The more information that is out there on the Internet, the more we need filters to sift through it, to get what is most relevant to us. More and more sites like Google and Facebook try to solve this for us by using information from our social graph to feed us the information that is, supposedly, most relevant to us.

On Facebook, this means that the content that is clicked, liked or commented by friends and family or friends of friends – people in our social graph – is what is delivered to us most. All done on the assumption that what is relevant and interesting to them is interesting and relevant to us.

But it also means that a lot of content is filtered out. Other content, from people, businesses or organizations that are not part of our social graph will not be delivered to us to the same extent.

For a business or organization the first implication is that they need to become part of our social graph to give their content a chance to get through the filter. On Facebook, they need us to “like” them.

But, there is more. The algorithm has other implications too.

Facebook’s Edge-rank decides how important something is to us and it currently consists of three components.

From Techcrunch:

“First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years.
Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.”

This means that the more a user interacts with content by a person or business, the higher the Edge-rank they get for that user.

The implication for a business or organization is that they have to try to create content that is highly relevant. They should probably also try to create incentives or suggest interaction, by for example asking questions that really begs a reply or at least makes you want to “like”. However, creating a lot of content doesn’t translate into a higher Edge-rank as the average number of interactions per piece of content probably goes down. It is a constant search for the right content and the right amount of content to maximize interactions and Edge-rank.

Another positive result of trying to achieve a higher Edge-rank is that the interactions between a fan and the business is more visible in the feed of that user.

The Daily Beast has tried to decode further how the Edge-rank is calculated and come up with some conclusions, even though this is in no way scientific facts:

1. Facebook’s Bias Against Newcomers – newcomers rarely show up in the feeds of others.
2. Facebook’s Catch-22 – to be more visibile in friend’s feeds, they need to interact with your posts, but without being visible, they won’t interact.
3. The Velvet Rope: “Top News” – a lot of interaction is no guarantee to show up in Top News.
4. “Most Recent” News Is Censored, Too – the Most Recent feed is also capped to a maximum number of friends shown in the feed. Can be changed though.
5. “Stalking” Your Friends Won’t Get You Noticed – you can’t change your visibility to a friend by constantly visiting their page.
6. Having Friends Who Stalk You WILL Help Your Popularity – you will become more visible if friends stalk you. Even with friends who doesn’t stalk you.
7. Links Trump Status Updates – links are more visible than status updates.
8. Photos and Videos Trump Links – photos and videos are more visible than links.
9. The Power of Comments – when friends comment on your updates, photos and videos, your visibility will increase.
10. Why Facebook Really is Like High School – visibility to people with large networks takes even more time.

For more about Facebook’s and Google’s filters, take a look at this interesting TED-talk by Eli Pariser below.

For more on Edge-rank you could take a look at The Next Web’s “Everything you need to know about Facebook’s EdgeRank” or EdgeRank, den hemliga ingrediensen i Facebook! (in Swedish).

This is really, really well made!

Very impressive execution! Very nice integration of other brands, which did it for free in exchange for the free attention.

Of course you can challenge a friend via Facebook or email, or share your results on Facebook or Twitter. Great concept and brilliant execution! According to Dagens Media, the site got 50 000 visitors last night, from all, over, the, world, and they spent on average 8 minutes on the site. The creative was made by Lowe Brindfors, production by B-Reel and sound & music by Plan 8.

Love it!

Language can be a barrier to viral spread. But, in this case no one understands anything… … or?

That fact, that no one understands anything, and the way it seems these “da da-twins” understand, is definitely one of the viral triggers.

This clip really intrigues me. It starts my imagination. It makes me think, “what if”. It makes me reconsider what I previously had thought almost impossible.

My first line of thought is like this. It seems these baby twins are really having a conversation. What if they really understand what the other one is saying? I doubt it, but what if?

The second one is almost as improbable, but nonetheless the one I think is the correct one. These small kids are imitating a conversation between adults. And they do it almost to perfection. They are talking, waiting for their turn to talk, making gestures as they speak. They even laugh as if the other one was pulling a joke! And almost most amazing of all – they often use a rising intonation at the very end of a sentence, something that we usually do when asking a question. I know kids are curious, I know they imitate, but all in all, the perfect imitation makes me think there is a lot more going on in those small heads than I thought before. I never thought they would be capable of imitating with such accuracy how we speak when we have learnt the language.

Don’t miss out on this lesson in “da da” that has just exploded on the Internet the last couple of days.

Here are three viral clips and links currently being passed around a lot:

The Best Handball penalty you’ll not ever and never seen! (yes, that title makes me have to read it at least twice too!) An amazing penalty, fooling the goalie entirely.

Back to the Future : Irina Werning – Photographer. Amazing before and after shots of people re-enacting previous photos from years ago, like when they were kids or teenagers.

And then of course the Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas . Funny to see how babies have the same movement patterns as drunk people!

P.S. Dont forget to download “Viral Thinking – a “Viral Marketing Toolkit” – my ebook about how to maximize the potential for viral spread. D.S.

It is finally ready! Download by clicking the image or link below.

Viral Thinking – a “Viral Marketing Toolkit” is my ebook about how to maximize the potential for viral spread. Creating something that is viral is sometimes the goal, but it is not easy. In this ebook I have tried to cover the areas you can work with to improve the odds.

You could call it a “viral marketing toolkit”. However, just increasing the spread improves the ROI, even if it doesn’t go viral. So, my hope and belief is that it is helpful for anyone who works within marketing, PR or communications, whether online or offline.

I would like to thank the people who have generously helped me with feedback on this text and made it a lot better.

In alphabetical order: Valerio Franco (doublebblog.it), Anton Johansson (antonjohansson.com), Henrik Johansson (theviralcompany.com), Daniel Mencák (danielmencak.se), Patrick Möller (flavors.me/patrickmoeller), Cédric Rainotte (bwat.be), Niclas Strandh (digitalpr.se) Pere Tufet (tonterias.com) and Emmanuel Vivier (emmanuelvivier.com).

And of course, if you have feedback to give, do not hesitate to send me an email on kristofermencak[at]gmail[dot]com.

I hope you enjoy it!

And feel free to pass it on!

Via ViralBlog I found a video for Hadouken! In short it is a compilation of people doing awesome stuff – things that have been posted on the Internet. Right now it is closing in on 4,5 million views. And, I must admit it is a pretty smart way of doing it.

I see a couple of reasons this video spreads:

• They have taken content that is already popular – great content – and put it together. It’s a compilation of great stuff. It makes it harder to fail.
• There is a lot of different clips in this video, with different sports for example, which makes it possible that a lot of different people can be appealed by it.
• There are clips that are fake in it, and clips that could be. Some people believe it’s real, others don’t. There is a pro and a con side to these stories. This sparks conversations.
• If they were smart, they have asked permission to use the clips, and also asked the owners of the original videos to post this on their platforms. These people, who already have an audience, have then acted as advocates to spread Hadouken!’s video.

All in all, a recipe that could spell success, and did in this case. The only thing that maybe isn’t optimal is that the music takes the backseat. I forget it’s a video trying to “sell” the music.

I noticed this video through Viral Friday. It is Google Mobile showing their new feature My Location. Usually, Google Mobile seems to get between 15 000 and 20 000 views on their videos, but they seem to have gotten something right with this one, since traffic is more than 10 times that.

So, what did they do right and what did they do wrong?
In a traditional sense, it seems they definitely broke some “rules”. The video is very long for being a viral – more than 10 minutes. And almost nothing happens in it. In retrospect however, maybe these “wrongs” turned into a right. You must admit there is a certain humor in it – it is kind of fun. But, it’s not hilarious in any way. Rather, it is a bit strange. Another thing is it is kind of a cliffhanger. Will something else ever happen? And finally, it can be used as a “revenge”. If you got fooled to watch it, you can get back. But, you can’t get back on the one who sent it to you, he/she already knows. Rather, you have to get back on someone else. So, you pass it on.

But, that is not all there is to it at all. What might have made this clip tip could be that it has some easter eggs in it. If you want to discover them yourself, stop reading now. Or, check them out below:

Click on:
The basketball at 0:42
The word “azzip” at 1:23 (yes, the clip is then played backwards)
The fire at 1:47
The weights at 3:29
The word “Florida” at 4:39
The horse at 5:49
The dinosaur at 6:36
Santa at 7:58
The toast at 9:06

Congratulations Youtube, you just turned five years old a short time ago! It is quite incredible actually that this destination on the Internet is just five years, considering we have seen countless viral videos, stars being made and political campaigns won.

Youtube celebrates with a channel where users can send in their story.

And here is a short story of Youtube in video (of course) format.

Oops, I’ve been had again. This is weird, but of course there’s some secret and logic behind it. Try it out yourself! Right now, it spreads virally in a lot of places, like on Facebook and blogs. It’s closing in on 2 million views right now.

Interesting to see how it has spread in the english speaking world (especially UK, where Richard Wiseman if from) and is relatively unseen in other parts of the world, except Scandinavia, where pretty much everybody is fluent in English too. To spread even more to a broad public, it has to be very easy to understand visually, or accessible in more languages.

And yes, I have started reading Richard Wisemans book, Quirkology, though I haven’t finished it yet. Too much to read! =)

Thanks Judith for the tip on Facebook!

A viral campaign – everybody wants one. Few ever gets one.

I am the first to admit that it isn’t easy, but there are things you could to to better the odds of ever creating a campaign that goes viral. I prefer calling it “a campaign that goes viral” rather than “a viral campaign”, because, by definition, it can’t be a viral campaign until it has proven itself to actually go viral.

Then there is of course the distinction between campaigns that go viral on a larger scale and the ones that only go viral on a small scale, in very contextual environments. But, I am drifting away here, to topics that I didn’t intend to write about this time. The intention was to write about using an amplification loop as a way to increase potential for viral spread.

Viral expansion loops were discussed throroughly in a Fast Company article about a year and a half ago, in April 2008 – Ning’s Infinite Ambition.

The article tells us about Ning, a startup in Palo Alto, designed specifically to exploit viral loops. In the article, viral loops are said to have emerged as perhaps the most significant business accelerant to hit Silicon Valley since the search engine. But, we also learn that while viral advertising can’t be replicated; by definition, a viral loop must be.

About viral expansion loops from wikipedia:

“A viral expansion loop is similar to viral marketing with one notable difference: viral marketing can’t be replicated indefinitely, while a viral expansion loop must be in order for it to exist. When properly conceived and implemented, a viral loop almost guarantees self-replicating growth…

And a short quote from the article:

…Ning grows because each new user begets more users. Every time someone sets up a social network, he has no choice but to invite friends, family, colleagues, and like-minded strangers to sign on as well.”

Ning benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user, drawing in more users, and any new user can become a network creator.

Campaigns that go viral are usually not created in a way to permit something similar. But, there is something equally interesting – the viral retention loop – incentivizing users to come back to a service. This is very often used by Internet start-ups. One way of doing it is to send updates on what has happened on their account while not there.

I think we can expand this thinking and try to build campaigns that makes interaction with campaign material more than a one-off. For this, we have to build in incentives for users who have already been touched by the campaign to come back to the campaign material, interact again, and spread the material further. This should increase the basic reproductive number. If we can double the basic reproductive number of a campaign from for example 0.8 (by definition not a viral campaign, since it’s below 1) to 1.6, we have managed to set an avalanche in motion. This by simply adding an amplification loop into the campaign. Of course, numbers might differ a lot – these are just examples.

The difference between a retention loop and an amplification loop would be that the latter also incentivizes spread of the material, while the former just incentivizes the user to return to the service.

Through this (these – there can of course be more than one) extra loop we amplify the potential virality of the campaign. The trick is, as always, to come up with something interesting, something worth returning to,  and something that makes the user want to pass the material on again, maybe with a new twist.

Here are some reading tips about viral loops:

5 crucial stages in designing your viral loop

What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption

And some for the swedish readers:

Viral loops vs. viral tools

Viral- & retention loops

Virulenta nätverk och loopar

Har din produkt en viral loop?