The behavior behind online content sharing

Dan Zarrela conducted a fascinating survey that lends tremendous insight into the behavior of online content sharing internet users. If you are conducting a viral or word of mouth marketing campaign, his analysis is a must read. We’ll cover summarize the study and findings here for your convenience.

The study:

Dan issued a survey to 420 internet users and queried their sharing habits, resources and reasons. In particular, Dan evaluated the behavior of users of various social web technology resources (blogs, social news, email, twitter, facebook, etc.). Of specific focus were the following points:

Word-of-Mouth: It’s All About Emotions

According to WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is “marketing that leverages interpersonal communication between individuals to drive product awareness and growth,” and is comprised of five elements.

• Educating people about your products and services
• Identifying people most likely to share their opinions
• Providing tools that make it easier to share information
• Studying how, where, and when opinions are being shared
• Listening and responding to supporters, detractors, and neutrals

Impossible to Ignore: Online ads prime the consumer subconcious for brand favoritism

Online advertising is an increasingly popular way to market a company. Web advertisements show up on virtually every web site and ad revenue has grown year after year. However, many businesses are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon as their own personal behavior suggests that few viewers pay online ads any attention. Indeed, some studies suggest that over half of internet users go no further than recognizing that an ad exists. This makes sense in the context of human behavior: when looking for something specific, we tend to avoid distractions. So if consumer tendency is to naturally avoid online ads, is this really a valuable means of marketing?

Enhancing your Business Blog with Customer Comments: Trends

One of the great business benefits of writing a blog is its ability to establish a repertoire with consumers. While the relationships is typically one sided with most consumers simply reading the content, many will participate in a community dialog by leaving comments. Comments are valuable in such that they garner insight into your customer-base and create a sense of community: many viewers will respond to comments left by others. As a result, people keep coming back to your site to interact with like minded consumers.

Given the value comments can add to a blog-based marketing platform, it is worthwhile to consider why people leave comments and how commenting can be encouraged. While we’ll delve into specific tactics that yield customer comments in a future post, Nick Halstead of fav.or.it aggregated some interesting comment related statistics that speak volumes about commenter behavior.

What is Your Content’s Reproductive Rate?

The concept of viral marketing was taken directly from the spread of infectious diseases. Like viral marketing, models of infectious disease begin with a seed group of individuals who spread the infection to their contacts according a reproduction rate, R. For an infection, or content piece to experience that highly sought after exponential growth, the reproduction rate has to be greater than 1. Let’s for example, see what happens when R = 1.25 and when R = 0.50 and when our initial seed size is 1,000.

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