The name is a nod to Umair Haque, who now writes for HBS and popularized the concept of the Snowball Effect applied to content on his blog a couple of years ago. The basic idea is that in a world in which you can watch anything you want (like, say on the interwebs), you’re going to want to watch the content that’s most interesting to *you* — and that the most effective way to find out about this interesting content is from like-minded people as opposed to from an impersonal marketing campaign. Thus, Umair argues that the abundance of content enabled by the Internet creates the conditions in which the ‘Snowball’ can be more powerful than the ‘Blockbuster.’
Just as a snowball rolling downhill gains mass and momentum, we share Umair’s belief that the right content pushed in the appropriate direction is a potentially potent force of nature. Our goal is to help enable this process by connecting producers of interesting online content with the people who will love it.
If you’re interested, you can find Umair’s full presentation here (.ppt). And if you dig that, you also might want to take a look at Ian Rogers’s Media 2.0 Physics presentation.
