My Favorite Presentation (No Offense)

All,

All of the presentations were great in their own unique way and I enjoyed being both entertained and moved throughout yesterday's class.  I just wanted to give a shout out to my favorite presentation of the day - Team Jenny.  From Bree's dramatic writing in silence on the whiteboard "What if you could change a life with just one click?" to the innovative video that proved the power of the written word on enciting emotion and communicating information - I was truly moved.  Here is their video:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9KaYniqjM

Here is the link to their website:  

oneclickonelife.org/

This was inspiring - thanks Team Jenny.

The Ripple Effect

Incredible class today. I was really touched to see Sameer's brother Prashant in class. I thought it was very fitting that he was able to be there and see a small part of the ripple effect that started with Sameer and Vinay. And now each of us is part of that ripple effect, and I don't think we'll comprehend the ultimate impact of our projects for a long time to come. A lot of incredible work was done. You never know how far-reaching an impact you might have. After seemingly banging our head against a wall for the first two months, it was only in the last week or two that our group suddenly started gaining real traction and seeing some real viral distribution of our message... And in the spirit of viral of course I'll provide a link to our video. :)

Thanks all - from Jennifer to the advisors to the guests to all the students - for an amazing class.

Using Humor as a Hook

Hey guys, I found this YouTube clip that uses Humor as a Hook to sending a message for social good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHkWv1vHtHk


So far its gotten over half a million views in one month!

Thoughts on Virality

A Wednesday morning visit with some of the leaders of a well known social media applications company (to remain nameless) produced some valuable insight into what has made the most popular Facebook applications viral.  Some of these may strike you as counterintuitive:

1. Creative is not viral

2. User experience is not viral

3. Thinking is not viral

Question: Ok...so please illuminate me....what IS viral?

Answer:  Process

Setting up an efficient A-B testing system that launches a series of SPAM (except it's not spam because it's from your friends).

A book that was recommended for us to read is "Don't make me think."

Facebook: How to make ideas spread

I loved this class! It helped me a lot to test the ideas we had as a Pod about MySpace, as well as generate more ideas on how to use this media and the different type of users for MySpace and Facebook. Just to give you an idea on the users, 4 out of 17 11th graders in our class use Facebook, 15 use MySpace!

I don't want to repeat the things that Vanessa and Anna have already said, so I will just let you know my key takeaways from the class.

1. Facebook has stimulated people to share more about themselves by having privacy settings that make the user feel more comfortable. As Matt said, "the more you can control the information, the more you will be willing to share" I loved it when he compared Facebook to the NY Times or Us Weekly about your friends... hilarious, cause that's exactly how I use it.

2. Always keep in mind the impact of social pressure. How does this usually work in Facebook? "6 of your friends have joined the group..."

3. Julio 5 tips were great. But the one I found more impactful was the power of "getting people angry", not to the point where they hate, but far enough to stimulate people to take action about uncomfortable issues.

4. Finally, Facebook has become highly important in communication. 70% of Facebook users use Facebook more than email in order to share information. This is a reality and the challenge now is how to use it for the right purposes.

Speakers email addresses:
Matt: mattwyndowe@facebook.com Twitter: wync
Julio: julio@experienceproject.com

The Perfect Storm of Social Technology

Hey Team PoST,

We (Alex and I - Donors Are Sexy Pod) are trying to follow a recommendation by Julio (Vasconcelos) to try to leverage the power of the different social tech tools to create what he called "The Perfect Storm" of social technology.

To do that, we created a new post on our Blog and included a Digg button as our first step. Our hope is that we get Dugg enough times to get some space on Digg's main page. Julio said you need as little as 200 Diggs to be there. If that works, then we hope we can get to be a featured video in YouTube, which could really boost our reach.

To get the blog read and Dugg we will try to use Facebook (our networks and the group page) and also reach out to two prominent Twitter-ers we learned about in class: Casey Wright and Sarah Milstein to see if they can help us spread our message.

So, if you want to check out our latest post to the blog, follow this link

Also, since you're going there, we would love if you Dugg it! If you still don't have a Digg account, I recommend it, specially now that they are working on a recommendation engine for news that's going to help us filter through the huge amount of content available today.

Cheers,

Donors Are Sexy! Team

Facebook Case

Monday's class was amazing.

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.