Spreading Susan Boyle

It’s nice to know that I am still thinking in the same direction of the industry at large, this is a really great article about the Susan Boyle video and why it spread so quickly on the internet. The author talks about social networks accelerating the pass along nature of this amazing video and the reason why people feel compelled to share content like this.

The article is quite short and deserves a full read (URL at the bottom of this post).

The role of Twitter in all of this is most interesting. Twitter Twits did what Twitter Twits do best — they tweeted alerts about an interesting bit of content and were able to embed micro-links so their followers could quickly access the content. I think of Twitter as like a swarm of bees that spread out in all directions, searching for interesting materials to share. When someone finds it, they come back to the hive, do a little honey dance, and send the swarm scampering behind them. This is how collective intelligence outsmarts the broadcast decision-makers: The Twitter Tribes can figure out what content the audience wants to see because the Twitter Tribes are the audience, making decisions in real time.

Equally important is that we had the agency to decide which content we wanted to pass along — out of all of the possible video clips posted on YouTube last week or indeed, out of all of the many segments of media content which are circulating around us.

We believe that we can only understand what happened here by identify the choices which consumers made as they decided to pass along this content and not that content. The USA Today on Monday sought to identify a range of different motives which shaped the decisions to pass along this particular content: “Vindication . . . Surprise . . . Guilt . . . Shame . . . Psychology . . . Hope . . . Distraction . . . Empowerment . . . Authenticity . . . Spiritual Solace.”

How Susan Spread and What It Means. Via Bigspaceship Twitter