Are They Going to Share This Article?

As a PR guy, I get excited when an article that I helped to make happen finally appears online. I get even more excited when I see that the article has been shared, retweeted and posted all over social media networks. And now, there is a research that looks into who shares articles and why. It provides a little bit of insight into which articles will spread virally. This fascinating study published by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and written about in today’s New York Times shows that articles need to create an awe.

“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,” told Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School, to the NYT.

And what creates this awe? Mostly science articles.

“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,” Berger said.

Note to myself: create more awes in 2010. You can read the full text here. Quite fascinating – that’s why I am sharing it. I have a feeling you will soon too.