “treat people like you want to be treated” and “give the other person a break.” Now and then, we should be our brother’s keeper.

Dan: Do you have any knowledge into how newly added cities reach a “critical mass” of Craigslist usage? How do people in new cities find out about it? Does usage in a new city suddenly blow up or does it ramp up slowly?

Craig: No real knowledge, almost always a surprise. Might have to do with people moving from a CL city to a new one, where they spread the word. That’s the only guess I have from observing rapid growth city sites, like Las Vegas and Hawaii.

Dan: If you don’t mind sharing, what were the biggest sources of traffic in Criagslist’s early days? What are they now?

Craig: I think, then and now, jobs, housing, stuff for sale.

Dan: What are your three favorite contagious ideas spreading around the web right now?

Craig: The notion that we gotta help each other out to survive, and that social media is key to making that happen.

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Want more clicks? My new data suggests that you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends.

Continuing the study of Twitter clickthrough rates I started last week, I added over 100 more of the most followed Twitter accounts to my database and indexed click data on over 20,000 bit.ly links Tweeted by those accounts. In all of the data below, I measured CTR as the number of clicks a link received, divided by the number of followers the sending account had on the day it Tweeted it. As I noted in my other post, this number can be over 100% due to ReTweets that may use the same bit.ly link.

The graphs below shows the percentage of difference in CTR at each hour or day from the specific average for each account. I did it this way to account for the wide variation in CTRs between accounts (some accounts have much higher rates than others).

The first data point I analyzed is time of day (EST). It showed the expected afternoon/evening preference seen in my other Twitter stats.

Next I looked at days of the week, which showed a much less expected weekend preference. I believe this is due to the “link fatigue” present during the weekdays, where there is a much higher level of activity and many more links are posted.

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