Yesterday, Bud and Amber were riffing about how Foursquare should offer an "Epic Battle Mode" when two players trade the mayorship of a single location several times within a few days.

This got me thinking about the potential for Foursquare to compel spontaneous real-world events.

What if Foursquare issued a time sensitive challenge to certain players in the same city who shared an interest or habit (like going to small local coffee shops several times a day)?

For instance, a player might receive a special message from Foursquare that said "The Cup of Joe Trophy is now available for the next 12 hours. Your next clue is waiting for you in Bryant Park..."

What could you do with a mechanism like this?

I met up with Brian Fountain last night, and we bounced around a few thoughts. He's gonna be posting more about it, and hopefully we can pass a couple ideas back and forth.

Yesterday's post raised some interesting questions about the role and significance of becoming a trending topic on Twitter.

Nora Geiss and Helge Tennø asked why worry about the quantifiable aspect of becoming a trending topic? As with all communications, it's the substance of the trending topic that's important.

There were also interesting questions about the ethics and effect of figuring out the formula for becoming a trending topic. Spammers are already gaming the system and leaching on to the attention earned by trending topics to trick curious users into clicking through to their spam websites. What happens if major brands start adopting a similar strategy?

We look to trending topics as a mostly reliable indicator of the evolving zeitgeist of the twittersphere. If the popularity of top trending topics starts to become artificially manufactured, then the meaning of the entire function is undermined.

This clearly isn't good.

So, what is the appropriate role of top trending topics in the context of marketing? I propose that trending topics have a useful and appropriate role to play as an honest indicator of a surge in attention around a brand or specific campaign. If that attention is earned by actually creating an experience or event that makes enough Twitter users talk about it that it becomes a top trending topic, then that achievement should be looked to as evidence of the project's success.

Tricking Twitter users into thinking that everyone is talking about your campaign via artificial means, however, does a grave disservice to both your brand and the Twitter community.

As I said in my comment yesterday, I completely agree with Nora and Helge that it's essential to remember that trending topics are a social phenomenon that occurs when groups of connected individuals are compelled to share an experience. The substance of the topic needs to be compelling enough to motivate people to talk about it.

The quantitative side of things is also relevant, however, to the extent that it provides context for an already used success metric. Brands already point to having achieved a trending topic as proof of the success of a campaign. Well, what does achieving a trending topic really mean? Is it really as big a deal as people think?

The preliminary numbers I presented yesterday indicate that because of how fragmented the conversation is on Twitter, earning a trending topic is not the same thing as "getting everyone on Twitter to talk about you." There's a huge gaping chasm between those two occurrences, and it's important that marketers understand the difference.

(Update: More on why this matters and its implications here in Part II)

I've been conducting some informal research over the past couple weeks, and I've discovered that a frequency of approx 20 tweets per minute mentioning the same word is enough to create a top trending topic on Twitter.

As I was watching the trending topics this morning, at 7am EST, I saw the word "peace" suddenly pop up on Twitter's list of top 10 trending topics. Using Twitter's search I quickly counted up the number of results over the previous 5 minutes, and found 69 mentions, mostly in reference to today being The International Day of Peace.

Over the next 5 minutes, there were approximately 120 new mentions. Combined, those mentions averaged about 19 mentions per minute at the time when the word became a top 10 trending topic.

This confirms an earlier bit of research I did last Wednesday, when I looked at the number of mentions for "Baucus" when Senator Max Baucus' proposed health care legislation became a trending topic. Using Trendistic to determine when the term got hot, I went back through Twitter search and counted the mentions. I found that a frequency of approx 20-25 mentions per minute was enough to make Baucus become a trending topic.

The other key variable in the trending topic equation is the duration of the frequency of mentions. Once you pass the necessary threshold of mentions per minute to become a trending topic, how long can you sustain that frequency? It's this length of time that determines the strength and staying power of a trending topic.

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Right now this is only a hypothesis. I don't have enough data to prove it out. But, as brands become interested in attempting to create a trending topic as a marketing campaign objective, it will be critical for us to have a better handle on what it takes.

I'd love to hear your own speculations, questions, findings, and general thoughts. Comments are encouraged.

Here's a couple weeks worth of my favorite links, photos, and videos from my Tumblr blog.

On a related note, I've started using Google Reader (switched from Netvibes) so that I can contribute to this little experiment that Bud Caddell and Undercurrent are cooking up. I've been sharing a lot of stuff over there; if you're interested, check out my shared items feed and add me add me as a follow so that I can see what you're sharing, too.

Charlie Todd, creator of Improv Everywhere, visited Vienna and took this funny picture.




Learning the basics of typography is a very underappreciated skill for anyone who's interested in communicating thoughts. Here's a handy round of of 10 Common Typography Mistakes, like lengthy lines of text:




This video is ridiculous.




Have you seen Al Franken draw a map of the U.S. from memory, yet?




Lots of good Facebook stats with sources listed here. A few of my favs:

• More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day.


• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide).


• Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 1 billion photos a month.

David Carr did a very cool evolution of my Spectrum of Online Friendship diagram.

I was reading last week's New Yorker article about Zappos and was reminded what a great example they are of a company that does all this "social media" stuff well.

I know that Zappos is a go to reference for a brand that gets Twitter. But, I feel like over the past 6 months or so, we've become tired of using Zappos as an example for other brands and companies who are trying to find their footing in this still nascent marketing environment.

(This may very well just be me. Please let me know in the comments if you feel the same, or otherwise.)

When clients used to ask, "Who does this stuff well?" "Who can we learn from?" "Can you give us some examples?" Zappos was always my go to. But then I started to feel like I was sounding like a broken record. I started to feel like this example was being ignored.

Reading this article made me realize that the reason why using Zappos as an example has lost its impact for me, is because it's too hard for me to explain what exactly Zappos does so well. I can't point to a specific campaign and say, "Remember The Giant Shoe Factory thing that everyone was passing around? That was Zappos." Most clients have a hard time understanding examples that don't feel like advertising campaigns.

What makes Zappos a great example is also what makes them hard to use as an example. The execute a totally organic, open, and bottom up approach to digital media that is lead by a strong unifying culture, unique brand personality, and a clearly defined calling: Service. Once those guiding forces are firmly rooted, their brand can become porous, seamlessly integrating with the rest of the web on a human scale.

This is what it's supposed to look like. This is what it will look like for all brands in the not-too-distant future.

It's not a shiny object tied up in a pretty bow. It's messy. It's a little chaotic and uncontrollable. But, most importantly, it's human.

Photojojo is one of my favorite sites on the internet. They send out a twice-a-week email newsletter with helpful tips and projects for you and your photography. And now they have a book!

What's best about Photojojo, though, is its personality. I constantly use them as a perfect example of how to cultivate a distinct brand personality on the web. Every brand can learn from them.

And one of my little 'ole photos has been used in their new book.

I got a look at an advance copy, and I can honestly say it looks awesome. Lots of fun and inspiring projects for photographers of all levels of expertise.

Check it out.

Yesterday, Facebook launched lite.facebook.com, aka Simple Facebook, aka Facebook sans Junk, aka Facebook without ads.

I was chatting about it in the office with Eric Tabone and Clay Parker Jones; while we all liked the quick and easy new experience, we couldn't avoid the irony that in so many ways the new site looks a lot like we would imagine an old version of the site would look. Less stuff. Less boxes and apps. Less banner ads and flyers cluttering up our sidebar.

I'm not sure where Facebook is going with this. What happens if everyone loves this, and wants to adopt it as the regular version of the site? As Eric pointed out, would that cause some problems for advertisers?

Editor's Note: Apologies for the long absence. I've been moving! There's still plenty of work to be done on the new apartment; at least we're starting to settle in a bit now, and I have internet again (hard to believe how much I missed it). So, back to work...

Motivating collective creativity among a group of loosely connected individuals with a shared interest requires more than just an offer of prize money. Brands can harness social and personal desires to inspire crowds to come together for collaborative endeavors.

Daren C. Brabham is a PhD candidate who does research on crowdsourcing. A few weeks ago I came across this paper (PDF) he wrote about why Threadless members participate. (I'm embarassed to admit I can't remember where I found this. Please pipe up in the comments if you were the person who passed me this link.)

Daren interviewed 17 members who participate on Threadless in different ways and for different reasons. He found that across this spectrum, there were a few main themes for why members participated: to make money, to possibly get freelance design work, to get better at designing, because they liked the community, and eventually because they get addicted to participating.

These themes have strong implications for the many brands who aspire to get their fans to collaborate with the brand on some kind of collective creative endeavor.

First off, brands need to acknowledge that their fans need motivation in general. They're not waiting around for an opportunity to be creative. They don't need you for that. If you're going to go ahead anyway, then be sure to design the experience to deliver as many of the potential motivations as you possibly can.

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