Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

I’m a big culprit of ignorance in an age of Wikipedia. For me it’s too much of an open invitation to indulge in highlight culture, giving me only the necessary fuel to read books that can’t be summarized by Wiki’s meritocratic article compilation. Perhaps Chris’ Gladwell post sits in agreement with me.

So I am intrigued to work on the 2008 National Year of Reading campaign which aims to engage the younger generation by welcoming any form of reading – offline and online. I may be too old to be in the target demographic but perhaps I’m in the ideal position testify how important it is for the future that an entertaining Web 2.0 successfully embraces (not opposes) offline and online reading for an infotained public. McQuail’s uses and grats coins this as cognitive needs.

I can also testify that my younger sister spends 43204834309 hours on social media – YouTube, Bebo and Facebook – the latter of which the topics of discussion I’m constantly reminded of via a newsfeed. Unfortunately as the fabric of social network discussion revolves around events or people the platform does not necessitate too much reading.  However, optimism must be expressed when the architecture for participation on social networking sites is the the wall – a perfect basis to share information as well as entertainment.

Name the Greek philosopher who once said:

“Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people”

(Yet when someone mentions this quote to me I can’t help but think the presupposition of the philosopher was one of big head and not great mind.)

What I really like about the National Year of Reading’s online campaign is that it uses video dares over YouTube as entertainment, to incite information retrieval in the form of reading – and then uses a YouTube channel wall as the voice or participation platform.

The online campaign targets 1-14 year old boys who have become disengaged with reading in school. Running until Christmas, the campaign aims to creatively engage with the target group by tapping into
their online habits. The press release stresses multiple values such a program instills into communities and reads: “The year aims to encourage people to read in businesses, homes, and communities around the country, providing new opportunities to read and helping people to access help and support through schools and libraries” — but i’ll leave you with a quote on why this as a Government initiative is also a great democratic process:

“A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” -
–  James Madison

The ultimate dare of the campaign is to read – do it, DO IT NOW! (your Governor needs YOU!)

Here’s a little Christmas present for all the media-buffs who read our blog – a colourful diagram from a simulation I ran of the distribution mechanism of viral marketing. The colour reflects the number of viewers the content ends up with, with Red being the most and Blue being the least.

(Click for larger version)

Explanation:

The x axis measures the quality of the viral content – i.e. the chance that someone will pass the content on to a friend when they see it.

The y axis measures a slightly abstract property of graphs. In this situation, given I could pass a viral to you, what is the probability that you could pass a viral to me?

The two extremes are Facebook and Bloggers:

On facebook there are only really “undirected” (two-way) connections – If you’re my friend then I’m your friend, and we both have the same ability to pass the content to the other person.

The Blogosphere is different – If I write a blog post (like this one) you can comment, but the vast majority of readers will not, so the connections are virtually all one-way (“directed”). I am far more likely to pass content to the readers of this blog than a random reader is to pass content back to me.

It turns out that this difference can be really important in the amount of traffic you can get from seeding a viral marketing campaign, but (in my model) there is a significant change in what this difference will mean for your campaign depending on the quality of the content.

Looking at the main plot again, it’s clear that there is a bifurcation in the results (commonly known as the “tipping-point”) half way along the x-axis (It’s only half-way because I have chosen the range on the x-axis to place it in the centre).

This is the point where many people will say the content has “gone viral” – although very little content ever reaches this level. It is close to the point where you expect every person that sees your content to pass it on to exactly one friend (see “Jamie Oliver starts to get viral marketing“.

This is often chosen as the point of “viral”, since it is a distinct point that can be predicted in models – even though it cannot possibly be measured in reality (perhaps that is also part of the reason…).

But notice how the behaviour changes at that point – on the left (where the vast majority of content lies) your content will do better if you focus on Blogger-like seeding, with one-way arrows. On the right your content may do better with facebook-style seeding.

More information:

This simulation was run assuming a population of 60,000,000 (approximately the size of the UK internet population), and with an initial seeding pool of 1,000 viewers. The colours shown are the predicted number of unique viewers of the content. For More information, contact Rubber Republic.

Tim