We not only had Matt Wyndowe and Julio Vasconcellos talking about Facebook, but we also had the students from the East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy contributing to the session.
The 3 main points explored during class were:
1) How ideas spread
2) Why ideas spread
3) What ideas spread
How ideas spread
While in the past we had limited tools to spread ideas (e.g. letter to a newspaper, message in a t-shirt etc), today we have several such as blog post, comment on the net, video post etc.
Why ideas spread on Facebook
- Massive scale: 175M users (50% log in every single day)
- Identity: users contribute with their real-world identity
- Friends: users connect with real-world friends
- Distribution: the best content is distributed - what matters to the user
- Privacy settings are different from what we had before in the Internet. Before it was either everything private or everything public (e.g. email versus video post)
- The "newsfeed" is a "magazine about your friends" passively shared
- There is no cost to share information and it can be viral
- Friends help you to find content. They "filter" the content for you
5 winning strategies to spread ideas on Facebook
1) Appeal to vanity - people want to look cool
2) Get people angry - they will join a group against x
3) Cuuuuuuuute sells - use cats, babies, dogs (I love the "cuuuuuute")
4) Social proof - again, people want to look cool. People want to be part of a group
5) Everyone can save the world - or at least everyone thinks they can save the world
Some moments during this session I wondered what the Privacy group was thinking about some points - specifically about the filter in each user's newsfeed. I would love to hear their thoughts.
Vanessa, great post. I was wondering the same thing about the PrivateSpace Pod, specially when Matt quoted "Zuck's Law" that every year people will share twice as much information as they did the year before.
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