Have you seen the piece about the orphan baby kangaroo and wombat who become BFFs? They also have a baby wallaby friend. Because of course they do.

Awwwww.

It’s obvious why these bundles of joey are making the rounds on Facebook. But how can you use the same approaches to make your content marketing messages travel the world, while others just languish on the couch?

Write a blog post that’s positive and emotional, suggest Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Make messages positive, emotional.

Together, Berger and Milkman reviewed some 7,000 articles that appeared in The New York Times to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-mailed list.

After controlling for placement, timing, author popularity and gender, and story length and complexity, they found that two features determined an article’s success:

• How positive its message was. Positive messages are more viral than negative ones.
• How much emotion it incites. The more extreme the emotion, the more likely it is to move people to act. Messages that make people angry, for instance, are more likely to be shared than those that make people sad.

Articles that evoked emotion — “Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies” — got shared much more on social media than those that did not, such as “Teams Prepare for the Courtship of LeBron James.”

And happy emotions (“Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City”) outperformed sad ones (“Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again.”)

Spread the word

What characteristics make online messages go viral?

Characteristics that go viral

Increase your chances of going viral by increasing these characteristics of your blog post:

Anger

This emotion is 34% more likely to go viral. That’s equivalent to spending an additional 2.9 hours as the lead story on NYTimes.com. And that’s nearly four times the average number of hours articles spend in that position.

Sample headline:

What Red Ink? Wall Street Paid Hefty Bonuses

That makes anger the No. 1 technique for getting your target audience to read your blog posts and pass them on. Show how your organization solves the problems that make readers angry with these techniques:

• Don’t be afraid of fear appeals.
• Make ’em sick, make ’em well.

Awe

This emotion is 30% more likely to go viral:

Rare Treatment Is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient

The Promise and Power of RNA

That makes awe the No. 2 emotion we can tap to make messages go viral (after only anger) is awe. Call it The Awwwww Factor.

So how can you make your messages as awe-inspiring as little orphan animal stories?

• Write about animals. Do you have a Ben the Bear story in your organization?
• Write about people. Try human-interest stories.
• Tell stories. Storytelling is the most effective way to add positive emotion to your content.

Practical value

This emotion is 30% more likely to go viral:

Voter Resources

It Comes in Beige or Black, but You Make It Green

Write how-to stories, tipsheets and news readers can use to live their lives better.

Interest

This emotion is 25% more likely to go viral:

Love, Sex and the Changing Landscape of Infidelity

Anxiety

This emotion is 21% more likely to go viral:

For Stocks, Worst Single-Day Drop in Two Decades

Emotionality

This characteristic is 18% more likely to go viral:

Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness

When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next

Surprise

This characteristic is 14% more likely to go viral:

Passion for Food Adjusts to Fit Passion for Running

Pecking, but No Order, on Streets of East Harlem

Positivity

This characteristic is 13% more likely to go viral:

Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City

Tony Award for Philanthropy

HubSpot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella found similar results from his research.

Zarrella used TweetPsych to analyze more than 100,000 accounts. He found that negative remarks — references to sadness and aggression, negative emotions and feelings, and morbid comments — correlate with fewer followers. (What a shock!)

“As it turns out, nobody likes to follow a Debbie Downer,” Zarrella writes. “Accounts with lots of followers don’t tend to make many negative remarks. If you want more followers, cheer up!”

Sadness

This characteristic is 16% less likely to go viral:

Web Rumors Tied to Korean Actress’s Suicide

Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies

Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again

___

Source: Jonah Berger and Katherine l. Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” (PDF) Journal of Marketing Research, April 2012, pp. 192-205

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Want to write better, easier and faster? Get clicked, read, liked and shared? Otherwise boost your writing skills?

As we plan our upcoming Master Classes, I’ve been creating a lot of new slides. Here’s a sneak peek at some of my favorites.

1. Make messages colorful with concrete details. Fun facts and juicy details might seem like the Cheez Doodles and Cronuts of communication: tempting, for sure, but a little childish and not particularly good for you.

But in fact they boost understanding, increase credibility, help people remember your message and move people to act. Add color to every piece you write with these nutritious elements.

2. Put your effort up top. Most writers spend very little time getting ready to write, more time writing and the most time fixing what they’ve written. But comma-jockeying ain’t writing, and the result is some pretty tepid prose. Write Better, Easier and Faster when you turn the writing process on its head.

3. Stop agonizing over the right length for your blog post. Over-the-counter tools like SEMRush analyze successful posts to let you know what Google will rank for your search term. Get word length, keywords to use, readability levels and more. Plus, find out how many words people really read on social media channels.

4. Lead with the benefits … substantiate with the features. Write about what readers can do with your products, services, programs and ideas — not about the products, services, programs and ideas themselves. The result: You’ll draw readers in and move them to act.

5. Are you addressing your email envelope? Recipients use four elements — the sender, subject line, preheader text and preview pane — to decide whether to open or delete your email or report it as spam. So if you’re just crafting your subject line, you’re ignoring 75% of the elements that readers use to determine whether to open.

To increase open rates, address all four elements of the envelope — not just the subject line.

6. Avoid the worst news release quote clichés. We know your VP is overcome with emotion over your latest Whatzit. But instead of quoting executives about how delighted, pleased, excited and thrilled they are, write how users are benefitting from your product, service, program or idea. The result: sound bites journalists will use and readers will read.

7. Reach readers where they are, not where you wish they were. Most Americans have basic or below-basic reading skills. That means that if you write at the 11th-grade reading level, you’ll miss 97% of Americans. Use readability statistics to make your message easier to read — for all of your audience members.

8. People spend half the time on your webpage when they’re using a smartphone. To get the message across on the small screen, write shorter paragraphs, sentences and words. Are you getting your message across on the mobile web?

The post 8 good writing tips for corporate communicators appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..