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Facebook: Away From Keyboard
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 * The seed has now been officially planted…**

A brainstorming session aimed at finding factors that can create a memetic experience; we came up with “Facebook”. Ok, Facebook, what about it? What else on the new media landscape is more viral these days than Facebook itself, really? Pushing the imagination boundaries even further, how would a ‘no Facebook tomorrow look like’ - seems to have some good potential for attracting attention.


 * Scenario**

Inspired from this super potent idea, we brought Facebook activities into the real world. Walking up to complete strangers with a photo in your hands asking them to like your photos-makes you a mad man. Even more so, when someone sees you as one, they tend to comply with you (so that you leave them alone, indeed) and do what`s expected from them, thus when asked to like a photo, passing by strangers liked our “mad man's”, i.e. Maciek's photo! Also, writing on walls, real walls in real halls is very, very interesting…If Facebook were to ever not exist anymore I would definitely implement this “strategy” of asking people to write on my CCIT walls how awesome I am…The benefit here is that if they write the opposite I can take care of the issue right then and there... And I would also give them my “super poke” (a punch in the face) too.


 * Promotional channels**

We relied on social media to promote the video. The channels most dominant were Facebook itself, Twitter, Reddit, several web forums. We posted the link to the YouTube video on Facebook and asked for some people to “share" it, others did this voluntarily. We attracted some attention in other parts of the world in our case mostly Europe, North America and Asia.

To avoid censorship filters in China we uploaded the video on Youku, a Chinese video website. Furthermore, we shared the video on other popular social networking sites as well, such as Renren, Kaixin, and Sina micro blogger. So far, we got 137 views in total. The conclusion here is that the majority of our international audience belongs to the Net Generation, a generation with diminishing language briers and with very similar concept of internet fun.

Another interesting fact is that there is social media "prime time". Facebook indicates the time when most people in your network are interacting with content. If we shared the video in the early morning, few people would have a chance to view it until their page refreshed. According to some research, 6-10 pm is the heavy usage of social media points. In addition, not only time period matters to the promotion. Compiled from nearly 200 million fans impressions on Facebook pages over a 5 month period, another survey shows that users click on links in Facebook fan pages 10% of the time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and 9% of the time on Mondays, with much lower rates later in the week.(http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-social-ctr-by-days-of-the-week-2009-9) Therefore, 6-10 on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are the prime time for us to promote the video. This is shown in our YouTube video stats, the traffic increase happened from Monday to Tuesday and then Tuesday to Wednesday:





On the other hand, Twitter features used were retweets and hash tagging. The retweet function reposts a tweet (one cannot retweet their own tweet) thus it reappears in the timeline. Hash tagging on the other hand aggregates the tweet into a bunch that share the hash tag term (subject describing the content), thus the tweet becomes searchable under any of the defined hash tag words (#meme, #humor, #facebook). Among the people who helped share the tweet some had status as opinion leaders and perceived as relevant in the field of new media (some with over 1000 followers). One person like that also pointed out the above mentioned idea for prime time in social media applies to Twitter even more. Twitter`s timeline is the equivalent to Facebook`s News feeds, but features a tweet only once and it does not reappear out of chronological order unless retweeted (reposted) by someone else.

Additionally, the video was also posted to several message forums. We posted the link on the [|UTM Anime club message forums]. The video got several responses from this site and generally was accepted as an interesting concept. Furthermore, the video was posted on anime and manga-focused message boards such as MyAnimeList, the AnimeOnDVD forums on Mania.com, the UTSG Anime Club forums and other forums focused on the two mediums. Sites with a focus on anime and manga are where many memes are generated nowadays, which is the basis of why the video was shared on these forums.


 * The final results…and the future of “Facebook: Away From Keybord”**

We got 1750 (updated Nov 17) YouTube views over the course of 5 days – a good indication that the video attracted some attention.Internet memes do have a planned component embedded in them- their creators have done their homework and heavily promoted them to make them popular. However, if after this point the "replication of the cells happens organically", i.e. traffic increase (if any) happens without any “push” action on our part, then we can conclude that our video went viral. Apparently, YouTube considers Facebook:Away From Keyboard to have some potential and is popular enough for ad revenue sharing. Here`s a screen shot of YouTube`s message: