Break Through the Noise

by Tim Staples

  The Good Samaritan category encompasses feel-good videos that showcase an individual or group going out of their way to help someone else and make that person’s life better. This type of content has been gaining steam over the past few years, possibly in response to the polarizing political content of recent election cycles.

  (A quick note about political content. We’re not going to analyze the virality of political content in this book, as a large portion of it traffics in negativity, fear, and division, which are not useful to expanding a brand.)

  An early example of Good Samaritan content is the 2006 video by PeaceOnEarth123 called “Free Hugs Campaign.” In it, a bearded young man, wearing glasses and a sports coat, goes to a public square holding a sign that says “Free Hugs.” The video shows him walking awkwardly through the crowd, who either ignore him or give him a laugh as they head in the other direction. That all changes when an elderly lady stops and gives him a kind word and a hug. Before long, the floodgates break open and everyone is hugging, with some wild and joyous variations. The video, set to a song by the Sick Puppies, has gone on to more than 70 million views and proved that a small act of kindness can indeed spark a large-scale response.

  At Shareability, we love Good Samaritan content and have had great success building feel-good videos with brands like Hyundai, AT&T, and Adobe. One of my favorites is the campaign we created for Adobe Photoshop, focused on lending a helping hand to people who were victimized when Hurricane Harvey decimated parts of Houston. The Facebook video, titled “Hurricane Harvey Restoration Project,” shows high school students setting out to restore photographs for families affected by the hurricane. Using Adobe Photoshop, the students repair and restore treasured photos that had been soaked and ruined as flooding overtook many houses in the community. The students then present new framed photographs to their surprised owners as tears and appreciation flow on both sides. The video soared to over 7 million views, led to great national media coverage, and offered a poignant reminder that in times of tragedy, that it’s the little things that can make a big difference.

  In short, there are many ways to be shareable. Trends are always changing, but by studying what has worked in the past and what others are doing successfully, you can evolve your own strategy and be best positioned to make successful content that an audience will not only watch but will want to share.

  Understanding and using the principles of shareability are the most important tools that you can master to have success on the internet. Getting people to share your content is critical to expanding your reach and finding an audience that is invested in you. We like to say sharing is the holy grail, because when people share, they care . . . and when they care, they buy. This mindset involves faith because you need to trust that your returns may come later. Instead of coming out and hitting someone over the head with your message, you engage people first and then build a relationship with them. In this way, shareability is essentially the opposite of advertising—call it the anti-advertising. Advertising is a one-way street from a brand to a customer, while sharing is a multi-lane highway, in which a friend recommends a brand to others and thereby expands the reach of that brand by bringing it to new customers.

  If you read this book and take away only one thing, I hope it is this: Be shareable.

  Rule 2

  Understand the Science

  Now that you understand the importance of shareabililty and have seen examples of shareable content, let’s ask a deeper question: Why do people share?

  Understanding this is essential to making your content spread organically, but the reason people share may surprise you. In our experience people generally share for one reason: They are being selfish.

  But wait, isn’t sharing the total opposite of being selfish?

  Sure, the act of sharing is selfless. Sharing is caring, after all. But the reason you are doing it is 100 percent selfish.

  Take a generous act of sharing, like cutting a sandwich in two and giving half to a person in need. Very selfless act, right? Especially since you were hungry and you actually worked to earn the money that bought the sandwich. You have just done something wonderful. How did that make you feel?

  I bet it made you feel good.

  Do you think you gave away your sandwich because it made other people feel good or because the act of giving it made you feel good about yourself? If you’re truly honest, it’s probably the latter.

  Studies have shown that, for the giver, it is better to give than to receive. In 2017, University of Zurich reseachers put this theory to the test. They clinically surveyed the current mood of 50 men and women and also had them undergo MRIs. They then gave all of them money, with a condition attached. Half were told to spend it all on themselves, and the other half were told to spend it on someone else. At the end of the process, the group was tested again. The givers’ moods were uniformly better, and their MRIs uniformly showed greater activity in the portion of the brain associated with altruism.

  So if most sharing is, at its heart, selfish, how is sharing still connected to caring? Actually, it is and it’s connected in an even stronger way—and one that is especially beneficial to brands. You share something because you care—not about the person you are sharing with, but about the thing you are sharing. For instance, if you share the latest Jay-Z/Beyoncé collaboration, you aren’t doing this because you care about your friends being in tune with the latest hip music video. Rather, you are doing it because you are a fan.

  This is an important concept and one that plays right into the hands of the strategies of Shareability. By making people care about our company’s campaigns, they then share them, and when they share, they are telling the world that it is something worthy of everyone’s time and attention. In other words, your brand is worthy of people’s time and attention. That is the biggest endorsement anyone can give.

  Building “Digital Walls”

  To understand how these social dynamics play out in sharing online content, we need to understand how the “bedroom wall” has evolved into the “digital wall.”

  In the 1980s and 90s, the walls of a teenager’s room told you exactly who they were and, even more so, who they wanted to be. For boys, there might have been posters of Kurt Cobain, Michael Jordan, and the Terminator. A girl might have taped up pictures of Britney Spears, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a rotating set of torn-out magazine pages featuring the boy bands of the moment. For each new band that broke, or screen hottie that dazzled, or fashion trend that hit, they would alter their décor.

  That culture has vanished. Now the bedroom walls of everyone, from teens to millennials to baby boomers, are their social media profiles, that is, their “digital walls.” These digital walls define how we present ourselves, from the descriptions of who we are, to the photos, content, and links that we post. Every liked or shared video says something about the person who likes or shares it, meaning that we post and share not just the stuff that we love, but more important, the stuff we want people to know that we love. It is how we represent who we are to the world, and ultimately how we want people to view us.

  The critical point to understand is that people like and share internet content not for others, but rather to define themselves, and for how it makes them look and feel. In short, they do it for self-serving or selfish reasons.

  Understanding this human dynamic of how sharing makes us social and how it presents us to the world is essential to creating shareable content. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our potential audience and to consider what value they would get out of sharing a piece of our content.

  Let’s say a brand creates a traditional commercial that promotes the benefits of a new skin-care line. The video is shot beautifully, using the latest cameras and lighting techniques, and tells people how amazing this product is. Will people share that commercial?

  Well, clearly sharing that video would be good for the company, but what benefit does a teenage girl from Milwaukee obtain from sharing it? Why would s
he ever do that? The obvious answer is that she probably wouldn’t, but I hesitate to say “obvious” because most brands still clearly don’t understand the dynamics of sharing.

  Not to pick on anyone in particular, but let’s take J.Crew. Who doesn’t love a brand that makes reasonably priced clothes you can actually wear and that last? In recent years, with its Ludlow suit and better-cut women’s clothes, J.Crew has become a staple of many younger working persons’ wardrobes. So the brand has some credibility to make shareable content that resonates with millennials.

  Yet, last year, J.Crew posted a video on Facebook featuring its Slim Perfect T-shirt that played, in my opinion, like a boring ad. The video featured a guy talking about how well the T-shirt fit and what kind of cotton was used. The result? The video had exactly 1 share out of its 1.8 million followers. Oh, it also had 1 comment, which simply said: “Rubbish.” That comment pretty much sums it up!

  Now contrast that with the video for a campaign that we executed for a pet food company called Freshpet a few years back, titled “Freshpet Holiday Feast.” Freshpet is a New Jersey–based firm that makes fresh, all-natural pet food, so fresh in fact that it needs to be refrigerated. This in itself was a very shareable product concept. In fact, Freshpet was one of the first companies to put refrigerators into the pet food aisle at various retail stores like Target and Walmart.

  Like J.Crew, Freshpet has a solid product, one that had gotten high reviews and had built a loyal following of users. However, Freshpet’s challenge was that very few consumers knew about their product. To alleviate this problem, they had tried traditional advertising, which did give them some lift, but they didn’t have the budget to break through to a mass audience.

  When they hired us, we asked ourselves, “What would dog lovers love to see on the internet?” Notice that the original question was not “What is great about Freshpet products that people on the internet would like to see?” That type of question comes later. What our research told us is that dog lovers would enjoy watching pets act like humans. From that one insight, “Freshpet Holiday Feast” was born.

  We created a video where pets acting like humans, with human hands and clothes, were gathered around a table for a holiday meal. The video featured 13 dogs and a cat, with each playing an archetype of a friend or relative who would be present at a holiday party. The animals were all dressed in holiday attire. This hilarious cast included the drunken uncle, the distracted teenager using a cellphone, the love-struck couple, and of course, the “cat boss” at the head of the table.

  The video was basically a silent movie set to festive holiday music that showcased the interactions of all the guests sitting down to a feast of Freshpet food. The video was around 2 minutes long and very lightly branded, and it finished with an end card sending viewers to the Freshpet website. As an additional twist, we partnered with the local Humane Society to supply the dogs and the cat, and all of the pets featured in the video were available for adoption (and, in fact, were adopted).

  So instead of focusing on Freshpet, we focused on what pet owners wanted and gave them an entertaining holiday video with a feel-good twist. Does this sound like something that pet owners would share? Well, they shared it like crazy. The video has become one of the most successful branded holiday videos of all time. It has skyrocketed to over 100 million views and millions of shares, while receiving positive coverage around the world in media outlets from ABC to Mashable to the Huffington Post.

  People shared the Freshpet video because it was funny, and it made them laugh. By extension, they were showing that they had a sense of humor while also bolstering their digital wall.

  That’s all great, you say, but what about Freshpet? What did they get out of it?

  More than they ever imagined. Store locator traffic for Freshpet product increased over 3,000 percent. When the company later went public, the CEO talked to Bloomberg about Shareability and the success of the video. Every year since, the video gets re-uploaded at Christmas and goes viral all over again, racking up tens of millions of additional views and awareness for Freshpet.

  In sum, the video had a real and measurable impact on the bottom line. That’s the power of shareability in action.

  The Five Shareable Emotions

  Marketers have long used emotion to engage consumers and encourage them to connect with brands. At my company, we spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about why people share content. We are constantly reading, researching, and testing the latest trends and science to better understand how to gain an unfair advantage in getting people to share.

  Numerous people have written at length about the emotions that drive sharing. Through all of our work and by studying the various reports on shareable feelings, we have discovered that there are five keys that drive a disproportionate number of shares online. We call them the Five Shareable Emotions, and they are a never-ending focus for us as we work with major brands and celebrities.

  Understanding these emotions and what triggers them can make all the difference in how your content is received and shared online.

  1. Happiness

  The first shareable emotion is happiness. Happiness content is exactly what you think it would be—it’s content that makes people happy. When you’re happy, what do you want to do? Very often, you want to share that feeling with a friend! People love to share things that will bring joy to people they care about, because that in turn will make them feel good about themselves.

  Videos that bring happiness are no different. Especially today, when the polarized content found in both social and traditional media has created the impression that the world is littered with constant negativity and division. (It’s not—the world is statistically a much happier and more unified place than ever before, but that’s a subject for another time.) In this perceived harsh climate, happiness content is incredibly powerful. When you can put a smile on someone’s face or bring even a small moment of positivity into their day, it can have a big impact. And we’re eager to make our loved ones and friends feel happy.

  This category includes all of the Adorable Babies content that we talked about earlier, along with what we like to call Internet Candy—fun, often silly or charming content that doesn’t make you think too hard, like “Freshpet Holiday Feast.”

  Another example of how we put this into practice is our work for the Olympic Games.

  The Olympic Games is one of the most recognized and respected brands in the world, and every two years the games take center stage on a global basis, recognizing athletic achievement. For that 16-day period of competition, the games are literally the biggest show on earth. The challenge is the time in between Olympic Games, when the torch burns far less bright. The International Olympic Committee’s content arm turned to us as they launched the Olympic Channel, a digital network meant to keep viewers and fans engaged between games. We knew that the type of athletic content that was so talked about during the games wouldn’t play nearly as well in the “off-season,” so we designed a video campaign that tapped into the pure emotion of joy on a universal level.

  Our brain trust came up with the idea of babies competing in Olympic events, and the ensuing video delivered one of the highest Shareability scores we have ever had. We tapped into the joy of cute babies set against the thrilling environment of Olympic events to create a piece of content unlike any other, which elicited smiles and caused shares. “Baby Olympics” became one of the biggest viral successes of 2017, garnering over 150 million views and 3 million shares worldwide.

  For brands, using happiness content is almost the exact opposite of advertising. Typically in traditional advertising, the brand is beating its own chest and telling the targeted audience why they should buy their product. This leads to a very one-sided conversation with minimal value to viewers. More often than not, they turn the other way and run.

  By producing a feel-good video instead of a commercial, the brand is saying, “I’m making this for you, the audience, so that I can hopefully
brighten up your day.” This transforms the content of a selfish commercial into a selfless act of kindness, and what happens when you do something nice for someone? They want to pay you back. We’ve seen again and again that when brands invest against their audience and give them something of value, something that is selfless, the audience will pay them back tenfold.

  They may repay you with their attention, their actions, or their wallet, but any way you slice it, you will have taken the first step toward building a real relationship with your customers.

  One important element of this—and one that brands understand and can quantify—is called brand sentiment. This is a measure of what the general population, or a specific demographic, thinks of your brand. How they feel about it. It’s well established that when consumers feel positive about a brand, they are far more likely to spend their money on that brand rather than on the competition. Creating this type of happiness content can accomplish exactly that. It makes the brand more likable, more relatable, more . . . human.

  We have seen the impact of this time and time again. When brand sentiment goes up, sales go up. These two metrics are connected in a very direct and measurable way.

  To create happiness content, start with the audience you want to reach, and figure out what type of content they enjoy on the internet. Then give them that. Of course, you also need to figure out how to connect the brand or product to the content in a meaningful way, but you’d be surprised how seamless that often tends to be.

  2. Awe

  Awe is the second shareable emotion. It is an emotion of reverence or respect, often coupled with a hint of fear and wonder. It can be triggered by novel, crazy, or interesting things that people have never seen before. They are often unique acts performed by animals or humans, impressive or selfless acts that make you say “Wow!” In short, things that are, well . . . awesome.