The internet has accelerated social communications and memetics more than it has fundamentally changed it (though it has altered some of the selection pressures on individual memes, namely around memory retention and expression). It has also, through mechanisms like Twitter and specifically ReTweets, made the exchange of cultural units much more open to quantitative analysis […]
I spoke at the 140 Twitter Conference this week and during my panel Robert Scoble asked me if I had any ReTweets-per-Follower (RTpF) data on users listed on Twitter’s official suggested users list. I didn’t but I realized it would be a very interesting data point to look at. I looked at the roughly 200 […]
The name viral marketing stems from the theory that ideas spread like viruses, making epidemiological metaphors and models useful when attempting to understand the spread of memes. Since the goal of any viral marketer is to create a pandemic with their campaign, we can learn a lot from the early spread of Swine Flu. Here […]
The dichotomy that has driven me to pursue what I call viral marketing science is that there are two ways to go about creating contagious campaigns. There is the path of conjecture and black magic “gurus” who cite un-researched social marketing “advice.” Then there is the path of data, analysis and testing. The scientific method often […]
I tend to look at social and viral marketing on a campaign level, evaluating viral marketing campaigns as a whole instead of individual components. For me, viral marketing science is all about figuring out what and how things spread, as opposed to the more general “how communities interact online,” and so the science comes in […]
If we want to be able to create contagious Tweets, we have to know what contagious Tweets look like. And I’ve created a new site that allows you to do just that: ReTweetability.com. The site has a list of the most ReTweetable users, as well as a search feature that allow you to find the […]
This post was inspired by a conversation I had with TED’s Chris Anderson. I’m not a big fan of “rules” for social media, but in certain circumstances it does make sense to conform to a certain community-set convention. With the existence of several ReTweet counting services and my ReTweet mapper, a certain regular format can […]
Inspired by David Kelly’s work on design thinking I’ve been thinking about a practical framework for creating social media and viral marketing campaigns. I think one of the most important steps in this process is the “Research” phase. When I started thinking about this process, I used a metaphor from genetic engineering: If I wanted […]
To help expand my ReTweeting research, please take my new survey and encourage your followers to do the same. My research has shown that the number of followers exposed to a Tweet has only a weak correlation to the number of ReTweets it gets, indicating that the content of the tweet may be more important […]
A topic of much recent discussion has been how do you quantify influence in social media and social networks. In the context of Twitter, much ado has been made of purely network-size-based statistics, which are easily gamed and present a shallow picture of the process of viral influence. Extending from the work I did with […]