Book review--Contagious (Jonah Berger)

As most of the readers of my blog know, as do my Facebook friends, I spend a lot of time sharing pictures of cats and links to articles that make me generally annoyed. (I like the cat pictures--it is the articles that annoy me--in fact, I LOVE cat pictures.) And being a writer, I am generally curious about why certain articles and trends light up the internet.

Contagious--Why Things Catch On (by Jonah Berger) is one attempt to explain why certain things on the internet and elsewhere go viral. It is not the only attempt that I have encountered, but it is the first that I have read by an actual Ph.D. who has conducted research on the subject.

Berger starts off the book with the story of Barclay Prime's hundred-dollar cheesesteak (the brainchild of Howard Wein), something that I never heard of before. Yes, I said, hundred-dollar cheesesteak. Exactly the type of item that I would have been curious about when I was still in the restaurant business...and let's be honest, I am still curious about such things. Berger hooked me with an interesting story, and kept me interested though-out the rest of the book.

I learned a lot about marketing from this book. I am not sure if I can make any of it work for me; let's be honest, I am not great when it comes to marketing (an advertising major, I am not). On the other hand, the book does give me hope that a certain project that I am involved in (yes, the farting monkey project) might have viral potential.

I give this book five stars. And I am keeping the book for my own personal library.

[Disclosure: The book used for this review was given to me by the good people at Simon & Schuster, a result of a GoodReads First Reads contest that I entered--thank you Simon & Schuster and Professor Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania.]

I have read a bad blog about you

The other day, I got a private message on Twitter stating that read:

I just read a really bad blog about you.

The message also included a shorted URL that rotated through a "session timed out" page before landing on what looks like the Twitter log-in page. I did not go any further. For one thing, the webaddress was not right, and I was already logged into Twitter on another tab.

I think that it is safe to presume that it is a phishing campaign.

But I will admit that it made me curious, so I googled myself "Morgaan Drake Eckstein." The only thing I saw bad in the first five pages was a couple of social networking profiles that show no activity.

I know that there is bad stuff written about me on the internet---after all, I blog about Golden Dawn and the occult. The number one pasttime of certain people in those fields is to badmouth anyone that looks like they might be an authority someday. In fact, I believe that this applies to all working writers.

My advice is to not really gave a duck's butt about bad blog posts about oneself, and just keep working. If nothing else, it will annoy the spammers and your critics.

How much is a twitter account worth?

Today, I stumbled across someone trying to sell their Twitter account for $300.

I was on Twitter, culling out some of the more useless people that I was following on Twitter. Mainly because I hit one of Twitter's limits on following people, so I was removing some of the people who never actually tweet.

Anyways, this person has 28,197 followers, and is following 29,768 people. They are listed on 126 lists. They have made 428 tweets, though their last tweet was on July 12th.

But is this Tweeter account worth three hundred dollars?

Beats me. I know that it is out of my price range at the moment. And it probably would be worthless to me; after all, I am dealing with a specialized market. The account was definitely not rigged for my market.

Yet, I still wonder if the account is worth three hundred dollars to someone who is less focused on a specific market than I am. Who knows. Nevertheless, I found it interesting---don't you?

I am a bad Twitter follower

One of the things that you are told about Twitter by those "who know how to use it properly for business purposes" is that you are supposed to follow everyone that follows you on Twitter.

I am a bad Twitter user. I follow most, but not all, of my Twitter followers. This may be because I am more prone to looking for story and article ideas, along with a few mintutes of entertainment than trying to run a business from Twitter.

Instead of giving you a list of the type of people I follow, it would be easier to tell you who (what) I won't follow on Twitter---tweets in languages and characters that I do not understand (Chinese and Russian mainly), machine-driven spam tweeters, and people who are going to tell me (loudly) that my religion is wrong.

The one I can look at and see that it is in a language I do not speak or read. I do follow some French and Spanish tweeters (I was surprised to learn that I could read some tweets in Spanish). The other is based on fair guess---if you sending out articles links detailing Christmas gift ideas in July, I am guessing that you are actually a machine. The last is typically loud Christian Republicans who openly state that all Wiccans (Witches) and Democrats should be burnt at the stake---you can hardly miss spotting them as they try to set you on fire.

I will admit that I do have a few people that I follow who fall into these categories. For instance, I do follow a few tweeters who use robots to tweet, but occasionally they (the real human being) comes along and posts something that looks personal. But most robots I ignore. The other categories also have their special cases---entertain me and I will follow, no matter how dubious your personal habits or the related language difficulties are.

Now I will admit that I have some weird tweets coming up---I have an article up on Associated Content about listening to Christmas music in July. But the article is actually meant to be read in July (or December if you are into Christmas music).

Anyways, if you follow me on Twitter and I do not follow you in a 48 hour period---this is probably why---you are a Pagan burning and bashing Christian spamming robot.

As always if you have discovered an useful reason for following everyone, even people you do not understand, please feel free to leave a comment. Remember it may take me up to 48 hours to get back to the computer and approve comments, and that I send spam and flames directly to the round pixel file.

Twittering the AC articles

There are just some days that you have to take care of the little business matters that you have been neglecting and today was one of them.

One of the little things I have been neglecting is linking my Associated Content articles to my twitter page. Of course, it turned out to be as painful as I thought it would be. For one thing, I needed to change my twitter password (it was shared by another site---I know---Bad Morgan!). Then I promptly could not type in the exact password again; it was strong, but not memoriable. So it goes.

Now at the moment, I do not have that many followers on twitter. A whole seven---and I am not really sure that they are real followers. But in twitter's defense, I have not worked at making sure people know I have a twitter account.

Then is also the whole issue that I do not update twitter regularly. Logging in today, I realized that it had not been updated for three months. A large part of that problem is that I do not have a cell phone, so I actually have to be near a computer to update my status.

So why am I setting this up now? Simply because I can foresee needing it in the future. For instance, in June when my wife is out of town, I plan on doing a lot of writing. I do not want to waste a minute of that two or three week period---those of you who have heard me complain about how she interrupts my writing will understand that comment. Having this set up ahead of time will help on that front.

Anyways, that was my big accomplishment of the day (if you ignore the fact that I changed my profile picture back to a real picture from the "last meal before execution" meme).

Follow Morgan Eckstein on Twitter.

Finally created a twitter account

Well, I finally set up a twitter account. I have avoided doing this for awhile. I realize that as a writer, I should have a twitter account. Or at least, that is what the good folks over at Associated Content tell me.

Personally, not believing in mobile phones, the idea of twitter has passed me by. You can have a cell phone; but for myself, I had one for a couple of years, and I think I used it a dozen times over that time period. So it is like a hundred dollars per time I actually used the phone to make or recieve a call.

But a couple of people I know have twitter accounts, and actually update regularly. So I created a twitter account to be able to read their updates.

And if I can figure out how to do it, I will set my Associated Content account up so that it posts a link every time I publish something on AC because I am not the world best promoter of my own material. Having some of my self-promotion set on auto-pilot might help.

So if you want to get updates of all my Associated Content stuff (some of it might actually be readable), follow me on Twitter. And I will try to update it as often as I update Facebook.