Promoting content in social media is only half the battle. Once it is in the face of thousands of visitors, there needs to be some sort of emotional and psychological drive to get them to share that content with others. This is key in creating a “snowball effect” that will build perpetual motion to reach a much more pervasive audience.

I covered creating emotional “hooks” to lure people in to viewing content in The Anatomy of Linkbait, but that doesn’t necessarily provide a visitor with the same kind of emotions to want to pass the content along to an individual or mass audience.

Seven types of content sharing motives

To understand how to make content more shareable we must first understand what motivates people to share in the first place.

1. Self-expression

The biggest motivator in social media is self-expression. It’s great that there are so many different ways to do this in social media. When promoting content, use this motivator by providing easy ways for the visitor to express themselves, via social share buttons, comment threading, or some other form of engagement. If a person’s beliefs or interests are related to the content, then they will be glad to share it.

2. Affinity

Everyone wants to feel like they belong and that they’re a part of something. Sharing within communities helps meet that desire. This is an especially dominant motivating factor in niche related verticals or communities.

3. Validation

Confirming or approving something often times feeds the ego for many by making someone feel important. Content that provides personal validation will likely motivate someone to share with a wide audience.

4. Prurience

Obscene or lustful content can be highly shareable. Some people pass the guilt of consuming such content on to others to make themselves feel better about doing so in the first place.

5. Status achievement

Individuals like to be recognized for their efforts, especially publicly. If content or channels feature users who share the content, then they are far more likely to be motivated to do so.

6. Altruism

Benefiting others often times makes people feel better. Content can motivate visitors by giving them the opportunity to do something good for the community. For example, an environmental report to raise awareness can be a motivating factor to share it with others to get the message out.

7. Self-serving interests

Rewarding people for their efforts goes a long way. This can be done in the form of status achievement recognition, financial gain, free or discounted products or services, and so forth. Motivate people who share content by rewarding them if they do.

Sending vs. spreading

Viral sharing can reach many different audiences, hubs, and influencers. There are a few ways (and reasons why) people share content.

One-to-One

This type of viral sharing is most common via direct messaging through social networks, IM, or email. Dan Zarrella did a study on this and found that most people share in a one-to-one scenario due to:

• Personal Relevance (40%)
• Humor (16.4%)
• Utility
• Relationship Building (9.5%)
• Common Interests (7.8%)
• Sole Informant (5.9%)
• Reciprocity (2.4%)

One-to-Many

This type of viral sharing is most common on social networks and social content aggregation sites. Social media has created an outlet for this type of sharing to explode. Also in Dan’s study, he found that most people share to many others due to:

• Audience Relevance (18.6%)
• Increasing Reach (10.7%)
• Increasing Reputation (8.8%)
• Furthering a Message or Cause (8.6%)
• Utility and Usefulness (7.4%)
• Feedback (5.5%)
• Personal Networking (5.25)

Below is a chart showing the most popular social media sites for sharing content. As you can see, Facebook is the furious leader.

Four tips for creating content for viral sharing

1. Value

Trust me, I’m just as sick of hearing “create great content” and “content is king” as you are, but it really is the key to in getting people to share. By creating valuable, resourceful, and compelling content you will seek the approval of the masses.

2. Credibility

Make sure that your domain, brand, and author(s) are always seeking to establish credibility. Often times it comes down to the credibility of the source, not the content or message itself.

3. Usability

Making the content easy to share and driving them to do so with a call-to-action will do wonders.

4. Digestibility

Make it easy for people to consume your content. Whether it’s putting boring statistical data in a visual infographic, formatting the layout of the content, or chunking and segmenting content with headers and other methods, you are providing an easy way for the user to digest the content. If they feel the content and data is easy to digest they’ll feel comfortable sharing it with others.

The takeaway…

While many people might think that viral Internet memes happen on their own, the shocking truth is that most of them don’t. There is a large cycle of creative, development, deployment, and seeding that ensures success. By readying content and campaigns for viral success, you are taking the first steps in the cycle.

–Jordan Kasteler

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You can think of social media as a set of tools that your business center can use for a variety of purposes – customer service, branding, promotion, relationship management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.

Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool.

The barrier for getting started with social media is low; it’s dependent on your involvement level, objectives, and goals. Thefacilitators of the message, our tools, are the key components that make it all work. The sole purpose of these tools is to: create, manage and distribute content, build awareness, drive traffic, connect with our customers and hopefully turn a lead into a prospective sale.

If social media represents a set of tools – what should be in your office business center’s toolkit?

Social Media Statistics

The default tool in any toolbox always starts with Analytics. Knowing where your executive suite company’s existing traffic or lack of traffic it is coming from will yield a goldmine of data that can be strategically utilized.

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher converting websites.

Build your blog community with RSS
Give your readership ways to stay up-to-date and informed with your blog, by encouraging them to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. FeedBurner, another Google-owned product, is the only game in town for feed management. It will give you statistical data about your feeds content, distribution, and subscribers. Even though the data can be taken with a grain of salt. The real benefit of Feedburner is the ability to offer email and RSS reader subscriptions to readers of your blog. The trend, I find, is shifting more to email subscriptions than RSS subscriptions. Feedburner’s email delivery service works very well and it can be customized rather nicely. If we can’t educate consumers on using RSS readers, we can at least educate them to subscribe via email, something everyone has done at some point.

Social Networking and Social Signage

Professional Networking
LinkedIn is the tool of choice for professional networking. At the very least, if you’re not using the site for employment purposes, fill out a completed work history, resume, and profile. Set your profile to public so that it ranks for your name. LinkedIn allows you to aggregate third party service content such as, blogs and SlideShare presentations into your profile page. Use your profile to showcase your work and talent. Create a group page for your business center and keep in touch with current clients and prospects that way.

Social Networking
Facebook: love it or hate it, it’s here, and it’s the 800-pound guerrilla force to be reckoned with. Use Facebook for professional or personal networking. Be cautious on how you combine the two, because they can very easily spill over onto each other. If you’re going to be doing any marketing on Facebook, set up a public fan page. Facebook is a completely different beast and should be treated as such. There are a ton of bells and whistles that will allow you to customize your Facebook page, in addition to aggregating content from other third party sources.

Social Megaphone
Twitter is a social megaphone. There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter, however due to 140 char limitations it’s best for megaphoning links and information back to your home base. Establishing a Twitter presence is standard protocol nowadays, but ask yourself what you want to get out of Twitter. Your objectives and goals will dictate how you use the service.

Social Profile
Create a Google Profile and control to some extent what information people see about you online. As long as your profile is set to public, it will appear in search results for your name. You can also link all your social profiles. This is outpost number one – spend the time, and optimize it correctly.

Social Curation
Delicious and Diigo are the only two tools for this category. These bookmarking tools have proven that they can scale and have a solid track record. There are pros and cons to both, but they both achieve the same objective: tagging, saving, and storing bookmarks. The nice thing about Diigo is that it can save all new bookmarks automatically to Delicious. This gives you peace of mind knowing your digital data is archived.
Video and Photo Sharing

Thanks to the advent of mobile technology, faster and more accessible broadband and sites that host, broadcast and share consumer generated content, the video revolution is upon us and has been for some time now. Social media, is well, social. Stories get people talking. Create informative videos that are relevant to your messaging and brand, encourage others to share it and to create their own video content. Viral videos are rare and lots of factors determine if something will go viral. If your content is good and worth sharing, people will take notice.

YouTube reigns supreme in this category and rightfully so. YouTube is yet another Google owned property (are you starting to see a common theme here?). YouTube makes it extremely easy to host and stream videos. YouTube videos are easy to embed and are very shareable. Create a branded YouTube channel for your brand and always optimize your title and keywords accordingly. YouTube is a video sharing site at its core, but it’s also a massive search engine.

Pictures are worth a thousand words
Photo sharing sites are in abundance, but the two we recommend are Flickr and Google’s Picasa. Flickr has been around the longest and has lots of social components, specifically a built-in diehard community. Picasa has the same functionality with basic editing capabilities and easy bulk uploading to the web. Both services offer the basics: uploading, tagging, and sharing of photos.

In Conclusion

The number one benefit of social media marketing is gaining the all-important eyeball. It will also generate exposure for your businesses, improving traffic and build new partnerships. Start working on your toolkit today to build your Social Media platform. Just take one step at a time and you will eventually reap the benefits of your efforts.

–Susan Smith

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Video content has a good chance of dominating the web. In July 2009 alone, an astounding 158 million U.S. internet users — or 80 percent of the nation’s online population — watched online videos, according to data from comScore Video Metrix. While the best way to meet this demand is to provide more video content, it should be noted that too much content will become an “untamable beast” — especially when it comes to ensuring that videos are personalized and customized.

In addition, according to recent research from The Diffusion Group (TDG), the number of global broadband households will near 440 million by 2010 and top 1.2 billion by 2030, bringing high-speed connectivity to a tipping point. As a result, online publishers will treat this broadband gold rush with gusto, ensuring that video content is prolific and ubiquitous.

So, the stars are all lining up for video to be the “king of content” on the web. Online publishers will post massive volumes of videos that are aimed at driving more traffic, and they will look to provide a more personalized experience to keep users engaged. The downside is that there is such as thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to video, and online publishers need to use tools to maximize this opportunity.

Once online publishers start building out a deep repertoire of video content by producing it, licensing it, or syndicating it, this massive volume of videos can become unwieldy and cumbersome to discover, share, and monetize. In addition, a haphazard approach to posting content — just based on posting high volumes of videos — would be like selling a product that people don’t buy because they don’t know it exists or have no interest in it.

To avoid being trampled under the foot of this potentially untamable beast, we recommend you follow these five critical steps:

1. Think strategically
Take a marketing campaign-like approach to posting video content. The most successful campaigns are driven by a well-thought-out strategy that is supported by the most cutting-edge tactics. Online publishers that actually spend time developing this plan in a written document, and ensure that the entire web team is thinking strategically while executing the tactics, will yield the best results.

2. Scale up quick and early
Scaling up can always be done, but is optimal when completed early in the game. By tagging and managing the videos by category — even if the categories go very deep in terms of user preference — you will be able to build a true foundation for all other videos to be launched, managed, and monetized. This will also allow third-party technology vendors to more easily be integrated to your site (in terms of analytics, third-party ad serving companies, discovery, and others).

3. Provide a personalized experience; create your competitive advantage
Make sure you serve up a more personalized video viewing experience. This means that, based on viewing patterns, tastes, and preferences, videos should be served up to users much like a custom-made piece of furniture or musical instrument — as unique products. Too much of a commoditized video experience will cause users to migrate elsewhere. Simply put: Web users prefer some guidance.

4. Maintain, maintain, maintain
If you have the right foundation in place and you are scaling properly, it is very easy to get complacent at precisely the time when managing online videos can become beastly. Make sure that you build in routine maintenance of your online video efforts.

5. Measure success and recalculate
Managing online video content without the proper analytic tools and metrics goals is like going hiking without the proper equipment. One wrong turn and you could be lost very deep in the woods. Be sure to fully analyze and measure all of your efforts at the end of a campaign (recommend every three months). This is the ideal time to truly recalculate efforts, purge low-value video content, and move forward with a modified plan. Such quantifiable metrics could be CTRs on your different navigation tools, colors schemes, player sizes, pages per visit, and others.

While the online video gold rush is showing no sign of slowing down and more ad revenues are kicking in from TV to online, publishers should avoid quickly rushing out West — much like the California gold rush — with the wrong tools for mining. After all, only a handful of people struck it rich during the gold rush — most were left destitute. By using the right strategies and tools for managing and personalizing videos, every online publisher can grab a hold of the bountiful riches.

–Adam Singolda

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Podcasting is seen to have a positive effect on radio listening, according to a study relased today in the UK. Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd) released findings of its second survey into podcasting and radio listening via the internet. The findings were based on 863 respondents who were asked to complete an online questionnaire.

People were asked if they had ever listened to the radio stations via the internet and the study found that 14.5 million people had done so – up 2.5 million from 12 million in November 2007.

When asked if listening to podcasts effectived their radio listening, three quarters of those listeners said podcasting had no impact on the amount of live radio to which they listened. And almost half said they were listening to radio programs to which they did not listen to previously.

Six million people in the UK have downloaded a podcast, up from 4.3 million in the previous survey. iTunes remained the software of choice, used by almost three-quarters of podcast users to subscribe to podcasts.

Overall the study showed that Podcasting appeared to have a positive effect on live radio listening. Almost 15% of respondents said they listened to more live radio since they began downloading podcasts while 10% stated they listened to less, and 39% said they were listening to radio programs they did not listen to previously.

Podcast listening occurred throughout the day, with an evening peak, when 44% of podcast users pressed the play button. The survey also found that 53% of respondents said they would be interested in downloading podcasts containing advertising if they were free, while only 31% responded positively to the idea of podcasts with advertising that had to be paid for.

This study somewhat contridicts the long thought idea that podcasting is stealing the terrestrial radio listening audience. It appears that the opposite is occuring, and that podcasting is recondioning listeners to listen to audio programs and even introducing them to content that they previsously were unaware of.

I have always loved pairing radio with podcasting. Radio serves as an excellent promotional vehicle and provides an instant audience, where podcasting allows you to manage that audience as they subscsribe to your feed.

Matthew

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