Twitter in plain english

Another smart clip from the guys at Common Craft.

Check here and here for some other great examples.

Only Human

Only Human is a community where people share stories about mistakes they've made in life and their advice to others.

Mass Interactive: Dark Knight Infects

Muhammad Saleem at Pronet details a fresh viral from Warner Bros.

First, the company made a website for The Dark Knight, and put nothing on the page but a graphic.


Because people have been anticipating the movie so much, just the fact that they had put a site up for it got people excited. But when you click the image on the site, you are redirected to another site
, with the following graphic and that's all.


After that, yet another site pops up, also (mockingly) in support of Harvey Dent and apparently defaced by the Joker.


However, this time there's a catch. User's can interact with the site, and each user, by entering an email address and a verification code, can receive an email which gives the user (X,Y) coordinates that when entered into a link (also included in the email) will remove one pixel from the defaced poster to reveal an image.


But since participation is limited to one user and one pixel removal per email address, the average user will only be able to participate once. And since every ardent fan is desperate to see what lies beneath, it is in the best interest of every fan to spread the word as much as possible and to get the process going faster and faster so that we can all see what lies beneath. At this point the users undoubtedly take matters into their own hands, start spreading the word and try to get other users to participate and remove pixels.


As you can see, the campaign has successfully become viral and the Warner advertising machine rejoices. Not only have the various sites been submitted to socially driven communities, but there have been incoming links from a multitude of film sites and blogs alike. Within a matter of hours, we have the following reconstruction of the final image:

WOM: Viral Marketing for the Real World

Influx Insights notes that Duncan Watts, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, was recently interviewed on the topic of viral marketing for HBR’s Ideacast series.

Watts starts out by explaining how viruses work, highlighting how it’s well known to science that a small number of people start epidemics. For a virus to become an epidemic, it requires each infected person infects at least one other person. Infect less than one and a viral epidemic doesn’t occur.

In science terms, an epidemic requires a “reproduction rate” of 1.

Watts believes marketers need to now think beyond viral, to an alternative that he calls Big Seed Marketing. This demands marketers go beyond the analogy of viral, where current thinking demands that viruses start with a small number of people. His recommendation is not to replace traditional marketing with viral, but introduce viral elements to traditional programs.

Word of Mouth: Creationist vs Evolutionist WOM

This is your brain on Word of Mouth...

...any questions?