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The Secret of Sharing Online February 12, 2010

Posted by Michael Carney in : eMarketing , add a comment
What makes a news item go viral? What types of stories do web users like to share online?
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There are plenty of theories, lots of hypotheses and more than a few bald-faced guesses. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
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Or at least that’s the way it was, until University of Pennsylvania researchers did the hard yards. Earlier this week, New York Times contributor John Tierney reported the results:
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The researchers intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
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According to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman, people preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
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Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles.
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“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
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To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.
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A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.
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The computer textual analysis could identify “affect-laden” articles like “Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness” or “When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next.” It distinguished positive articles like “Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love With the City” from downers like “Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies.”
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More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics.
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The researchers used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.
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The motivation for mailing these awe-inspiring articles is not as immediately obvious as with other kinds of articles, Dr. Berger said. Sharing recipes or financial tips or medical advice makes sense according to classic economic utility theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you’ll someday return the favor. There can also be self-interested reasons for sharing surprising articles: I get to show off how well informed I am by sending news that will shock you.
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But in general, people who share awe-inspiring articles seem to have loftier motives than trying to impress their friends. They’re seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said.
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“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”
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The Penn researchers found evidence of readers’ sharing other emotions, too, like anxiety — which, based on the old “fear sells” theory of journalism, might be expected to be the most influential emotion on readers. But of all the variables studied, Dr. Berger said, awe had the strongest relationship with an article making the most-e-mailed list.

It’s likely, of course, that this result is influenced at least in part by the source material: the New York Times, certainly a more cerebral read than many of the alternatives out there. And, of course, the Times is not typically a source of ribald comments or bad jokes.

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Even so, the study has implications for marketers as well as content creators: awe-inspiring communications are naturally viral, and long copy still works.

Time for us marketers to lift our game?

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Facebook, Twitter and the Anti-Spam Law February 10, 2010

Posted by Michael Carney in : eMarketing , add a comment

In recognition of the fast-growing power of Facebook in particular, Trade Me last week added social sharing links to all auction listings, enabling visitors to share any listing on either Facebook or Twitter.

The move raises an interesting question: does using Twitter and Facebook to pass on commercial messages contravene the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act?

When New Zealand’s anti-spam legislation came into effect in September 2007, it had at least one unintended consequence on otherwise-legitimate New Zealand marketers: the previously popular device of “Friend Get Friend”, FGF, (encouraging consumers to tell their friends about the sponsor’s fine products — suddenly fell into a very grey area.

Given the provisions of the Act, was FGF now illegal (as seemed to be the case)? The question was of especial importance to Trade Me, who had previously provided easy email facilities for members to email auction details to their friends. It was a great method of helping unusual auctions to go viral. Was the party now over?

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act was intended to stamp out spammers, not hinder legitimate Kiwi businesses just trying to market their wares effectively. Would the Act kill “advertiser-assisted” viral marketing?

You’ll be relieved to learn that,after a time of wonder, a reasonable interpretation of the Act led to the following advice being given by the Department of Internal Affairs (who administer the Act):

Friend get friend campaigns, or ‘viral marketing’, usually encourage subscribers to provide the name and email address of a friend who is then sent a commercial electronic message and emailed by the company or promoter encouraging them to opt in/register.

An electronic message such as this would be unsolicited because the friend has not consented to receiving the message from the company or promoter. Consequently if the message was commercial (i.e. marketing or promoting goods, services, land, a business or investment opportunity) it would be considered spam. However, if the companies’ email is forwarded by the recipient to a friend(s) this is usually okay.

For example: A and B are good friends, and send each other emails on a routine basis. Company C has an express consent from A to send commercial emails to them. A then decides to forward to B commercial emails he received from company C. If it can be assumed from the relationship that B is happy to receive the commercial emails forwarded by A, consent could reasonably be inferred.

That consent, however, will not exist between the company and B. If the company only had A’s consent, it cannot assume B has consented to receive its commercial emails.

In most cases, the relationship between A and B is not likely to be of interest to the Anti-Spam Unit, unless B complained about A’s emails. In that case, the onus will be on A to show that inferred consent existed.

In other words, if marketers solicit friends’ email addresses and then send out commercial entreaties, that’s spam. But if marketers merely provide the tools for consumers to use, that should be typically be a permitted arrangement under the Act.

BUT WAIT

Skip ahead a couple of years and now there’s Twitter and Facebook being used in a Friend Get Friend capacity — not just by Trade Me, of course, but their example started us thinking about those services and marketers’ increasing attempts to harness the power of the social networks for commercial gain.

Before you ask — no social networking service is specifically mentioned in the Act, but the carefully-constructed legislation catches them anyway. The Act governs the sending of Unsolicited Electronic Messages to electronic addresses, and defines the latter thus:

electronic address means an address used in connection with—
(a) an email account; or
(b) an instant messaging account; or
(c) a telephone account; or
(d) a similar account

In other words, Twitter and Facebook (and other digital distractions not yet born) are caught in the Act (under ‘d’) in the same way as email et al.

FRIEND TWEET FRIEND?

You’d have to say that a whole lot of the birdseed spread through the twitterverse would indeed attract a “Caution — may contain spam” label. Of course, if you sign up to follow a Twitterer, you are effectively giving permission to them to send you stuff — and if they’re a commercial enterprise, then clearly you can expect to receive commercial messages.

But what if you follow an individual, who typically shares his/her transient living habits (“What a night — ### was SO ######d”). Suddenly, you receive a tweet about an auction — or a new CD — or whatever. Spam? Back to that grey area.

IN YOUR FACEBOOK

Same scenario, different planet. Your Facebook Newsfeed, usually so trivial/personal, is suddenly polluted by a commercially corrupted, soon-to-be-un-friend.

Spam too? Looks that way, especially if there’s a marketer lurking in the wings fanning the friendly flames of ‘Free! Buy now!’.

We should also be conscious of the need for transparency in the online space (as demanded by the US Federal Trade Commission and its October 2009 Guidelines requiring that that bloggers and other marketers be upfront and honest about endorsements and testimonials, and disclose when promotional commentary has been paid for by the producers of any product or service being endorsed). We may not have legislated for that transparency in NZ yet (except perhaps loosely under the Fair Trading Act), but it’s probably on someone’s agenda for the near future.

WASSUP THEN?

We’re of the view that the Trade Me example — mild encouragement to share socially with friends — is as acceptable under the legislation as was moderate emailing encouragement back in the day (circa 2007).

But we’d certainly warn Kiwi marketers to proceed with caution when inviting consumers to spruik on their behalf in the social sphere. It may be a new frontier but it’s neither unpoliced nor unpunished.

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