Have you ever received an e-mail with a link to a YouTube video or a quirky Web site, watched the video or visited the link, and then, without quite pausing to consider why, passed it on to your friends? Did you happen to do this on the boss's dime? If so, you are part of what Jonah Peretti calls the bored-at-work network. But what turns a no-budget basement video into a global media phenomenon—is it purely random, or is there a science to it?
As a pioneer in "contagious media," Peretti has long been trying to crack the code of why things spread. It began, accidentally, with a forwarded 2001 e-mail exchange between himself and Nike in which he wondered exactly why he couldn't order a new pair of customizable sneakers bearing the word "sweatshop." It swept the Internet and got him on the Today show opposite a Nike rep. With his sister, the stand-up comic Chelsea Peretti, and a few friends, Peretti began scheming up other experiments to see if this viral success could be replicated (it could), including the Rejection Line, a phone number that exasperated recipients of clueless come-ons could dispense when asked for their own. (The number led to a recording with such options as "Press three to cling to the unrealistic hope that a relationship is still possible.") Even more "contagious" was Black People Love Us, a Web site that gently skewered the liberal anxieties of race relations through its depictions of a fictional white couple, Sally and Johnny, and their overeager attempts at celebrating their own social diversity. ("Is that roof high enough…or does it need to be raised?!")
Peretti, who also cofounded the Huffington Post, now helms BuzzFeed, a company that helps businesses tap into the contagious power of the bored-at-work network, or BWN, which he insists is bigger than the viewership of CBS or NBC. Its Web site, buzzfeed.com, selectively tracks the BWN's current obsessions by using algorithms that scour the Web (or, in Peretti's terms, the "online popularity contest") in search of increasingly followed links, or keywords that are being used for the first time—hints of things on the cusp of being talked about. Human editors help shape the conversation. Buzz begets buzz. "We can't snap our fingers and make anything go viral," he says, "but there's certain qualities to things that are viral or slightly subviral but still really socially engaging. We help you detect when things actually have a potential to reach a bigger audience, then we help you amplify that." Advertisers, not surprisingly, view this viral media as the holy grail—a way to get people talking about a brand rather than trying to tell them about it. This is where BuzzFeed's business side comes into play; early clients range from MTV to ooVoo, an online video chat service.
Peretti is engaging in what he feels is a particularly American enterprise: Taking ideas—in this case, that six degrees of separation are all that separate us from anyone on the planet—and seeing what one can actually do with them. "It is a really significant change that we live in a world where people can so easily share things," he says. "The six-degrees theory doesn't just matter as an interesting intellectual curiosity, but matters every day in the world in terms of how media is spread across the Internet."
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