I’d never experienced non-biological ‘viral’ until last week, when unwittingly I tweeted:

new IFTTT recipe: send an email to anyone posting “Inbox Zero"

— tbiz (@tbiz) April 27, 2014

…which is probably the first Tweet I’ve ever had get RTd or Favorited more than 3 or 4 times. As of this writing, this is close to 1,000 RTs and 800 Favorites.

I pretty much just watched the fun happen without trying to intervene or analyze. All I know is very early on someone I know well favorited it:

But only now, as I reflect a smidge on the data, do I see that he was actually technically the “second” favoriter. I don’t think he saw the original though (and, have no idea how she saw it either!):

I suspect precise chronological order is not directly tied with ‘virality’ (which is not likely linear, but is rather something like superlinear). So here’s a thanks to sonal for at least teeing up the fun.

Conclusions? Well, people either really love IFTTT; really hate email; both, or…given all the social media analytics power and strategy I put into this, this is likely the best (though I wouldn’t mind it happening again ;):