Big-seed marketing. Instead of relying purely on viral marketing or mass media marketing alone, big-seed marketing combines the two approaches so that a large initial audience spreads the marketing message to a secondary audience, yielding more overall interest than either approach would have by itself, even if the message isn't that contagious. "Because big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread."
Update: Full paper with data is here. (via atomiq)
Jonah Peretti, late of Eyebeam and currently of Huffington Post, and his fine team have launched Buzzfeed. From the about page:
BuzzFeed distinguishes what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped. We only feature movies, music, fashion, ideas, technology, and culture that are on the rise and worth your time.
The content territory that Buzzfeed aims to fill is an interesting one. The site is not Digg with 125 new items to read on the front page every day. Neither is it an historical record of what people thought was interesting at a certain point in time. It's more like a water cooler conversation with velocity, a moving snapshot of what the media and blogosphere is talking about. As a result, the stuff you see on Buzzfeed is not the absolute newest, freshest thing...there's no truly breaking news on the site because to have buzz around something, people already need to be talking about it somewhere. But unless you're completely obsessive about keeping up with everything going on in all corners of the world, it's likely that Buzzfeed will show you something new and interesting every day, especially if it's in an area you don't normally pay attention to. That's the goal, anyway.
I think it's a great approach, an attempt to cut through a bit of the hype and look past the memes you might chuckle at and then completely forget about and instead, as the about page says, "aggregate authentic excitement that captures what real people are saying about the things they find most interesting". The Borat trend is an example of something that really works with this approach. Unlike most films released these days, there's a surprising number of different things around Borat to talk about. There's the movie itself. There's the surprise popularity of it. And the almost universal great reviews. Then came the lawsuits. Now there's a bit of a backlash. And there's the Snakes on a Plane angle...Borat is a movie that succeeded through viral marketing where SoaP largely failed. A bit of something for everyone there, even for the hardcare Borat fan.
Warning Disclosure: I am an advisor to Buzzfeed.
I'm the Design Advisor for a new small company in NYC, and we're looking for a full-time web designer. I can't tell you a whole lot about the company here, but I can say it involves the web, contagious media, & weblogs and the people responsible are creative, reasonable, smart, level-headed and not at all "dot com".
What we're looking for is a generalist sort of web designer, someone who can develop the information architecture for an information-oriented web application, do visual mockups in Photoshop/Illustrator based on the IA, code the site up with valid XHTML/CSS, doesn't flee at the sight of a little Perl or PHP code, is familiar with weblogs, and knows some JavaScript. You don't need to be completely solid on all of that, but if you're not, you should be a quick on-the-job learner and just generally curious about the world and interested in learning how it all fits together.
I will provide ad hoc feedback and you'll be working closely with Jonah Peretti and a small team of smart folks onsite in NYC (most likely in Soho or Chinatown). This is a full-time salaried position, benefits are included, and you'll get equity in the company. The position is open immediately so if you're interested, send your resume/portfolio to jobs@buzzfeed.com with a subject line of "Web Designer position" (plain text resumes and links to online resumes/portfolios are greatly preferred to email attachments). We look forward to hearing from you.
This one guy tried to get the word "sweatshop" printed on his custom Nike shoes and Nike wouldn't let him. "The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word 'sweatshop.' Sweatshop is not: 1) another's party's trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately."
