The Correlation Between Influence And Knowledge Sharing

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Recently, The NYTimes published an article covering the research of University of Pennsylvania to understand the factors behind the NYTimes “most emailed” list which appeared on their site. To go about doing this, they checked the NYTimes every 15 minutes for the past six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or Web page.

I believe this is in par with a previous article I wrote; Analysis of Knowledge Sharing on what drives people to share. This factor is the next rediscovered territory for marketers; the psychology behind knowledge sharing. Despite the idea of neuromarketing being a viable option for marketers, I do not see the value behind hiding the truth from your customers.

In John Bell’s blog, he made it known to everyone that his team at Ogilvy has been analyzing Cialdini’s drivers of influence and persuasion in relation to social media. Here is what they came out with:

People who share are influencers in their own way but what drives them to share is of a totally different subject matter. However, in the world of marketing, it is very useful to know what really drives people to share.

From that article in The NYTimes, the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman uncovered some unexpected results.

“People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

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, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”

Do check out their study in more details here.

“Some people talk more than others. I call these people “hubs”. I make a distinction between social hubs—people who talk more because they know more people—and expert hubs—people who talk more because they know more about something. How do you identify these folks? And once you do, what do you do with them? The academic debate about the topic has been going on for decades and was recently reignited by Duncan Watts at Columbia. Watts’s work should remind us not to overstate the importance of hubs, but I want to make sure that marketers don’t dismiss a valuable method because of a few catchy headlines in trade publications.”

One of the chapter of Emanuel Rosen’s book on Real-Life Lessons In Word-Of-Mouth Marketing.

What do you think of this correlation between the psychology of influence and sharing? Share with us your thoughts on it, we’re looking forward to it.