If you are on Twitter, you can befriend @SouthByScruvy. Who is this? It’s a virus, both literally and figuratively.

Many of us came back from SXSW with a nasty flu-like virus. My friend, Jason, jokingly wrote on Twitter that he’s pretty sure that we all had scurvy. I followed up by confirming that diagnosis, with evidence that we did not drink much OJ while at the conference.

A day later, Twitterers were no longer writing about the flu, people were referencing SXScurvy. Two days after that, the virus joined Twitter as it’s own person @SouthByScurvy complete with an avatar of a virus and tweets about “collecting souls”.

What I find fascinating, as I sit here still trying to get over this illness, is watching healthy people referencing our illness by this new name. Why is that interesting?

Because it means the branding of the virus, SouthByScurvy spread quicker and more virally than the virus itself.

UPDATE: So what do web designers do with all the time on their hands being home sick, they make a website for the virus: http://www.sxswscruvy.com.  Stephanie and Jeremy, great job keeping the branding moving faster than the virus.