Matt Kelly on Digital Strategy

So in a period of just a few weeks facebook has gone from being one of the greatest, best, most popular social networking websites to one of the more infamous..

See, Mark Zuckerberg is NOT a good CEO. He is a great visionary, perhaps an even better developer, but when it comes to guiding staff and providing products to consumers, he makes excruciatingly poor decisions.

No one knows what’s going to happen next, but we are starting to see some fairly influential figures leaving the popular site in search of open alternatives.

The (potential) loss of Zynga is also significant for Facebook. Social gaming is huge, and Zynga building their own platform for Farmville, Texas Hold’em and Mafia Wars could create huge drops in numbers for FB.

Time will tell, and all we can do at this stage is wait.. However, in the mean time, check your privacy settings.. Seems they have a way of ‘undoing’ themselves..

Time and time again articles are published whereby the results of social media integration prove significant gains for companies who implement a new online strategy WELL. Time and time again, companies still manage to ‘do it wrong’.

I find that I am continually telling people/consultants/companies that there are better ways of ‘doing it’ ie: marketing, ie: spreading the word, ie: using social media. I decided that its time that I was able to prove it. Prove it in a way that shows how a ‘situation’ starts and how the viral nature of social media takes action.

So here it is, my own personal little game, my own personal little challenge, perhaps the most daring and ‘out there’ thing I’ve ever done.

See, I don’t have a great deal of facebook friends, 287 at the time of writing. This group consist of roughly 30% work friends, 40% school friends and 30% university/friends from other places. I wanted to be able to prove that you don’t need to have a big following to be able to ‘put yourself out there’, to ‘reach the masses’ and to ‘make an impact’.

So my friends set up a challenge. The challenge is that “If 1000 people join this group, Matt Kelly will eat…”. The description contains; “4 cheeseburgers, 4 medium fries, 4 medium cokes and 2 large chocolate sundaes in a period of 40 minutes.”

Is this a challenge that I can complete if we achieved 1000 followers? Of course it is, in fact it isn’t quite as extreme as first anticipated. Sure, I’m positive I won’t be feeling too well after the event, however the potential gain in being able to illustrate how social media works justifies the ‘physical and emotional’ strain of the challenge.

See, there was a reason as to why I needed the title and description to be so ridiculous. It had to be compelling. As an individual, I don’t have a product or service I’m trying to sell. I simply wanted to prove the fact that with compelling content, through the right avenues, the ‘followers’ will come, and they will share the content they deem worth sharing.

So what was the result…?

Well after one day, there was already an interesting skew of results. It turns out that only 46% of the group members were existing friends of mine. What is more interesting however is that 54% of group members, I had never heard of.



The results skewed even further from there showing an even more significant sway to ‘randoms’ rather than people I knew.



By day 14, the results were clearly skewed to the point where the reason for the challenge has been proven. 



The interesting thing here is that as time went on, the results continued to skew. This is because as people joined, their personal networks became further removed from mine. This proves that if you have something compelling to share, unlike TV or ‘old media’, it can be recycled and redistributed by others. In other words, you create the viral effect with quality content and without the need for a big budget or a team of people.

I’ve outlined a visual example of exactly how this works on Facebook. See, the average Facebook user has approximately 130 friends (according to Facebook statistics).  If one user shares a message which is compelling to their 130 friends, there is a chance that at least 3 of these will pick up the message and re-share it, and so on. After 3 trenches of communication, 13 people have shared the message, but approximately 1690 people have seen your message. If this sequence follows two more times, you have had 120 people share your message and 15600 have seen it! Beyond this point, the story only continues to magnify.

Or in more visual terms..



The best part about social media marketing is that there is no limit to the number of times something can be shared, which is why we see ‘viral’ YouTube videos with in excess of 20 million views. Companies currently spend millions of dollars per year on television commercial budgets and publication of articles however this content rarely lasts longer then a number of days at best. In a television commercial’s case, it is literally lucky to last beyond 35 seconds.

If your organisation has an opportunity to identify your target market online, viral marketing is increasingly becoming a necessity. If you would like to contact me, feel free at any time using the email link to the right of this column.

For more information about the challenge or to join the group, click here.

UPDATE - 10th July, 2010.

The challenge finished several weeks ago and the video has finally made it to youtube.

Check it out.