It’s All About Shareability
The biggest difference between a traditional media campaign and a social media campaign comes down to Shareability. What’s shareability? Shareability is the degree to which your message will be passed on by the people who receive it. Pretty straight forward, I know, but no at the top of the minds of marketers accustomed to broadcasting to a Nielsen household. A lack of understanding shareability is also at the heart of failures for app and advertising campaigns within social media.
Shareability is really compried of two parts, the message and the technology encapsulating that message. Imagine a YouTube video. The video is the message, while the player is the technology. The YouTube player has a balance between the two pieces, while an application invite weighs more heavily on technology and a funny photo passed over email weighs more heavily on message.
Here’s the checklist:
Message
Will sharing add value? - People want to share because it adds value to their relationships with other people. Sharing something funny, intelligent, or symbolic with our friends or followers builds goodwill in our relationships. Ideally your message would add more value as more people share it, i.e. getting points for inviting your friends, or spreading the word about a building critical mass for a cause.
Call to action? - It may seem obvious, but you have to leave people with a direct request to share. Either this is presenting them with a sharing button or providing them with a direct value add for sharing.
Technology
Do you have multiple ways to share? - Not everyone is a member of Facebook or MySpace. If you’re not within a social network, give viewers a couple of ways to share, such as embeds, Twitter, or *gasp* email.
What is your degree of sharing? - To get the most out of your sharing, aim for modes that let users share with more than just one person. Increasing the number of people the message can be shared with at each level, increases the likelyhood it will be shared again.
Is it easy? - Sharing is nothing new, but the ease of sharing is. Services like Delicious, Facebook, or Twitter make it dead simple to broadcast something interesting in only a couple of clicks. Easier sharing increases the likelyhood your message will be shared to begin with.
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December 30, 2008 at 3:33 pm
[...] Shareable messages that project the company’s core [...]