weekend diversion on social media as tool to get a puppy

the key is the dad
Fascinating piece from The Atlantic that I hope is tearing up the inter-tubes involving 5 cute kids who want a puppy, Facebook, and a set of parents who were trying to delay the arrival of the inevitable puppy. The narrative is simple: kids who want a puppy are told by dad that they can have one if they get 1,000,000 people to “like” their Facebook post about wanting a puppy. Apparently this sort of thing happens often (one example of Kids + Facebook = Pet, here), but the key here is that the dad is

a digital-media scholar at Northeastern University who studies the first half of the 19th century, with a particular interest in a kind of relevant question: What makes something go viral?

(My italics, btw.) A viral expert set what he thought was an incredibly high goal, thinking that his kids would be distracted by an ultimately unsuccessful campaign long enough the parents to heroically give them a puppy anyway, in a few months.

"My expectation when they came to me was that they would post it and maybe they would get several thousand people who would come to the site over a couple of weeks. It would be family and friends. And then I did expect that friends of friends would find it and would come. But I just thought it would kind of peter out at that point,"

He knew that the characteristics of things that go viral today are similar to those that went equivalently viral within 19th century society:

Brevity, comedy, charm, and resonance with cultural values (in the 19th century, those were often religious ones) all increased the likelihood of virality. "Even 200 years ago, it still wasn’t complex philosophical treatises that were going viral. It was a short little pithy story that taught you a lesson," Cordell observed.

He probably did not underestimate the charm of his kids, or the resonance of kids-wanting-pets and the power of images in today’s culture. But here is what surprised the expert:

Just seven hours after his two daughters started a Facebook page entitled "Twogirlsandapuppy," the Cordell children blew past their goal.

So now the dad has a new data set to work on, to distract him from his research on 19th century texts that went viral. How did the Facebook page of his kids get transmitted from a network of a few hundred people connected to the family to generate a “like” response from over a million people in 7 hours? Remember, smart dad thought they would top out in the thousands, and even that would take a few weeks.

I suspect that this will prove to be very distracting for the dad.

© Sandy Mattingly 2013