Firecrackers are the one-hit wonders of citizen marketers.

Sometimes the proverbial wild hair springs up, and a few hours later, two guys with a video camera record a funny rap about McDonald's McNuggets, post it to a video-sharing site, and watch it accumulate 65,000 views.

Not all Firecrackers are get-'em-out-fast productions. George Masters's iPod ad was a one-hit wonder, but he spent five months creating it. Firecrackers typically attract considerable attention because they have created a song, animation, video, or novelty that generates a lot of interest but tends to die out quickly as the creators go on with their other work.

But the Firecrackers illustrate three principles of amateur content in the social media universe: (1) memes, even latent ones, can live indefinitely on the Web (memes are discussed more fully in Chapter 6); (2) social media networks accelerate the spread of memes; and (3) people love to mimic what entertains them.

Even though they may disappear as quickly as they arrived, the Firecrackers can have a measurable impact on a slice of culture or business.

One day, a 17-year-old girl who goes by the online handle "Bowiechick" (her real name is Melody Oliveria) wrote a diary post. In the early years of the 21st century, a personal diary for some teens is to sit at the computer, turn on a $99 video camera, record your innermost thoughts, and post them on the Internet. Bowiechick is one of those teens, and she posts her work to the video-sharing site YouTube.com.

On one particular day in 2005, while talking about the troubles of young love, she also covered her face in cat whiskers, a mustache, a gas mask, and funky hats, all of which were created digitally. The effects were cartoonish but precisely placed along the contours of her face, creating an instant sense of wow! Thousands of links to her post flourished, creating waves of word of mouth. About 1.2 million people watched her video. Hundreds left comments on her post, many of them questions about the effects.

The Bowiechick video illustrates two fundamental principles about social media, especially with amateur culture: social media simplify word of mouth and facilitate collaboration. Bowiechick wasn't video blogging in obscurity: the thousands of links and hundreds of comments on her post are immediately available to her or anyone else who blogs.

It's a real-time feedback system on one's ability to strike a chord within culture. Because of the feedback, Bowiechick created another video a few days later explaining how she had created the effects. Simple, actually. Software included with her Logitech computer webcam made the effects easy, like a mouse click.

Bowiechick's response video illustrates a culture of collaboration taking root with social media. The future of personal publishing and the business of culture are being driven by the inherent ease and desire for people to build knowledge together. The academic world has done this for eons, building knowledge atop one another's research and relying on a peer-review process to validate work.

The amateur culture attempts something similar, but the time period is days or hours. Validation is from in-bound links. Some 250,000 views later of her explanatory video, Bowiechick helped fuel a spike in sales of the webcam on Amazon.com. From Amazon.com Logitech learned that sales of the QuickCam Orbit, the product showcased in the video, increased by 128 percent over the same time frame from the previous year. Logitech was awaking to the future of amateur culture, too.

Several months later, it formed a partnership with YouTube to make posting videos created by its camera and software to the video-sharing site virtually seamless.