Friday, January 14, 2011

The Speech I Wish Sarah Palin Would Give

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The Holiday Effect: Using Social Networks and Cultural Amplifiers to Drive Download Intensity

If you're promoting your act on social networks, a chestnut to recruit is the holiday effect. Simply: people buy on the holidays. Market to the season. Sort of a marketing cosmic d'oh but it's fun to prove the merely obvious. Here are some Insight stats from YouTube. The first the overall downloads for the site.



The tall spikes are release times. Releasing often to keep these high is important, but a measure of amplitude range (think of it as how far a speaker cone travels to make a sound) whereas the peak clustering is the measure of intensity or hits across all properties in the channel. To create intensity, you want multiple properties. However, burstyness is a sign of coupling among the properties and the market: to wit, the Christmas cluster of products will create bursty download behaviors.

Notice the almost flatline performance until a year ago when the social network couplers kick in. The big boil at the end is the result of the Christmas Carol and Ave Maria productions getting the seasonal hits. You can use the video bar on this page to see these videos.



The second shows the Ave Maria download stats in isolation. As with all releases to a network I've observed so far, there is a big spike from the close network (eg, Facebook) followed by the secondary networks and revisits. If you look closely, you see the spike at Dec 24/25 and January 10/11 with low points at the day after Christmas and New Years. You can actually watch this pattern in the video.

You can see the cultural preferences in the diaspora of the downloads.



Holiday effect is an example of cultural product clustering, eg, Christmas records, keyed to the season when the money is spent and the themes of the people spending the money freely. Mercantile it is, but the effect on the download intensity is easy to see and these bursty effects are key to inciting the emergence of the act into the attention of the network spanning functions. or.. mo'like gets mo'betterand mo'noticed and mo' is mo'.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Safe In Your Arms

With all that is happening in the world, it is harder to imagine or remember simple intimacy and the joy of being safe. Love who you love with all your strength.

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