Emerson Spartz is the founder and CEO of Chicago-based Spartz Media, the company behind Gives Me Hope and OMG Facts. If you haven't heard of Spartz: he started MuggleNet, the #1 Harry Potter fan site, when he was only 12 years old.
Spartz shared his tips for creating viral content, maximizing your presence on social networks and growing your business by learning from your competitors as part of Social Media Week.
Here are seven tips we picked up from Spartz:
1. Adapt successful ideas from other industries
When developing MuggleNet, Spartz consistently visited other fandom communities and observed what they were doing. He began to pluck all their best ideas, adapting them to fit his site. “All the other Harry Potter sites would rip off MuggleNet, so MuggleNet got the reputation for being the most innovative Harry Potter site. This is a good metaphor for describing how innovation actually works in the real world: it’s just connecting the dots between different industries and different disciplines, saying ‘Hey, that worked in this field. How can I get it to work in my own field?’” he said.
2. Don’t just read, take the time to review
To make sure you extract the highest possible value out of every minute you invest learning, Spartz suggests reviewing your reading materials on a space repetition schedule. Consistently review everything you want to remember one day later, one week later, one month later and then every six months in perpetuity. “You will forget 90 percent of what you learn unless you review it in a schedule similar to that. We are not neurologically programmed to retain large amounts of information without having significant review invested,” Spartz said.
3. Understand the roots of virality (going "viral")
To understand the roots of virality, Spartz studied persuasion theory, network theory and social gaming companies like Zynga. He came to the conclusion that virality is just the online version of word-of-mouth marketing. “An easy way to make things go viral is to take things that have already gone viral and introduce them to another community,” he said. To better understand how to make viral content Spartz recommends reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz.
4. Test your content before publishing it
According to Spartz, it is OK to test content on a small audience. “For most population distributions, a sample size of 30 will get you to a 90 percent confidence interval,” Spartz said. Another way to test your content is to spread your budget and avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Spartz refers to this strategy as firing bullets, not cannonballs. Shooting bullets first to make sure you are lined up will help you understand what will go viral. “Editors are never going to be as accurate as using the crowd like we do,” Spartz said.
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