The Facebook Five hits No. 5: Brevity
Saying it in 120 characters is one thing. Making it memorable is another.
James Geary is the high priest of the aphorism, and today we see the most shared items on Facebook as visual mashups of the pithy quote and the cutesy photo. Read more here on the importance of aphorism.
We even have established genres -- the Successories knock offs like Despair, the Faux greeting cards, the 19th century line drawing wood cuts, SomEEcards being the most popular form.
George Takei's entire Facebook feed is devoted to the concept. And the other night, Alton Brown took it to an art form with an entire night of TwitPic Tweets (I know, mixing platforms -- but it's about the concepts, not the tools) in which he responded to the impassioned pleas of fans with photos of cartoons he drew on Post-It notes.
Pintrest's growth is based on this. As with social trends, this is not something new in human interaction.
When you marry the right words with the timely photograph you can achieve something memorable.
They call it a post card.
What the social world ads is the "viral" -- I prefer to say networked. The folks at the old shop got this image after Arkansas advanced 2-0 in the CWS for the first time since 1979. It brings it all together -- and happens to have the perfect line built right in as baseball coach Dave Van Horn walks under one of the branding signs at Omaha.
At the end of the process, the key to success in the Facebook EdgeRank is sharing. If you don't say things that are interesting and provide information that people want to know, you will be doomed to the side bar, not in the main news feed.
Coming up this weekend: The Twitter Three followed by -- if you at in St. Louis for convention -- the Four Rules of Crisis.
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