

How Stuff Spreads #1: Gangnam Style vs Harlem Shake - pathik
http://www.facegroup.com/how-stuff-spreads-1-gangnam-style-vs-harlem-shake.html

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MJR
I think the article brings up a lot of great points and analysis, but misses
the mark on one of the key foundational elements that makes these videos so
different. Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake are different types of media.
Gangnam Style is a 3:40 music video by an actual artist with a dance. Harlem
Shake is a dance to a 30 second song clip. They both include music and dance,
but the length and other factors make them very different and in some cases
unworthy of comparison.

So from the beginning you're looking at two different lengths and types of
content. Is 30 seconds more "shareable"? Probably. Does a pop song climbing
the charts earn the music video more publicity? Probably. Can you then compare
lifetimes of these two memes against each other and draw conclusions? No
probably not. It's apples and oranges.

Maybe it's just a bad infographic, but I feel there are a lot of valid
conclusions that could have been drawn from this type of analysis. But instead
of that you get comparisons without explanation of why these memes are
different and have different characteristics. I think they could have looked
at two long-form music video memes or two short 30-second video clip memes,
drawn better comparisons and put together a more complete and accurate
analysis of these memes.

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kachnuv_ocasek
>video by an actual artist

PSY is a joke from the beginning, as is LMFAO et al. Harlem Shake was
originally just a song which got somehow mixed up with a crazy dance and that
went viral.

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sweedy
Pretty nice article about how "viral" at all the harlem shake was.
[http://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-
viral...](http://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-viral-
corporations-did/)

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joosters
Yes! I remember reading this, it is notable that Facegroup failed to mention
this, or to even spot that the "viral" nature was being pushed by particular
groups.

Oh, "Each video was led by an individual or organization with massive reach –
YouTube", yeah, real deep analysis. Much more interesting would be to break
down into who posted what videos, who was hyping them on twitter, and so on.

Could the influencers and their actions described in the qz article be spotted
by some form of algorithmic analysis? Now _that_ would be interesting.

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GHFigs
_it is notable that Facegroup failed to mention this, or to even spot that the
"viral" nature was being pushed by particular groups_

The first rule of viral marketing club is that you do not talk about viral
marketing club.

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antiterra
This is conjecture at best, snake oil at worst (considering this is an agency
that sells its research.) The data points are interesting, but the conclusions
simply do not follow from the evidence. There's an implicit assumption that
the actual 'value' of the videos is the same, that the content is ultimately
fungible and what matters is how the content was originally shared and by what
communities. However, to even the most casual observer, the 'memes' are two
very different things.

The analysis claims that Gangnam Style had a "leader" and Harlem Shake was
distributed. However, this is a kind of warping of the fact that Gangnam style
was viral and satisfying in its own right, whereas much of Harlem Shake's
value came from the parody videos and the fact it was a "thing people are
doing."

There's no mention of the fact that Gangnam Style could and did make it to the
radio in recognizable form. There's no mention of the length of the video, the
season they were released, the "singability" of the content, the production
value, actions of pr/production agencies, or countless other factors that
could have a larger effect than the identified parameters.

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joosters
And they failed to spot that Harlem Shake certainly did have one or two
leaders - see the qz.com article linked by sweedy in a previous comment.

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cuillevel3
Wow, that missed the mark.

I always thought big media invented the harlem shake, because they failed to
see Gangnam Style rising for several months.

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adolgert
Statistics would help us believe this article. Are they quoting 196% variance
over the mean? What does it mean to be 4.5 times smaller? Even the basics are
amiss here. There are a lot of conclusions from just two examples of highly
complex dynamical systems. The authors poked around and thought a lot, and we
know that unfortunately isn't enough to say something believable.

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sp332
They explained what they meant by variation in point #3. _We quantified this
variation by first calculating the standard deviation of the daily sharing
rate (i.e. how much sharing levels varied day by day), then dividing by the
mean to give us the coefficient of variation._

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adolgert
Ah, I missed their explanation. The 196% and 338% are still bizarrely high
figures, given that the variance of a Poisson distribution equals the mean.
338% variance, and you don't ask what kind of distribution you're measuring?

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kalleboo
Mirror, as it's currently down for me [http://www.facegroup.com.nyud.net/how-
stuff-spreads-1-gangna...](http://www.facegroup.com.nyud.net/how-stuff-
spreads-1-gangnam-style-vs-harlem-shake.html)

