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British hypnotist Chris Hughes is intending to set a record for the largest online hypnosis session via webcast on Monday, January 4th, at 8.30pm GMT.

Apparently he’ll test those that signed up in a 30 minute session for susceptibility to hypnosis, and then ‘Socialtrance‘ will begin.  Epileptics, pregnant women and those under the influence of drugs and alcohol shouldn’t take part, and the aim is to apparently put people in a good place for 2010 as well as introducing them to hypnosis.

And interestingly, although the webcast itself will be done via audio, so all you need is a net connection, comfy chair and headphones, you need to sign up via your Twitter or Facebook account. Which obviously then sends out a message on your behalf to say you’ve signed up. (Examples)

‘Just registered for #socialtrance, the online hypnosis world record attempt with Chris Hughes. Get involved! http://bit.ly/socialtrance‘

It’s been reported in several places that he’s planning to hypnotis people via Twitter, which obviously isn’t true – but it ties into Twitter hype far better than ‘Hypnotist markets online hypnosis session via Twtter’!

Either way, it seems to be working, with just under 5000 people signed up to attend with a little under 48 hours to go – especially considering he originally aimed for around 2000. Whether or not people will turn up, or indeed fall under hypnosis is another matter, but it’s definitely further proof that unusual events and concepts can market themselves pretty well simply by building in connectivity to Twitter and Facebook – which can then lead to media coverage – which then builds on the Twitter and Facebook marketing.

UK newspaper The Sun is getting plenty of online coverage for a viral video it has created to capitalise on the interest in Apple’s rumoured tablet computer. But what noone has mentioned is that the seeding started with paid Twitter advertising from Be A Magpie (referral link)…

And I know that because I’ve been running paid Twitter advertising for a while as a test, and spotted it in my approval queue early yesterday, which then got picked up first by Paid Content UK.

The Sun's paid Twitter advert in my stream

Searching Twitter for the bit.ly link shows that 4 other people are using Magpie and beat me to place the advert, as they all used the same text, same ‘ad:’ disclosure, and all posted via the API. And then the link started to take off around 22 hours ago, coinciding with it starting to appear on more and more websites and blogs.

Partly this is down to the advert itself being worthy of comment/repeating. See it for yourself:

But it’s also interesting that The Sun (Or whichever agency/affiliate placed the Magpie advert) is now using paid Twitter advertising – previously the majority of all advertising has been for technology products (with one charity popping up as a one-off).

You can see it’s got around 1457 total clicks today by appending the identifier on the bit.ly url on your own bit.ly info page. And considering the going rate of paid Twitter advertising at the moment, I’d love to know exactly what they’ve paid, but I’d assume it’s been pretty cost effective judging by the prices I’ve seen, and the fact it got picked up by websites following on from the tweets.

The question is whether this was sanctioned by The Sun itself, and whether we’ll see more and more mainstream brands starting to use paid Twitter adverts in addition/instead of using their own accounts or trying to earn Twitter mentions?

In The Sun’s case it definitely makes sense, as their accounts are RSS feeds with less followers than my individual account! e.g. The Sun News, The Sun Bizarre, The Sun Football.

If you happened to catch my previous post, you may have been wondering what had prompted Britain to start defending the NHS on Twitter.

Well, Dave Cushman (Disclosure – friend and former colleague), has a nice summary of the factors he feels were involved in the creation and spread of #welovethenhs.

They include the fact that something many people cared about was attacked, it’s a belief that could be shared by many people who had been emotionally affected, and the tools etc were really quick and simple to use to get involved.

It did have a small bit of celebrity involvement from British comedy writer Graham Linehan, but I suspect this trend had it’s own momentum.

Of course, as a further postscript to the image from my previous post – within the same day Les Paul had died

Dave also raised the issue of how newspapers and organisations feel odd when they’re reporting on Twitter – as I wrote before, this is the stage where we finally accept that TV, Radio, Internet and Mobile have made print-based newspapers into paper archives. There’s still a place for them, but if you were able to study the numbers of people discovering breaking news of a specific event on Twitter, for example, and compared that with those seeing it for the first time, I would be that one is increasing almost as fast as the other is falling. And that is without considering how many people would hear about the event, e.g. Michael Jackson dying, from friends/colleagues/family before they got near a newspaper.

Twitter users have long been able to share images via Twitpic, but video generally relied on using a URL shortening service to link to the content in question.

New service Tweetube aims to solve this problem, for Youtube videos at least.

You can either use the url of the video/page, or keyword search from the main Tweetube page.  Edit the message as your wish, and then submit using your Twitter username and password.

If you then visit Tweetube and log in, you can view all shared videos, with the time submitted, and the total cumulative visits.  It also has a Public Timeline of all videos submitted via the service, which is quite handy for seeing what is being shared, and a Popular Videos stream (which doesn’t include publicly-viewable figures sadly).

The ability to post and track visits is something that could be accomplished fairly easily via a URL shortening service – but the Public Timeline is definitely interesting as a method of identifying popular content, what is going viral, and people who might be interested in similar content etc.

In some ways, it’s almost a very lightweight Blip.fm for video, with the sole weakness that you have to post a public Tweet for it to register your video – whereas Blip exists seperately, so you can choose whether or not you need to share each song you listen to.

Definitely a service worth using if you’ve got an interest in producing or sharing video.

Tweetube Public Timeline

One of the major tipping points in getting a business benefit from using Twitter is if you can provide something which spreads via other users seeing value and retweeting it.

Which is why the work Dan Zarella has started looks like it’s the beginning of something incredibly useful and valuable…

What’s in a Retweet? The Data Behind Viral Messaging on Twitter | Dan Zarrella.

It also reinforces the value of being polite and saying ‘Please’ !

A couple of conversations on Twitter had me dreaming up a great Twitter experiment.

1. Organize two very large groups on Twitter and make sure they have very few common links at the outset.
2. Now give one group red shirts and other one blue shirts. Don’t tell the red shirts that the blue shirts exist, or v.v.
3. Then after a while, get some red shirts to follow blue shirts and v.v. – but don’t mention the shirts. You are the only person in the know!
4. Check how many red shirt people start to wear blue shirts, and v.v.

• Network theory suggests that we mimic what other people do, without realizing we are doing it. So red shirt wearers are likely to wear red shirts more and more often. As are blue shirt wearers.

• When we introduce red shirt wearers to blue shirt wearers, they will wear each others’ colors without thinking.

• Network theory also tells us that we are affected by what our friends’ friends do. We don’t need to know our friends’ friend either!

• So if some red shirts start talking to people who wear blue shirts, other red shirts might start wearing blue shirts.

It is fairly alarming that we are so easy to influence. But there are two sides to the coin. It not three!

• We influence back. if you want a tidy room, make it tidy! People who come in will be tidier than if their first look is an untidy room.

• We also have many influences competing for our attention.

I think the key is that we have to budget for competition. How much work do we have to do to win? And what will we do if we come second? Toby Moores, the CEO of Sleepy Dog, budgets one successful commercial idea out of 200. How well do we understand the processes of creativity, innovation and group influence? How can we give kids experience of the give-and-take of creativity, innovation and group decision making?

Any experiments for that?