Some things are rare and precious in life – a blue moon, a unicorn galloping across a grassy knoll, a retweetable tweet.

This past Sunday, watching The Walking Dead as I frequently do on a Sunday, I was doing a bit of live tweeting. A few little chirps went out, nothing out of the ordinary, until I thought of something (I figured) would be funny to let loose from the coop. So I tweeted the following:

Nothing too crazy; albeit I made up the stats and self-admittedly thought about this very notion of Carol’s short hair at least two months ago. So what?

Then, it happened. My feed started to go bananas. People were finding the tweet and sharing it, over and over and over again. From 19 to 33, 56, 79 – I was about to hit 100! It felt like my lotto numbers were coming up one after another.

The tweet ended up getting 240 retweets and capped off after about 24 hours. The life of that tweet was longer than the average 15 minute-Twitter chirp, I daresay.

It’s interesting. As I soak up all there is to know about social, I rarely come across articles or white papers about what to do once you’ve found social media success. We’re all still pushing the rock up the hill. What do I do to capitalize on this new found social wealth? What can I do?

I reckon that this tweet was made successful by its: hashtag, timing, brevity, wit and by the dedication and hard core feeling it shows towards the plot and characters. What if brands also captured the true essence of these sentiments?

I leave you with one excellent example. Oreo did it, with its Super Bowl tweet that received tens of thousands of retweets. Fans tipped their hat to such an in-tune brand and on-call creative and social team. Kudos, Oreo Cookie. Let brands strive to be like you (and me)… but really more like you.