The TrendWatch

One of the funny things about Twitter is that, if you have a lot of people on your list and have a feed updater that shows you on the minute Twitter updates, sometimes you can smell a trend coming on. Such happened just a week ago.
You might be familiar with the character Martine, or the portuguese Anita, or even the english Emma. She was a popular childrens’ book character who had just about 50 books release with her name since the 50s. The stories were always related to her being in the farm, or in the city, or learning to cook a cake. Softcore reading for the young.
How could this character be related to Twitter. Well, it all started when a portuguese Twitterer posted a comment on why doesn’t Anita upgrade to the new generation, like “Anita learns how to use Twitter”. And boom, a whole viral movement began.
Quoting from the author himself:

From 10 am to 8pm here’s a glimpse of what happened:

The twitter search was submitted to digg and received 35 diggs so far;
Several links showed up in delicious; (mostly because of me)
The wikipedia page for Anita was created and edited;
Not happy confined to the web, #Anita went out into the world and was spotted through flickr;

Since then, the references to #Anita can be found anywhere. The name turned into the fastest meme in the history of Twitter.
This just comes to show you how viral can be random at sometimes. Using the imaginary universe we all share from our childwood, #Anita showed how the retro movement that we see on society nowadays is spreading online… and how Twitter could be powerful for Brands. Imagine getting this sort of attention to your Brand. Sound good, but the bottom line is – you can’t control it. Therefore, the main point of this small post is: don’t try to control the online information flow. On the contrary – go with it and play with your consumers like you are one of them. For example, create a twitter account for your brand and provide interesting contents to gather users. And then, just play with them… “#Anita would love a glass of Coca-Cola by now!”. Be one of us!
To learn more from this story, visit the users’ blog and watch how the movement grows. And remember… #Anita is watching you.