I have heard a recurring pattern to these questions, and I would like to share them here. Call it the first draft of an FAQ, if you will.

Q: My organization needs to ensure its messaging follows compliance regulations, and our legal department tends to be very strict on what we produce. Can we still use social learning?

Yes. However, before you launch a pilot, you will definitely want to have a conversation with your legal department to ensure that you create a set of procedures which meet their requirements.

Q: Do we have to completely cede control to our learners?

For some reason, people who are new to social learning envision a “wild west” situation. However, user-generated learning shouldn’t resemble the mash-up of content on a band’s Myspace page. That’s why I’ve proposed a model of smart learning where the organization partners to produce bi-directional communication and learning.

Q: Will formal structured learning go away?

Not for a very long time. We’ll still rely on classroom training to implement certain soft-skills as well as certain hands-on skills. Social learning serves as an ideal supplement to these ideas. Therefore, learners hear about concepts in class and receive reinforcement from a community after class.

Q: My IT Department has concerns about using open-source software or software that makes calls outside of the corporate firewall.

Some social learning solutions are purely open-source projects that have been built around plug-ins. For example, WordPress Multi-User and BuddyPress offer highly versatile solutions. However, plenty of LMS vendors have also entered the game and added social learning technologies to their product. Your choice now depends on your business strategy and your budget.

Q: This technology seems to be evolving quickly. If we buy a system from a vendor, will it be outdated in just a few years?

We’ve seen a lot of ideas towards a social learning management system, but no vendor has created the “killer app” yet. Honestly, vendors are still protoyping in an emerging market. So, embracing a software-as-a-service strategy (SaaS) may be a savvy approach.

Q: Where do we start?

The best place to start a social-learning pilot is often with a core group of users who have common learning needs, but they are highly geographically distributed. I have seen pilots work exceptionally well with salespeople as well as end-users of software within the organization. Start small and manageable with your pilot, and then let the concept evolve from there.

Q: Where can I see a model of bi-directional collaboration within learning?

In March 2010, I published an article entitled Smart Learning for Smart Grids in Powergrid International magazine. In addition to looking at next generation learning technologies, you’ll find models for SMART learning in figures 2 and 3. Together, these models indicate that learning and development departments will have to rethink how they serve their organizations.

It’s a long presentation, but it’s a piece that really encapsulates powerful trends in social networking, game design, and human behaviors.

In this presentation, he highlights some of the most unexpected trends in social media and games over the past few years: Guitar Hero, Facebook, Webkins, and Mafia Wars. More importantly, he looks at the psychological twist (or hook) embedded within each game.

In  the world of digital game design, we’re seeing a huge shift in the psychology of games from single-person experiences to massively multiplayer experiences that reward you when you blend real-life and game-world. If you’ve been on Facebook, you’ve probably seen Farmville’s “lost cows” wandering through the stream of your friend’s status updates.

Yes, you can leave a note on your friend’s facebook wall, or if you both play a Facebook game together, you can give them a gift which allows them to advance in the game. This constant gift giving makes a viral game, and it also pings on the psychological principle of reciprocity. If you give something, then you can expect that the recipient will feel a social pressure to give something in return.

These seemingly innocuous Facebook games took the videogame industry by surprise, but they also have impact far beyond gaming. I’d propose that they present a new way of generating collaborative learning within simulations.

Next generation learning solutions cannot just push content to learners and expect they will learn like passive sponges. In the old days, instructional design followed a clear linear path (“ADDIE“) from analysis through design, development, and implementation. Now, we’re in a world where we have to design massively multi-learner collaborative learning environments.

This video offers a lot of key insights for serious games (simulation training as well as social learning). In fact, if I were teaching a course on next-gen instructional design, I’d put it on the syllabus.

I’m not only a fan and follower of Tim, I count him as a friend. He mentored early on in my career, and he’s been someone who forces me to think about the world from fresh perspectives.

When I look at the world through the lens of social capital, there’s a clear reminder that digital connections can only take us so far. We cannot merely push out content to others. We cannot claim to benefit because we contributed more flotsam into the stream of communications. Really, that’s both a cruel and lonely approach to communication where we all send messages-in-a-bottle into the ocean and hope someone bothers to read them.

Too often, we use digital technologies to deliver monologues and soliloquies.  That’s true for both individuals and corporations. It doesn’t work, because you don’t build a relationship. That’s why I strive to respond to others at least as much as I write new content. I would rather engage in conversations than stand in a corner and talk to myself.

Too often, we produce content without listening and without communicating. We have to break that habit as individuals, departments, organizations, and communities. It’s not making us any more effective.

The work within Valve Software has produced pioneering titles such as the Half-Life series, CounterStrike, Portal, Team Fortress, and the Left 4 Dead franchise.

From a business perspective, Newell understands how to create an environment where highly creative people expect that they will be doing cutting-edge work each day, and he offers some management insights.

However, I want to point out some pieces in his presentation which reflect a sea-change within the way that business works. Starting at 3:15, Newell describes how digital rights management (DRM) has essentially created a wall between game developers and consumers — where consumers have essentially been forced to experience games within walled gardens designed by the game’s developer and publisher.

Instead, Newell discusses the ecosystem of collaboration between Valve and its fan community (starting at 6:30). Fans produce custom mods and maps for many of Valve’s titles, and they’re allowed to share these modifications with the community. In fact, games such as CounterStrike have remained popular years after release because the community remains engaged in the development process.

In the digital age, bi-directional collaboration has found a place within the world of marketing and even product development. Fans/customers provide real-time feedback (and often participation) with the manufacturer or service provider. However, the world of learning and development has lagged behind in this trend. Organizations still push content out from their central core to learners.

In the traditional model of training, learners are consumers of content. They get spoon-fed learning within walled gardens of classrooms and e-learning modules. Learners then have little opportunity to contribute or collaborate. However, that model has become antiquated through so many collaborative technologies that now exist. Instead of forcing learners into a passive role, organizations must re-envision the process of learning within the organization. The members of the workforce must become active collaborators in the production of learning.

If I were teaching an entry level instructional design class, I might ask students to differentiate between Valve Software’s view of “customers as collaborators” with Ubisoft’s seeming approach that all customers are potential software pirates. Ubisoft’s approach has generated an uprising (including frustrated individuals launching DDOS attacks).

Quite simply, do you serve your customers’ needs or do you try to force them through unpopular and potentially ineffective processes to suit your own needs?

Even in the world of learning and development, we must align our solutions with our learners’ needs. More importantly, we must respect that they likely know much more about those needs than we do. We must invite them to collaborate with us to find effective solutions.

As a result, I’ve been having a number of excellent conversations with people who have been thinking about the future of learning and development.

• The traditional design methodologies of ADDIE and ISD need re-envisioning in the post-Facebook age.
• The tempo needed for learning and development departments has accelerated.
• The mindsets and skills needed within training departments need to be reconstituted.

In short, organizations need to rethink the relationship and network structures within their organization.

The article itself provides a nice framing platform for some of these conversations, and I’ll be diving more deeply into these topics over the next few weeks.

(Port-au-Prince, Haiti)  On January 20, 2010, staff from the Maison des Enfants de Dieu (Children of the House of God) orphanage accompanied by representatives from the U.S. ministry, For His Glory Adoption Outreach (FHG), attempted to obtain humanitarian parole from the U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince for 133 orphans.  The orphanage staff and FHG representatives were turned away because of confusion about photo requirements for each child.  Additionally, they were informed that humanitarian parole would only apply to approximately 111 of the 132 children from the Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage.  These are the orphans who have a “United States qualified referral” dated prior to the earthquake on January 12, 2010.

In accordance with specific instructions received today, orphanage staff and FHG representatives will depart for U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince in the early morning of January 21, 2010, with the 109 children eligible for humanitarian parole.  We anticipate they will receive authority to depart Haiti via air by the early afternoon and will provide further information on the actual schedule as soon as we have it.  Three of the remaining 24 children are being adopted by parents in Argentina and Canada and are waiting for those countries to announce their evacuation procedures.  The remaining 18 children at Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage will remain in Haiti since they have not yet been referred for international adoption.  The orphanage receives request each day to accept new orphans, however their ability to accept children orphaned since the earthquake is very limited.  Orphanage staff today reported they were out of diapers, low on food and they remained concerned about security at the orphanage.

During the day, another orphanage successfully got their children out to safety. Governor Rendell went to Haiti and airlifted 53 Haitian orphans out.

However, the 135 children at the Maison des Enfants des Dieu are still facing dehydration and starvation because of potentially lethal red-tape. According to my sources at the “For His Glory” charity which runs the orphanage the situation is becoming critical.

Why not leave the orphans in Haiti?

The State Department says that they want to set up a safe area to complete the adoption process. However, there’s no details on when this “safe area” may be created. These children are facing dehydration and malnutrition. The children need to be made safe first, and then process the adoption paperwork. It’s a case where hours matter. Waiting a week or two for a safe area may very well be too late for many of these children.

Were these children orphaned because of the earthquake?

No. These children were all in the adoption process prior to the earthquake. An adoption from Haiti can take years. These children have adopted parents who have been waiting months or years for them.

What can you do?

Please contact your congresspeople (senators and representatives) to help cut through this red tape.

Here’s a link you can use to locate the phone #s for the offices of your senators and congresspeople. Please call today.

P.S. Some congresspeople have asked for contacts with the U.S. charity. If that happens, please contact me, and I can provide phone and e-mail contacts.

While the medical cause of death will be dehydration, the actual cause of death will be death-by-bureaucracy.

Over the past five years, my business partner, Lonnie Harmon and his wife Kim Harmon have adopted five orphans from Haiti. As a result, they became responsible for the US charity that supports the Haitian orphanage of 100 people. They also have one child who was almost fully through the Haitian adoption process when the earthquake hit.

Early on there were reports of people robbing the orphanage for supplies.  The US military is ready to evacuate the kids to the US, but they’re waiting on ok from the State Dept to allow the kids to enter the US.

Most kids have been in the adoption process for several years and parents approved by U.S. These kids can be brought to the US and the adoptions fully (and safely) processed here.

Kim and Lonnie have been friends for ten years. They are exceptional people. According to Kim:

“We are going to start losing babies due to dehydration very soon if we do not evacuate these children quickly. We do not have time for a one-by-one assessment of the state of the adoption process and visas prior to evacuation.”

According to Lonnie, Fox News has caught wind of the story. On Monday, Shepard Smith covered the orphanage in his show. Lonnie and Kim got to see their son on tv. Lonnie was crying when he told me this story.

• Article about the orphans
• Fox News coverage about the orphans’ plight (the video here is actually of the orphanage)

Lonnie and Kim have asked for your urgent help.

Please take 10 minutes to call your congresspeople’s offices and ask them to request the State Department to let the children and infants into the US. The adoptions can be processed here in the US.

The name of the orphanage is Maison des Enfants de Dieu. (The US Charity is the “For HIs Glory.”)  These children had begun the adoption process before the earthquake. With so many records destroyed in the earthquake, it will take time to process these adoptions. However, these kids shouldn’t be left starving and dehydrated while in a legal limbo.

Bring them to the US where the adoption paperwork and visas can be processed properly while the kids are safe.

Here’s a link you can use to locate the phone #s for the offices of your senators and congresspeople. Please call today.

P.S. Some congresspeople have asked for contacts with the U.S. charity. If that happens, please contact me, and I can provide phone and e-mail contacts.

One of the nation’s most passionate puzzlers, Mike Selinker, solved the mystery of the status updates. Mike is an old friend of mine, and he’s the president of Lone Shark Games, a Seattle design studio that specializes in social network games such as puzzle events and alternate reality games.

Mike and I exchanged messages as we think through the bra-color meme: relating it to social networking, marketing, and social learning. We’re reprinting it below.

Mike Selinker: Today was… interesting. I woke up to check my Facebook feed and saw that a number of people on my flist were posting colors as their status. Instead of asking why, I tried to figure out what the people who did this had in common. They came from very different sets of friends, who had no connection to each other beyond me. Then I realized that they were all women. And I thought, “In which arena would my female friends pick wildly different colors?” It had to be something they didn’t know about each other, something intimate. And then it hit me. They were all posting the colors of their undergarments, specifically their bras.

So I posted a message of amusement, and the secret was out. I’m sure I became a vector for this meme, despite not being contacted in any way by the propagators, and not being able to participate directly. (I am not currently wearing a bra.) The virus spread through email and inboxes, and manifested in public. That’s something I don’t think I’ve seen before.

Only later did someone point out that this was started as an awareness mechanism for breast cancer. Which I find fascinating, because I’m sure that if the Susan Komen Center spent donation money on getting people to post colors on their Facebook statuses, there would be a board of directors meeting hastily convened. And yet I certainly thought more about breast cancer today than any other.

Bill Sherman: Like you, I found myself smiling and laughing during the day as I saw the meme propagate across Facebook.

I’m going to focus here on transmission vectors, misidentifications, and mutations.

By evening, I started to see a trend of women who had received the e-mail in their personal account and didn’t post until after dinner. So, there was a second wave of color postings that rippled east-to-west in the evening.

The bra color meme, in some way, is a mutant strain of the pink campaign. For many years, breast cancer awareness (as an advocacy issue) has been associated with pink. We have pink ribbons, turn buildings pink, and redecorate grocery stores each October. We’re conditioned to think about [color] –> breast cancer awareness. In many ways, we’re primed psychologically to connect the concept of color with breast cancer awareness.

Throughout the day, the virus followed two separate transmission patterns. E-mail was the initial vector. It included an explanation of what to do, why it was important, and a note of encouragement. It also turned the activity into a gender-divided game.

However, the Facebook status updates quickly produced an array of responses (from men and women) who hadn’t received the e-mail. Many women and men had their first experience with the meme outside of the e-mail.

In these cases, the meme was misidentified or and in some cases even mutated.

For example, early yesterday morning a male friend posted the following cryptic status update “is in on the joke. It’s not hard to deduce, guys . . . ” He had deduced the game component of the meme, and he assumed that it was merely a semi-risqué meme that had propagated.

Also, it became possible to track mutations created by people (men and women) who had not received the e-mail but wanted to participate. Here are two of my favorites status updates:

• a list of fifteen colors in one status update (by a man)
• “infrared”

While these posts were delightful (and caused me to laugh), they were mutant strains of the initial meme which had been divorced of the breast cancer awareness element. These actions reinforced the self-replicating social game, but it created “noise” that competed with the issue-advocacy element.

So, we have two transmission vectors for the same meme. And it’s a really exciting way to use social media technology. The primary vector (e-mail) reinforced the social advocacy, and the secondary vector (seeing the meme first on Facebook) often produced mutations and misapprehensions.

Splitting the meme this way created some interesting ripples. It’s like throwing two rocks into a pool of water. We saw a single meme’s ripples create interference patterns with itself. That was incredibly cool (and compelling to watch).

Here’s my question for you, Mike. We both found this meme fascinating. Yet, when it comes to issue advocacy (or even marketing), awareness is good but moving people to action is far better. Was this a five-minute diversion or did it make a difference?

Mike Selinker: A reasonable question, and one I get asked about games all the time. I’m a proponent of buried messages, important points that bubble up when you think back on the experience you had. For example, for our alternate reality game Citizens of Virtue, left-wing evangelical preacher Rob Bell asked us to make people think about hypocrisy in church messaging, a very complex issue. So we invented a fictional Focus on the Family-style organization called Citizens of Virtue, which sounded very plausible to many. Their “Virtual Virtues” campaign—”virtual” in the sense of “electronic,” but also in the sense of “not real”—was a weekly dispensation of tasks that purportedly would inspire one of the Seven Cardinal Virtues, but instead propagated the corresponding Deadly Sin. So for example, “Humility” was encouraged by purchasing an expensive “LORD shackle bracelet” a la Cartier’s LOVE bracelet, to show how humble you were. This of course was the height of Pride. These were complex messages to pass on, but as people were having fun exploring the game and undermining the CoV from the inside, they walked away with some important thoughts about important issues.

So too, I think, with the bra meme. There were three things going on that I think directly benefited the cause of breast cancer awareness:

1) The repetition of the rationale for the color posts. People would say “Why are you doing that?” and others would respond “It’s my bra color. It’s a breast cancer awareness thing.” That alone could lead to quite a few reminders to schedule mammograms.

2) The minor backlash that concerned the female-only delivery method. There were several posts that said, “Hey, men get breast cancer too!” Now, we do so only at a rate of 1% of the female population’s incidence, and it’s a very strange sense of male entitlement to demand equal treatment for diseases. But there are probably men who thought, “I better get myself checked out.” They may never have considered themselves at risk before.

3) After I posted that I was tempted all day to write “Pics or it didn’t happen,” the call to action you’re looking for came from a friend who pledged $5 to breast cancer research for every “proof” picture he received in his inbox. Quite a few women took him up on that, apparently willing to sacrifice that amount of dignity for a good cause. So voyeurism gets subjugated to good works. Creepy, but awesome nonetheless.

So I’d say yes, it was a five-minute diversion, and yes, it made a difference. Is it more effective for cancer awareness than the TheTruth.com ads? Probably not. But which would you rather watch?

Bill Sherman: Although this meme launched on Facebook, the social media ripples have extended to Twitter and blogs. This quickly became a meme that people wanted to discuss. And the discussions have been fascinating:

1. A woman who had a double mastectomy blogged her thoughts to the meme.

2. Mary Carmichael at Newsweek blogged her response to what she called the “pointless underwear protest.”

3. Users created and joined new FB groups: “Your Bra Can’t Fight Cancer, But Your Wallet Can.”

4. Individuals became fans of Susan G. Komen for the Cure on Facebook.

We saw two distinct phases in this game. First, many women chose to play the game, and that created the many color “status updates.” I honestly didn’t expect so many people would want to discuss this meme.

I think that people inherently sensed many of the flaws of the original meme, and social media facilitated the conversation about those flaws.

A friend of mine wrote a status update where she: “is fairly certain that everyone knows that cancer exists. How exactly is this game helping? Instead of posting @%#& telling people to post more @%#&, why don’t you go donate a dollar?”

In this way, we saw a social media game begin to evolve as people identified the flaws and want to improve them.

The color game has spread to Twitter, but the text mutated into Tweets like the following one:

“White! Which color of bra do you wear? Add a Twibbon now to support breast cancer awareness! ”

This new mutation contains the original game, a viral question, and a call to action. Is this new strain better than the previous one? Well, it depends on the goals of the meme. I’m sure the people who provide twibbon icons are happy.

People care about this game (because of the issue advocacy), but they also recognize the original game’s flaws. They have taken time to discuss and improve the game in a form of collaborative game design and development.

We’re looking at the intersection of social games and social learning. Fascinating stuff.

Mike Selinker: I quibble with the word “flaws.” There’s nothing necessarily valuable about hemming something toward the ordinary. When a friend turned the meme toward underwear color, she added a sentence “For ovarian cancer awareness” and a link explaining symptoms of that horrible disease. While this was laudable, turning it into a link (as opposed to a status update) automatically blunted the spread of the mutation. We’ve all seen friends post charity links before, so this was just a variation on that. If it’s ordinary, it’s probably not going to spread virally. That’s not an improvement of the game.

Without any question, this was a chain letter, spread through a whisper campaign. Those are negative terms; nobody I know is going to admit to sending a chain letter, or engaging in a whisper campaign. This got them to do it. It’s a good game as is.

It’s also important to view it as a limited-time game. As people continue to post bra colors, people are already in the mindset of “Honey, that was so yesterday.” That’s okay. If you were part of the spread, you talk about it later. If you weren’t, you’re made to feel like an outsider. Even a nationwide in-group enforces clique rules.

Now comes the question of whether this is a marketing lesson. I am sure that I soon will get a call from one of my advertising clients saying, “Mike, can you make the color thing happen for us, but this time with varieties of yogurt?” Even if I say no, someone will say yes.

Bill Sherman: As you said, “Can you make the color thing happen for us, but this time with varieties of yogurt?”

If we’re going to think about marketing, then we need to pull in some ideas from the social psychologists. First, the behaviors of people around us influence our behaviors. We saw this behavior manifest with the bra-color posts, but it resonates with Milgram’s crowd-behavior experiments.

Stanley Milgram, who performed many different (and notable experiments), ran one experiment on the streets of NYC in 1968. He positioned research assistants at strategic points on the street and had them look at the window of a nearby building for one minute.

If only one person stared at the window, then 4% of passersby would stop; however if 15 research assistants stared at the window then 40% of the passersby also stopped.

It’s the old “made you look” technique. We can create buzz and direct eyeballs and behavior (whether fully or partially) by planting conspirators within a social network. Then passersby mirror (wholly or incompletely) the behavior.

So, while stunts can attract attention, will they be significant enough to get people to notice the product (our yogurt) or cause them to act (refer to a friend, make a purchase, etc.)? That’s what matters.

For that, Robert Cialdini makes a good point about descriptive norming and behaviors. He’s done a lot of research around environmental messaging (such as recycling or towel reuse at hotels) and finds that people respond when people believe they are acting in concert with people like themselves. Descriptive norming creates a positive social pressure to spread behaviors virally. These ties of “people like me” are powerful, so that even knowing that people who have shared the same physical hotel room typically reuse their towel influences your behavior.

In Connected, Christakis and Fowler argue that we’re influenced by the behaviors of our friends’ friends’ friends (3rd degree connections) for behaviors such as smoking cessation, depression, suicidality, etc.

If the average Facebook user has 130 friends (which approximately correlates with Dunbar’s number of 150), then a single person launching this meme would have had access to 130^3 (2.179 million) users. However, that number would have been reduced by many duplicated connections. So, just like radio broadcasts, retransmitters boost the signal.

I think our strategy for replication would depend on a number of different factors:

1. Yoplait (known brand) vs. Mike’s Yummy Organic Yogurt (unknown brand)

2. Definition of success . . . do you want people to become Facebook fans, want them to buy yogurt or become aware you exist?

3. Is this a flash-in-the-pan strategy or does the client want to create a relationship with these people?

I think we could craft many “made you look strategies.” There are also many “build relationship strategies;” however, it’s often difficult to achieve both goals simultaneously.

Mike Selinker: Amusingly, it took less than a week for a client at a marketing firm to say to me, “Did you see people posting their bra colors on Facebook? Well, like that, but….” (But not on a yogurt account, sadly.)

Facebook seems a direct challenge to Dunbar’s number. Dunbar believed that settlements broke at 150 people, because humans couldn’t maintain social connections with more than that number of people. But Dunbar was talking about groups with intense external pressure to stay together. An army unit in wartime has such pressure, because if it fails to move effectively, its members will be killed. So too with an office or a school, where social disorganization is problematic to authority. I think what we’re seeing is that without that pressure, without that need for authority, we are capable of monitoring and casually interacting with much larger numbers. I’ve had a running joke of every time I get another 100 friends, I make a stupid status report announcing it (e.g., “Mike has 20 square friends” for when I hit 400). I didn’t expect I would have to keep doing it past 1300.

And here, I think the army travels at the speed of its FASTEST member. I don’t need all my friends to be aware of a meme to respond to it, I only need one. I wasn’t the first of my friends to hear of it, but I was certainly the first male I knew to figure it out. That made a whole lot of people spread it outward from me. The meme was designed to treat me as a scalar, but I became a vector.

That’s where marketing can learn. We ask all the time, “who is this message aimed at?” What we also need to ask is, “what is the effect of this message on people it is NOT aimed at?” There was a horrible example in the game industry of my former employer Hasbro marketing the new version of the boardgame Risk to boys with a site featuring a game where you try to sleep with as many women as possible, and another where you fling poo.

Though I doubt it, let’s assume this hit square with the boys it was aimed at. The resultant backlash among women—specifically mothers, who buy almost every boardgame—likely destroyed any positive effect Hasbro could have gained. As it spread among Facebook friends, the female gamers I knew couldn’t see what any of this had to do with Risk itself. All they knew is that they weren’t going to buy it. (Not that I dislike things aimed at males, of course. There’s an amazing promotion for the Dodge Ram. That’s all male, all the time. But it’s also awesome, which excuses a lot of sins.)

When you set something out where everyone can see, you have to consider the impact on everyone who can see it. Facebook has the potential to reach everyone, but you have to reach them with something they want. Otherwise, you may wish you hadn’t reached them.

Bill Sherman: According to the current Facebook press page, the average user has 130 friends. According to a research study published in 2008, that number was 110 friends, so we have seen an upward trend.

Also, check out the 2009 analysis of maintained relationships on Facebook’s site. It’s well worth a read.

I’d argue that your 1300 friends is probably several standard deviations from the mean. Quite simply, you’re a network hub.

When we look at a social graph, your Facebook friends’ network has a high degree of centrality. You’re closer to the center of a network than to an edge.

When you cracked the code of the colors in the status lines, you became the equivalent of a high-powered radio station broadcasting louder and farther than people with smaller networks. If we accept the 3 degrees of influence benchmark, then 1300^3 leads to a network reach of 2.3 billion (but that number will certainly be lower in practice due to mutually-shared connections).

If you hadn’t touched the meme, then it would have evolved and spread in an entirely different fashion.

Technology has changed how messages are transmitted through networks. Instead of closed, geographically-bound relationships within villages, we have been able to maintain strong, geographically-distributed relationships. Yet, I’d say that Facebook allows us to maintain many more weak-tie connections than we could previously (even when compared with Granovetter’s day).

Interestingly, the Risk example and the Ram microsite are both examples of a traditional marketing message where each visitor interacts with a company-approved site. Memes work differently, because they spread person-to-person rather than through an approved central hub. That opens the opportunity for mutation.

So, here is what I see as our final takeaways:

1. You point out that you have to consider the potential impact on everyone who can see it, and that message may produce undesired reactions.

2. I emphasize that the message itself transforms when people within the network interacts with the meme and rebroadcast it. Therefore, once you set a social meme out to the world without requiring it to “phone home,” it takes on a life of its own.

All in all, these two very powerful trends reshape how marketing messages and learning ripple through a large-scale social network.

Mike Selinker: That all makes sense, Bill. This has been without doubt the most interesting discussion about bras I will care to admit to having.

I spent most of my childhood very sick, and I never thought that I would live to see my eighteenth birthday. Now, my life has been filled with warmth and joy brought by so many different people.

Some people will be present when I raise the glass, but many more friends will be absent. They will be separated by geography or even time. Some friends have passed in the last year, and they will be missed in the years to come.

Therefore, I raise a glass and offer a toast to absent friends tonight. I will do this every January 6th until I myself can no longer raise a glass.

If you have touched my life, then I say thank you. I also encourage you to raise a glass to the people who have influenced you.

• Perhaps that teacher who challenged you in school.
• Or the young child that you played with on the playground.
• Or a colleague at a former workplace.
• Or a friend who lives in a different city.
• A family member who lives far away.
• Someone dear who has died.

May all of our friends, even when absent, never be forgotten.