Is there a "Twitter Effect," by which the rapid spread of information through the microblogging service can crush a Web site with traffic? As I see it, the answer is yes, but it's not as simple as it might appear at first blush.
First, the background: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore, whose Twitter postings more than 52,000 people follow, concluded his February 2 tweet mentioning that a blog post on "how to use Twitter to find your next job" took that site down with an inundation of traffic. He suggested calling the phenomenon the Mashable Effect.
Next, Pingdom, a company that tracks site availability, suggested instead the more general and more apt Twitter Effect:
It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential site crasher...
The Twitter Effect formula = (Original tweet * followers) + (retweets * followers of retweeters) + (retweets of retweets * followers of those), and so on.
This way, tweets can spread out like the branches of a tree or a root system and reach a very large number of Twitter users. The spread is basically only limited by the size of Twitter's user base. If the tweet contains a link to a site, this site is bound to get a significant amount of traffic as the tweet spreads.
Overall, Pingdom has it right. People like to share links with their followers over Twitter, and good ones get passed down the chain, or retweeted (look for the all-too-easily missed "RT" in front of a tweet). But there are some caveats that probably should be noted before people assume their 140-character bright ideas will bring the Internet to its knees.
(Credit:
Twitter)
I see three circumstantial considerations. First, It helps to start with somebody like Cashmore, with his relatively gargantuan Twitter audience. Memes from lesser figures would take much longer to spread, if they did at all, giving Web sites more warning that heavy traffic was on the way and time to respond.
Second, at this stage in Twitter's development, it helps when the tweet is about something the tech-skewed Twitterverse cares about, with Twitter itself being high on that list.
Third, plenty of Web sites have had well over a decade to figure out how to handle heavy traffic problems, so it'll be the smaller sites that are likely to have insufficient capacity to handle the traffic.
Then I see three more general caveats, too.
First, a key part of Pingdom's back-of-the-envelope math is the retweet effect. But many people have symmetrical relationships on Twitter--I follow you, you follow me. Consequently, the amplification factor of retweeting will be reduced by some echo-chamber factor that Twitter users are seeing their own tweets retweeted.
Second, there's the interest factor. Some fraction of people just won't click on the link or retweet it. So Pingdom's formula mostly governs a theoretical maximum spread. But that's kind of like guessing every neutron in a fission bomb strikes another uranium nucleus.
The Twitter Fail Whale is seen less often these days, but Twitter's infrastructure does potentially limit the spread of viral information.
(Credit: Twitter)Last, there's a scaling problem: If the retweet network is so well established that memes are constantly bubbling up into virtual flash mobs, Twitter itself will be inundated with traffic. It's true that the service handles heavy loads vastly better than it did a few months ago, but even if Twitter holds up, will people? If your Twitter stream is constantly awash in tweets and retweets, many of them repeats of other retweets you've already received, will you spend your day glued to Twitter for the latest updates?
For those of us who get hundreds or thousands of e-mails a day, it takes more for an interesting message to stand out above the crowd, and Twitter doesn't get some magic exemption from the signal-to-noise problem just because it's popular. And of course, any popular medium will be a target for spam and opportunistic marketing efforts that degrade people's experiences.
Pingdom does have it right in broad terms, though. By virtue of the retweet network, Twitter can be a powerful, fast-acting amplifier for information well suited to viral spread.
But it's probably good news more than a reason to panic: although some Web sites may crash as a result, my guess is that Twitter more often will just bring Web site publishers the traffic they crave.
NEW YORK--Blogger and new-media publicist Brian Solis struck down one of the biggest marketing buzz terms of the past few years in a panel on Wednesday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here.
"There is no 'viral marketing' per se," Solis said, referring to the marketing trend of creating a catchy online gimmick and hoping it will spread like the latest cat-does-something-funny video on YouTube. Rather, Solis explained, it's the people who make it viral. Getting a grip on online marketing is an ongoing strategy, he said. "This isn't a campaign. This is something new, this is something we have to do every day."
Getting brands onto social networks is one of the hottest topics of the marketing world these days, from partnerships with MySpace and Facebook to "appvertising" on their developer platforms.
Solis' tips for the audience: get to know bloggers as well as traditional journalists, be aware of what people are saying about your company or brand on blogs and social networks, and know that there's more to the Web than a Facebook fan page. "This whole thing is bigger than Twitter, (and) this whole thing is bigger than Facebook," Solis said.
"You're not a marketer anymore, you're not a public relationships professional anymore, you're just a person who knows what you're talking about, so you're just able to jump in and cultivate relationships," he said. "We're humanizing our story."
Idealistic, for sure, and Solis acknowledged that the rules of "social-media marketing" are by no means set in stone. Things can change fast, and companies need to be ready to adapt.
And the underlying truth is that this is all still advertising, marketing, and public relations, and too many attempts to mask it as "conversation" can come across as a gimmick. Indeed, Solis said that a lot of people are screwing it up.
"They're creating profiles on every social network and they're 'friending' everyone like it's going out of style," he said, talking about Twitter spam and showing a PowerPoint slide of the cartoon incarnation of trying too hard, Wile E. Coyote. "It's not about shilling, it's not about pushing, and it's not about faking it."
Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It's time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.
Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they're there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It'll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they're not yours).
In case you're already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.
The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you're a videographer looking to get a video out there it's not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.
If you're a cheapskate like me, there's also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you're on your own.
Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.
On Friday morning, YouTube announced the second annual iteration of its YouTube Video Awards. What? Awards?
The video-sharing service, owned by Google since 2006, awarded accolades in categories like "Adorable," "Creative," and "Comedy" to original videos hosted on its site that were uploaded in 2007, as voted on by users. The prizes, per YouTube, are "bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year."
Okay, so the videos are kind of amusing. The "Adorable" category winner is a video of a baby who falls over every time he laughs (wonder what'll happen when his friends find out about that in 10 years), the "Creative" winner is that "Human Tetris" thing you've seen a million times, and the "Music" winner is none other than that "Chocolate Rain" video that everyone was watching last year.
But the culture of YouTube doesn't really lend itself that well to awards. YouTube, for better or worse, is a cultural hub rather than strictly a creative outpost; there's plenty of cool, original content there, and it's no surprise that Google would want to highlight the good stuff rather than the goofy prank videos and pirated content that propelled it to the upper echelon of the Web.
Content on YouTube, however, doesn't necessarily become popular because it's high-quality or original--just look at the Rickroll phenomenon, an '80s music video that has been seen millions of times because people get a kick out of tricking their friends into watching it. Or the current hot clip, a British public service announcement with a hilarious twist.
Or, for that matter, this week's number-one YouTube video: Barack Obama's most recent speech.
Viral marketing be damned, sometimes time spent searching the depths of the Internet for small, tucked-away items can be fun. Especially when you're rewarded from your efforts.
Web-printing company Moo is running its own Easter egg scavenger hunt in conjunction with several other hip online companies like Etsy, Blurb, Ponoko, and Picnik. People are supposed to hunt down small Easter eggs on the various services and claim them. Moo is also bundling some of the eggs in products sent to customers in the next week. Meanwhile, the company keeps track of who has found what, and awards various prizes from the partnered sites.
In addition to the Easter eggs found online, Moo is also venturing out into the real world (which it calls the "great outdoors") starting on Saturday. Real world eggs will be placed around cities with special codes people can claim, and hints are provided in the form of poems on Moo's blog (complete with rhyming couplets).
I've seen a lot of viral campaigns in my day, including one from Nick.com that was previewed a couple of weeks ago at Adobe's Engage event. None of them really seem to offer much in the way of user benefit--besides the potential of a prize or hidden piece of content that's usually been leaked elsewhere or is too inconsequential to warrant the time and effort spent. In this case, Moo's gone the route of tying together a small band of blogs and services its demographic is likely to enjoy using.
The rules are simple. Finding the hidden mystery eggs may not be, however.
(Credit: Moo Print LTD. )
NEW YORK--Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.
A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan's upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007's "Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards," a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.
Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you've ever heard of (as well as some you haven't), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.
Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl" competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban's "Never Hide" ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads; and naturally, "Will It Blend?" The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious "iPhone in a blender" video.
The full list is here. But what I'd like to know is, for every one of these runaway hits, how many equally creative Web video ad campaigns flop? I'm still a believer in randomness on the Web. But then again, I can't see any way that a guy putting an iPhone into a blender and hitting the "smoothie" button couldn't have been a huge hit.
Some Web 2.0 concepts don't make sense to people unless you break it down to them in ways they can understand. We do our best with our Newbie Guides for things like Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, and Facebook. Along similar lines comes a video about Del.icio.us, and social bookmarking in general, from Common Craft--a consulting company that does Web videos. This may be viral marketing, but it's very well executed and a joy to watch. I'd hire these guys for my start-up video.
[via Digital Inspiration and DownloadSquad]
It's a well-documented phenomenon: the rise of Web video has fueled a trend of 'bite-size entertainment.' Wired magazine devoted an entire cover story (actually, a set of mini cover stories) to it in its March '07 issue. The attention-deficient Web's appetite for small clips and short blog entries has gotten to the point where MySpace.com has actually condensed classic TV episodes into "minisodes" for its members.
But the latest viral video craze makes those three- to five-minute minisodes seem like Titanic. This is the "Dramatic Chipmunk," a 5-second clip of a chubby rodent making a foreboding face at the camera accompanied by a Snidely Whiplash-worthy musical interlude. (Bonus points if you know who Snidely Whiplash is.) The video proliferated, thanks to YouTube, as well as frat boy hub CollegeHumor, which put a link to the clip on its front page and touted it as "the best 5-second video on the Internet."
You can already tell that, after only a few days (the video was originally uploaded earlier this week), it's reached the gold-medal level of viral videos--somebody made a dance remix.
Here at CNET, we had a little bit of a debate about whether the "Dramatic Chipmunk" footage was actually real. Was it doctored in one way or another to make the chipmunk look more Hitchcock-esque? If it proved real, we wanted to know who the heck managed to capture the moment on video.
An e-mail to CollegeHumor Managing Editor Jeff Rubin answered our question: yup, it's real. The clip comes from a Japanese TV show in which the rodent was put on display for some reason. The priceless 5 seconds appear to have been the result of a very, very lucky camera angle.
CollegeHumor has uploaded the original footage and named it "Undramatic Chipmunk." You can see it here. And the full video also reveals, as zoology buffs had suspected, that the "Dramatic Chipmunk" isn't actually a chipmunk but rather a prairie dog.
UPDATE @ 1 PM PST: Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, CollegeHumor's in-house T-shirt retailer, BustedTees, is now selling a Dramatic Chipmunk t-shirt.
MySpace quietly launched Trailer Park this morning, a new area showcasing trailers for upcoming movies. All videos are played on the in-house MySpace player and can be embedded on member pages. Trailer Park is launching with five trailers from Lionsgate, Warner Bros., Independent, and Buena Vista Pictures.
The page is designed to feel like a member's profile, with forums, a friends list, and a comment board. The dearth of actual content about a movie (actors, ratings, and so on) can be found at the movie's marketing site, which gets its own link alongside the trailer.
Unfortunately, from the looks of it, trailers only stick around briefly before removal, unlike Apple's Quicktime trailers page where they reside for months after a film's release. Also, there's no option to download the trailers at various quality levels (including high definition) to watch offline.
Not to knock page design here, but the trailer gets about 20 percent of the entire page.
(Credit: CNET Networks)GabJam is a viral video service made for user-generated content, but think more soapbox-standing and lonelygirl15-style personal musings than, you know, cat videos or pirated clips of Colbert.
That's because it's all short recordings made on a Webcam. The company is called GabSight, and it offers two services: GabMail, which is one-to-one video messaging, and GabJam, a threaded, reply-all version of video messaging.
GabSight CEO Mark Lipsky in a GabJam video
(Credit: CNET Networks)Several video messaging services are beginning to pop up--check out Webware's coverage of Eyejot, which debuted at Demo 07 last week.
CEO Mark Lipsky and I chatted by phone (I wish I could tell you we did the interview by Webcam, but alas, no), and he said he's excited that the video messaging space is beginning to heat up. For his company, the goal of GabMail and GabJam was to develop services "as closely to a complete e-mail metaphor as possible, in terms of text e-mail," he said.
I think they've achieved this. You don't have to register on the GabMail site or use any proprietary Web mail service. When you upload a video it is sent from whatever e-mail client you use. The interface isn't as slick looking as Eyejot's, but GabMail does allow for longer messages--up to 2 minutes, and soon 5, Lipsky says.
GabJam is the more interesting part: It launches at the end of February as a social forum for public videos. Users create their own profiles that they populate with uploaded and tagged videos they've shot. All uploaded videos are searchable, and anyone can reply. All replies will go to everyone else who has already replied to that video. If you find a video you like, just save the link (all video is hosted by GabJam) as a bookmark. Every time that page is refreshed, all the video replies will appear. Eventually GabJam will provide a drag-and-drop video editor, allowing users to mash up any of the video messages on the site.
Another great feature that all video sites should look into: Right clicking a video that offends you brings up an option to "cite this video." You can report why it's inappropriate and who sent you the video, and GabJam will investigate it and decide whether to take it down if the video offends the "community's" sensibilities. That may not happen immediately, but Lipsky says the video will be instantly cloaked from your screen once you report it.
Yes, that seems very family-friendly, but it's not clear if the same standards apply to the banner ad on the site or the pre- and post-roll video ads that will attach to each message.
