Towards the end of the working day on Friday, Darragh casually mentioned that he was going to see “some guy called Ze Frank” at the Science Gallery in Trinity that evening. Immediately I was asking to tag along, because Ze is probably one of the funniest people I have ever encountered, online or off. Like most good comedians, he also has a way of getting a message across when he wants to, though I’m not sure what he thinks of being considered a comedian. Well, at least I’m not saying it alone.
Turns out Ze wasn’t the only person speaking, Jonah Peretti was also speaking. I wasn’t familiar with the name, but he’s the guy behind BlackPeopleLoveUs, which I found quite hilarious in college 
Not necessarily a good reason to listen to him talk for an hour of course, but he also happens to be one of the founders of The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and now his cred is apparent.
As one fellow attendee put it, Jonah was there to talk about the physical mechanics of the network by which viral media is dispersed, whereas Ze was there to talk about the media itself.
Jonah had some interesting stuff to say about “viral marketing” which he summarized as such:
- Contagious Media
- Big Seed Marketing
- Mullet Strategy
- Fanatics
- Mormonism
To expand on the concepts a little as I understood them (because I’m no journo and paraphrasing from memory doesn’t count as an explanation):
Contagious Media
The idea of contagious media is that it’s stuff that will appeal to the “Bored At Work Network”, ie the large group of office workers who don’t necessarily enjoy their jobs, have free time and a fast Internet connection. I feel this is a pretty basic concept, but I can see why it might be overlooked. After all, how many people are really capable of looking beyond their own fascination with their creation to notice whether other people might actually enjoy it? Just because you like looking at pictures of your kid doesn’t mean anyone else necessarily will, unless…
Big Seed Marketing
Big seed marketing sounds to me like dressed up spam, the idea being that you seed a very large audience with the idea being that a percentage of that large audience will pass along the message to a much smaller, but still significant (due to the large seed) secondary group.
Mullet Strategy
Keep your shiny, well presented content to the fore and your rough, unedited user generated content deeper in the site, “Business up front, party in the back”. This is the model the Huffington Post uses for presenting it’s data, and I think it has it’s uses. If you think about a user generated content reviews site, for example, you’d probably want to have some professional level articles seeded in there to draw users in in the first place. Some sites work well as pure user generated content, some don’t. Many novice webmasters are under the impression that simply by building something, or installing a piece of OOTB software, people will flock to it. This is another example of “my kids photo” mentality and it’s a prevalent one.
Fanatics
Peretti coins this as something like “people with personality disorders”, which I think is quite appropriate. One of his examples he used in the talk was Wikipedia, which singularly exploits the Obsessive Compulsive disorder. Edit, revert, tidy, cite, categorize. I vaguely recall a generic statistic on user generated content sites that the generators are something like 1% of the actual audience of the content. This sort of correlates with rough Boards.ie data, which last year put “active contributors” at a figure of about 16,000 per month, while our audience figures were something like 1.3 million.
Mormonism
Evangelists. People who love your stuff and will “sell it” to their friends and anyone they know. I thought a more Irish equivalent would be your average chugger on the street, but I have a feeling Mormons don’t generate nearly the amount of animosity that charity muggers do. Mormons are persistent overall, but polite and generally inoffensive in my experience. More importantly, they slowly make conversions without, I believe, generating heavy negative collateral.
Ze’s segment of the talk was largely focused on the surprising unpredictability what is and isn’t popular. He spoke about connecting to people on a very personal level, and put emphasis on how he doesn’t set out to make money on any of his forays into social media. He’s just trying to have fun and try new ways of interacting with people and having them interact with each other using the Internet.
Some of the most successful experiments by Ze appear to possess the commons traits of having a low barrier to entry (almost anyone can try it) and requiring minimal effort or expenditure of time. But they also allow for the “fanatics” to really push the boundaries and explore the limits of the idea. Some examples of these are “YoungMeNowMe”, the “Ray – Whip Ass” remixes and “Earth Sandwich”.
Overall, I was very happy that I was able to attend this talk, I also met a few interesting people at the gathering in the Science Gallery café after the talk, like @cianmm and @patrickod. Unfortunately I missed out on the flashmob experiment at the Stag’s Head on Saturday (I would have been a circle), probably missed my only opportunity to get a photo with Ze too, which is disappointing. Ah well.
