Monday, March 2, 2009

What we talked about:
- How ideas spread
- Why ideas spread on Facebook
- What ideas spread
- Example: captain Junkies

How ideas spread: a brief history
Cave drawings -> stone -> printing press -> telegraph -> phones -> tv -> fax machines -> mobile phones

1970s/1980s: easy to communicate one on one, but what if you wanted to communicate broadly to a group of people (one to many)?
Now: new tools that let you broadcast messages to the world really, really easily

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” - call it
Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing

Why ideas spread on Facebook
3 things that make Facebook unique:
- 1. Identity - users connect with their real world identity.
- 2. Friends - users connect with real-world friends.
- 3. Distribution – the best content is distributed across the social graph.

Privacy control means more sharing: the higher the privacy settings, the more likely people are to share.

Main ways to distribute content on Facebook:
- newsfeed (this means that things can spread virally without a single dollar spent on marketing
- groups and applications can go form 2 members to millions of members within a matter of weeks: this is really unprecedented in social technology).

What ideas spread
Five winning strategies for the types of ideas that spread:
- Appeal to vanity (i.e. Facebook notes feature “25 random things”; hotness application)
- Get people angry (i.e. starving dog at art exhibit)
- Cuuuuute sells (i.e. fluff friends application)
- Social proof
- Everyone thinks they can save the world (showing that you care about cause; i.e. “causes” application)

Example
Captain Junkies (Logan presents application on Facebook)

Concluding comments:
- This Friday (03/06) is an off-site
- Jennifer will send out email with location of where Monday’s presentations will be held
- Please send all presentation materials to Jennifer so that things run smoothly next Monday
- Feedback evaluations are coming – watch your inboxes.

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