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Dan Zarrella

http://twitter.com/danzarrella

South Boston, Massachusetts

Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist

Areas of Expertise:

  • social media
  • viral marketing
  • social media marketing
  • marketing
  • twitter
  • facebook
  • blogging
  • linkedin
  • seo
  • consulting
  • speaking
  • programming
  • training
  • writing

Biography

Dan Zarrella has written extensively about the science of viral marketing, memetics and social media on his own blog and for a variety of popular industry blogs, including Mashable, CopyBlogger, ReadWriteWeb, Plagiarism Today, ProBlogger, Social Desire, CenterNetworks, Nowsourcing, and SEOScoop.

He has been featured in The Twitter Book, The Financial Times, NYPost, The Boston Globe, Forbes, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable and TechCrunch. He was recently awarded Shorty and Semmy awards for social media & viral marketing.

Dan has spoken at PubCon, Search Engine Strategies, Convergence '09, 140 The Twitter Conference, WordCamp Mid Atlantic, Social Media Camp, Inbound Marketing Bootcamp, and The Texas Domains and Developers Conference, and he currently works as an inbound marketing manager at HubSpot.

Books

The Social Media Marketing Book The Social Media Marketing Book
by Dan Zarrella
November 2009
Print: $19.99
Ebook: $15.99

Blog

Dan's blog posts are hosted at:
http://danzarrella.com

Introducing: The Social Media Marketing Book

November 23 2009

As you may or may not know, I’ve been working on a book for a while. Well, its finally done and in-stock on Amazon and should be in stores this week. The whole process has been very exciting and a lot of work (I had a ton of help from… read more

Interview with Craig Newmark: How the Craigslist Meme Spread

October 30 2009

One of the most ubiquitous and disruptive websites to emerge in the last 10 years is Craigslist. Impacting industries from real estate, news paper classifieds, careers and auctions the site has for the most part remained entirely free to use. A great example of organic, word-of-mouth spread I’ve always been… read more

Weekends and Afternoons Show the Highest Twitter CTRs

October 27 2009

Want more clicks? My new data suggests that you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends. Continuing the study of Twitter clickthrough rates I started last week, I added over 100 more of the most followed Twitter accounts to my database and indexed click data on over 20,000… read more

Modeling ReTweet Dynamics

October 26 2009

Earlier this year I read a paper called “Modeling Blog Dynamics” in which they propose a method of modeling the spread of links through the blogosphere using zero-crossing random walks and exploitation vs. exploration applied to a logical flowchart model: The authors suggested that the model could be used in… read more

Want More Clicks? Tweet Less

October 21 2009

Tweet Much? Don’t Expect a High CTR. New data I’ve been working on seems to indicate that the more frequently you Tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get. I’ve been working towards a statistical model of how an individual makes a decision to ReTweet a specific Tweet and in that process,… read more

To #SaveReTweets, Make Sure Everyone Knows How to ReTweet

October 19 2009

I wrote a little while ago about how Twitter’s plans to mangle ReTweets with its Project ReTweet, and the danger that poses to the crowd-invented functionality. After having several conversations on the topic and wondering what we could to do save ReTweets, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only… read more

Does Social Media Accelerate the Spread of Dangerous Ideas?

October 15 2009

Is the social web becoming a dangerous platform for contagious, destructive ideas? As social media usage grows and becomes a hive mind of collective consciousness, it enables a number of positive things to happen, but it also presents a grave danger in the form of dangerous memes. Dan Dennet gave a… read more

Introducing Dr. TweetDreams

October 12 2009

We love talking and speculating about dreams, and Twitter is the perfect place to discuss those subconscious thoughts, images and emotions. Dr. TweetDreams takes those Twitter dream musings and tells you what they mean. DrTweetDreams.com analyzes the elements of your Tweeted dreams to see what they mean for your past,… read more

Twitter’s Deal With Search Engines? I Called That.

October 09 2009

News broke yesterday that Twitter is talking to major search engines (Google and Microsoft) about licensing Twitter’s full firehose API. Over the past few months I’ve been seeing signs leading to exactly this kind of thing; here’s why Google will jump on this data. When Twitter announced their intentions to completely… read more

Designing for Contagiousness

September 30 2009

When marketers think about “going viral,” they think about creating infectious content and getting it in front of the right people. And while that’s a great place to start, contagious design can also go a long way to help. Here’s 7 things to think about when designing a blog or… read more

The Science of ReTweets Report

September 24 2009

After putting together the most recent version of my “Science of ReTweets” presentation and putting it up on Slideshare, I got a lot of great feedback, including that it’s a little hard to understand without my explanations along with each slide. So I pulled all the data together (including some… read more

New TweetPsych Feature: Top Lists

August 31 2009

Now that there are over 80,000 users indexed by TweetPsych, I’ve added a new feature that ranks users by specific characteristics. For the select traits listed below, you can see the 20 users who scored the highest. Please remember that this is for entertainment purposes only and that the codes are… read more

The URL Shorteners that will get you the Most (or Least) ReTweets

August 26 2009

We know that most ReTweets contain a link, but there are hundreds of different URL shortening services available to help you save space with that link. I analyzed my database of over 30 million ReTweets and compared them to over 2 million random Tweets to find which shorteners are the… read more

The 20 Least ReTweetable Words

August 25 2009

I’ve looked at the 20 words and phrases that tend to get the most ReTweets, but what about the flip-side of that coin? What about the words that are least likely to get your ReTweets? I used my database of over 30 million ReTweets, and compared it to a sample of… read more

The Punctuation of ReTweets

August 24 2009

140 characters doesn’t leave much room for extraneous letters, numbers or symbols, so you might think that punctuation would be sparse in Tweets. But I compared a random sample of over 1 million “normal” Tweets to a sample of over 10 million ReTweets and found that 85.86% of Tweets contain… read more
Dan Zarrella