Last Friday night, fairly late, I unleashed a modest Facebook application called Your Halloween Name using the slightly-more-than-beta interface of AppDeveloper from the newbie start-up AppBank. My creation follows the primal recipe of most Facebook apps in that it promises to:

A) tell you something about yourself, and

B) share that something with a small coterie of friends who will, in turn, share it with others.

Your Halloween Name also features dopey, spurious, black-and-white drawings of vampires, werewolves and some sort of bug-brained creature. It took me far less than three hours to produce, start-to-finish.

But within a half hour of publishing this content, a friend reported that his cousin had used it. And, as I write this — barely 48 hours later — 29,431 unique Facebook users have encountered my trivial Halloween pursuit, which does little more than translate their name into a spooky moniker (a la the credits on the annual Simpson’s Halloween Special.)

Here’s some current data from my recent foray into viral content:

• 28.25% of those users are between one and 18-years-old, while a meager 2.26% are over 55.
• Nearly three quarters are under 35.
• Females outnumber males in a ratio of 79.22% to 20.78%.
• The users are nearly all from the U.S. and Canada, with the states of New York (2,484 impressions) and California (1,390) leading the pack.

Later this weekend, over on YouTube, my millennial offspring introduced me to the Mean Kitty Song which has enjoyed 26,634,112 views since its posting in 2007. The Mean Kitty Song and its subsequent spin-off video franchise are basically amateurish videos of a guy playing with kittens. They are unpolished, nominally edited, and relatively goofy. They are, in short, pretty much next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. And yet, if each of the Mean Kitty Song’s views was made by a unique individual (of course, the viewers are not actually unique), that number would constitute roughly 1 in 12 of every human living in the United States. That’s one powerful kitty, friends.

Today in still another corner of the digital world, I watched the exceptional advertising case study for the Queensland Tourism Board by the firm Sapient Nitro. This campaign used classified display ads to generate one of this year’s most massively successful returns in earned media.

My experimental Your Halloween Name app, the Mean Kitty Song, and Sapient Nitro’s Best Job in the World Campaign all share a few common features:

• They look like they were thrown together.
• They are casual.
• They are very, very cheap.
• They do not appear to sell anything.

All of this got me to musing. It seems like content that isn’t overly crafted or commercial may also help lower the barrier to viewership. It’s almost as though, as digital foragers, we have become accustomed to favor content that signals its own impermanence and lack of airs. While we might well shell out ten bucks to see a blockbuster movie, that movie usually costs upwards of $30 million to make. If that same movie returns $100 million in profits, it has delivered only 10 million impressions, give or take. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Mean Kitty dude probably spent about three days and $150 in software to generate twice that many viewings.

In my mind, none of this tolls the death knoll for the thirty-second spot, an ad format that has been much lamented by our industry of late. But it does mean that a few creepy Facebook drawings, a kitten caught on an amateurish videocam, or a classified ad all have the power to drive one more nail into the spot’s coffin.

That’s what I’m calling next-to-nothing to the something-th power

I don’t know why it’s so damn hard to figure this out, but the raging stat geek in me has always wondered: What’s the record for the most comments ever on a single blog post?

I just spent a good five minutes trying to Google the answer every which way imaginable, but I can’t find it. I mean you’d think there’d be lists of this stuff all over the place on the Internet (c’mon Technorati). I found an entry from an obscure blog from 2006 that touches on the topic, but the few record-breakers it cites aren’t higher than some popular blog entries I’ve seen recently.  It does, however, link to another blog entry whose comments reveal some contenders.

I routinely see blog entries with comment totals in excess of 1,000. That happens all the time. So I’m guessing the record is well beyond that. Actually, what renewed my curiosity on the matter was when I stumbled onto the satirical blog “Stuff White People Like.” I must be the last person on Earth to discover it, because it gets a sick amount of comments to every post. We’re talking hundreds, sometimes over a thousand comments to every post. One post (for some weird reason because it’s not even close to being the funniest post on there) has 14,588 comments and counting!

That’s the most comments I’ve ever seen on a single blog entry. If anyone has proof of more (we’re talking blogs, not message boards or forums), please let me know… with a comment, of course.

I’ve been on a bit of Twitter kick lately, but it’s the social medium du jour so I guess it’s understandable. I’ve noticed a lot of celebrities Twittering away the hours which leads me to believe that social media usage is either really high among Hollywood types (and they have lots of time on their hands) or many of these tweeting stars are fakes. Both are sort of correct.

The Twitter Fan Wiki has compiled a whole list of phony celeb twitterati, which span the big screen, small screen, stage, radio, books, politics and even fictional characters (I guess you had to assume the latter were fakes.) Here’s a compendium of just a few imposters, some of whom have attracted hoards of followers who were duped into thinking they were receiving tweets from the real thing:

Sarah Palin (Former GOP VP Candidate, Governor of Alaska) – “Palin 2013!”

Osama Bin Laden (elusive terrorist mastermind) – “Still pissed about Saddam”

Pee Wee Herman (comedian, cultural icon) – “Aaaaaahh!”

Chuck Norris (lethal weapon) – (Though he may welcome all comers in real life, Norris is rather guarded on Twitter and has opted to protect his updates from those not pre-approved by him.)

David Hasselhoff (TV star, “The Hoff”) – “Deciding which leather jacket to wear”

Santa Claus (the nice one) – “Words cannot express just how much the elves LOVE reading your twitter posts.”

Santa Claus (the not-so-nice one) – “elves are driving me fucking nuts”

The USA (global superpower) -”Got $787 Billion in my pocket and it’s almost the weekend. Who wants to party?”

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (fictional character, the only real reason to watch Full Metal Jacket) – “I AM A FICTIONAL CHARACTER, I EXIST FOR ENTERTAINMENT, MAGGOT.”

Eric Cartman (cartoon character, the only real reason to watch South Park) – “A hippie and a terrorist is the same thing.”

Uranus (celestial body) – “So you think my name is funny? You suck.”

Stewie Griffin (cartoon character, Family Guy star) – “Lois is washing my hair”

The LOST island (island…on LOST) – “I will be confusing the fuck out of you all soon.”

Darth Vader (Jedi hater, Lord of the dark side, Luke’s dad) -”Note to @Alyssa_Milano – Tony Danza is not the boss. I am.”

Satan (CEO of Hell) -”all my stocks are rising”

Global Warming (environmental phenomenon, the only thing keeping Al Gore relevant) -”Sadly, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite launch failed. The OCO would have measured CO2 in the atmosphere. http://tr.im/gJce”

Okay, so they’re not all funny or even entertaining (there’s a lot of wasted comic potential with global warming), but you get the idea. A lot of real celebrities have taken to calling out the fakes, but it doesn’t seem to have slowed the growth of the faux star twitters… at least until the long arm of  the law (or Chuck Norris) shuts them down.

The one or two people out there who doubt the power of the Internet need only look at the mind-boggling response to Susan Boyle’s April 11 performance on “Britain’s Got Talent.” As I write this, it’s estimated that it’s been viewed more than 100 million times – which seems like a low estimate. Thousands of sites have linked to the main posting on YouTube or thrown up their own copies.

It’s an indictment on our society that people are shocked that a plain-looking 47-year-old woman has the voice of an angel. We suspect that she could NOT have gotten a recording contract on her own, despite her talent. We think recording studio executives would dismiss her because of her looks. This harks back to Shanna’s entry on sex in advertising/marketing, “Where’s Rosie the Riveter When You Need Her?” That Rosie is actually pretty sexy. Did real life female riveters look like that?

People weep when they watch Ms. Boyle sing “I Dreamed A Dream” because she not only bravely faces a studio audience filled with smirking people – sending them to their feet with wild applause – but she packs so much power and emotion into her performance that you think the song must have personal meaning for her. She jokes about being single, “never been kissed” and living with her cat Pebbles, but isn’t that just bravado?

One thing to take away from the response to Susan Boyle is that people who want any kind of audience at all outside their little corner of the world – and that means outside a one-block radius – MUST put their message online. Why can’t people spell? Why do they turn to the Internet to make friends or be entertained? Or get their news? Shop? Or do anything for that matter? Because “new media” is the massage.