Humor works. Humor + Negativity works even better. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will certainly not become viral, I have been studying viral marketing and wanted to share about a small experiment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories (Kindle Edition) in which the author states

It turns out people react to negatives. Several years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Executives Only,” which generated more traffic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are interesting, and people want to know what’s there.

This got my creative juices flowing and I decided to experiment. Continuing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an example of a blogger, Mark Hinkle, who did a satirical article on Ubuntu. Just so happens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by making a negative article of “Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not serious at all, actually it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily written, jotted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog normally receives 200 visitors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 visitors. It had been picked up by a couple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stumbled, it was twittered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather interesting conversations in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of success on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an article that I spent hours on.

I read a great article on the failings of modern education in this rapidly evolving world. The author states

Web site development experts said in a recent survey that colleges and universities lag behind in using the latest in web design technology and ignore foundational lessons that would produce college graduates ready for the rapidly changing profession.

I can attest to this. Having recently graduated from higher education (recently meaning within the past 5 years.) They teach to much about the tool in front of you and not enough about the methodology behind why the tool works in the first place.