Viral marketing is as much about context as content

Saturday and @Madeupstats is running another #madeupstaturday for Fyneales. This weekend's theme: the Internet.

Sadly lacking in creativity today, I was amused by some quite clever quips.

Then I saw this:

1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA. An ejaculation is a data transfer of 1587GB in 3 seconds - via @bsiscovick & @nivertech #BigDataForTheWeekend
— Michael A. Jackson (@MAJACKS0N) January 14, 2012

Nothing to do with #madeupstaturday, it was a bunch of numbers and vaguely Internet-related.

So I appropriated it.

1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA. An ejaculation is a data transfer of 1587GB in 3 seconds. #madeupstaturday
— Alex Guest (@AlexGuest) January 14, 2012

While Michael Jackson's tweet got 8 retweets and 1 favourite, mine received 50+ tweets in moments. Twitter won't tell me the exact RT count but it looks like 100s and over 20 favourites within 4 hours. As I stood chatting to a potential new flatmate, my iPhone was going insane with notifications from Twitter with replies, retweets and new followers.

Also, Michael has been informed that his information is a @madeupstats!

So what?

Getting a tweet to spread - and to spread all over the world from South America to Russia - in quick time, is not just about the content. My taking the tweet and associating it with a different hashtag, with far more watchers, meant that it propagated far outside my usual Twitter network. Let's call it 'reproduction marketing', taking content and repurposing it in order to disseminate it far and wide.

Meanwhile, you may well be curious to know if the original information is accurate.

I ran a search for 'MB of DNA in sperm' and discovered that Reddit had the exact same information back in 2009! And it's been repeated over and over in various corners of the Internet. But it appears to be false.

According to UTheGuru.com,

approximately 21.45 megabytes of ‘data’ is transferred during each act of human sexual reproduction in the form of gametes.

 So the figures really were @madeupstats.

Last year's top stories on alexguest.me

Along with everyone else who runs a blog of some sort, I had a look at the most popular posts on alexguest.me for 2009. It seems the topic area that attracted most visitors was Twitter and related platforms. Here are the top five.

Still sceptical about Twitter: three ways in which Twitter has made a difference to my life and working practices. Just three examples but very indicative of the many possibilities.

Bing - Microsoft restarts search engine: a look at Microsoft's relaunched search service, Bing. I speculate that market share in search is closely tied to browser market share.

Sky earnings undermine ad-funded online TV: BSkyB's earnings report reveals the extent to which satellite broadcasting is set to remain far more lucrative and profitable than online TV for years to come.

Tweetdeck v Seesmic: ten deciding features was just that, a comparison of Tweetdeck and Seesmic. So similar in many ways but ultimately the bugginess of Seesmic led me back to Tweetdeck.

#Moonfruit marketing on Twitter: both an entry into the Moonfruit Twitter competition (by virtue of using the hashtag in the title) and a criticism of the campaign, which ultimately was stopped by Twitter itself.



In 2010 I fully intend to spend more time writing about the London/UK/European start-up scene and also share some of my learnings and experiences of building my business.

IE6 will die on its own

No need for euthanasia.

Earlier this week, the IE6 No More campaign was launched, led by Weebly and a number of other mostly young Internet companies. The plan, no less, is to kill off Internet Explore 6, once and for all. Their reasoning:

As any web developer will tell you, working with IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things they have to deal with on a daily basis, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Beyond that, IE 6's support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create and holding the web back.

There are now over 70 companies backing the campaign by including a banner on their websites, visible only to those on IE6 (and earlier) encouraging them to switch to Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari 4 or IE8.

It's frequently claimed that IE6 accounts for 15-25% of Internet users. I wonder whether that paints an accurate picture of the usage of IE6.

When I was at Zattoo, visits to http://zattoo.com from the UK by IE6 users were very low. In fact, they accounted for just 6.5% in the last six months of my tenure (1st January to 30th June 2009).

Since we launched TV Pixie earlier this week, the proportion of visits from IE6 account for just 6%.

This blog, meanwhile, has just 3.6% of visits from readers on IE6. You guys are really advanced: 64% on Firefox (although the one person on v1.5.0.6 might want to upgrade); and of those on any IE version, 78% are on 7 or 8.

In other words, IE6 is dying all by itself. Web designers, especially start-ups, can probably ignore IE6 compatability, with impunity.

My gut instinct is that the IE6 No More campaign is a splendid PR coup.

Weebly, the leader of IE6 No More, is a direct competitor of Moonfruit. As I mentioned recently, Moonfruit launched a big Twitter campaign, which apparently resulted in a massive increase in activity for them, even though Twitter forced them to pull the plug on it. So it should come as no surprise, that Weebly responds with a campaign of their own. Theirs, however, is so much more subtle and avoids engaging in spamming techniques and product giveaways.

If you are one of those on IE6, I do recommend switching to another web browser. I generally use Firefox 3.5, which I find is stable and fast, as well as making it easy to install add-ons (like the Facebook toolbar and Foxclocks) for further functionality.

Unfortunately, for online banking, like many people I'm forced to use Internet Explorer. Should we start a campaign?

#Moonfruit marketing on Twitter

#moonfruit has rapidly jumped up the Twitter trending topics. Moonfruit is the latest company to make use of hashtag-based promotions and is offering a MacBook Pro to ten lucky winners over ten days. To be eligible to win, simply tweet #moonfruit. Mashable reckons it's an example of Twitter promotion done right.

Sitting at the top of the trending topics list reflects massive awareness of the campaign. I wonder, however, how many people actually know what Moonfruit actually does.

I'm also already tired of #moonfruit tweets and, having posted both a haiku and a cocktail recipe, have got bored of participating: there is no reward for creativity.

And that's a shame. Moonfruit has chosen it's prize well but the mechanism is surely wrong, for a company which helps people build websites. The MacBook Pro is ideal for web designers but creativity is also a vital component.

Sadly for Moonfruit, although celebrating its tenth anniversary, it wasn't quick enough to grab the Twitter handle @moonfruit. It belongs instead to one Ashleigh Hart of Maine and Upstate NY, whose updates are blocked. And they are left with @moontweet.

Now, please can I have a MacBook Pro?