This summer, SIF Fellow Thomas Breideband presented his work on how things grow in the complex ecosystem of social media at TEDx Vicenza in Italy. Over 5000 people watched the event on a live stream, and a half million people were reached by it on Twitter. Thomas’ expertise on social media, developed through research for his dissertation, figures prominently in one of this years’ new SIF projects, the Nation Branding project, which uses facebook and twitter to study the effects of Latin American countries efforts to brand themselves as tourist destinations, a project on which Thomas serves as team lead.