Emotional engagement is the key to viral marketing success. People share their everyday experiences by communicating them to others in and outside of their network. This social sharing is more rampant when the individuals develop intense feelings like fear, disgust, sadness, joy, anger and surprise.

Of all these emotions, surprise is a necessary ingredient which encourages people to pass on information they come across. Now let’s look at what surprise is and its impact on viral marketing. As partial reference, I’ll use a study from the Journal of Economic Psychology, one that examines surprise and its relationship to word-of-mouth.

Many have made money and built reputations by solving problems. Doctors cure the suffering of illness, psychiatrists help heal the troubled mind, lawyers protect names from being tarnished, consultants offer marketing advice and a dazzling array of products help to remove any inconvenience you might possibly encounter in your daily life.

Many people are solving problems. They’re all offering solutions to people who need them. Some are giving them away for free. Others are selling them for a price. When problem and solution is a perfect fit, a relationship of trust is built between two parties. If this helps me now, it might help me again. If this solves my problem, it might solve my friend’s problem too.

Viral marketing is the process of using peer-to-peer communications in order to rapidly spread information about a brand or message. The term ‘viral’ stems from the concept of a ‘virus’, a self-perpetuating phenomenon which infects whatever it comes in contact with, spreading itself in an expanding outward arc. Your message is the virus. The carriers are your audience.

People encounter specific data or ideas daily and pass it on to their friends and other people in their network. All things equal, one can say that information is shared more rapidly when the recipient has a strong emotional connection with the specific message. They adore it. They despise it. They are deeply puzzled by it. It makes them upset. It makes them happy.

Ambush marketing is a strategy used by companies to promote their brands at events without paying any sponsorship fees. An example: “Dutch buyers of Heineken beer were given green hats to wear to the recent Euro 2008 football tournament. Anyone who tried to enter a stadium wearing one, however, as many fans did in 2004, was asked to remove it.

The hats were an “ambush marketing” campaign… Heineken’s rival, Carlsberg, was an official sponsor of Euro 2008, paying $21m for the privilege. A few TV close-ups of fans wearing Heineken hats would have cost very little by comparison”

A while ago I wrote about using selective reporting to frame news, grab attention and make your content stand out from the rest of the competition. Now lets looks at creating original content specifically for a social media channel. How do you increase the chances of your article striking a nerve and spreading like wildfire within a specific community?

The answer is simple. I’ve mentioned it before. First of all, you need to start by gathering tactical knowledge on the specific website. Know your audience’s fetishes. Know what they love/hate and know what they talk about. Know what cliques exist within the community. Know what totems,  symbols, personalities and ideas are embraced by the general populace.

The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers,  bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and  persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return.

It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors.

Getting users engaged with your content can result with a sale, subscription, bookmark and return visit. One of best ways to increase reader engagement is to make sure that your site architecture interlinks related content and displays them in a way which encourages the user to click around. If the first article doesn’t result in a subscription, the second might.

A term commonly used to measure visitor engagement is the bounce rate, which is the percentage of initial visitors who leaves your site after arriving at the entry page. These are visitors who ‘bounce away’ after arriving without viewing other pages on your site. You can easily find your site’s bounce rate by using stats tools like Google Analytics.

A billboard located at the street corner is watching you. A camera is embedded in the billboard and a computer analyzes the people who pass by it. It tells the advertiser how many people walked in front of the screen, turned to face the ad and how long they looked at it. It reads your gender with an accuracy of 85%, so men and women will each see different ads.

Plans are already underway to detect different ages and even family groups. This intuitive digital advertisement exists, courtesy of Quividi, a French marketing technology firm.

Blogs are quite often a one-person show. The owners maintain the blog, write the content and promote the site themselves. They switch between different roles whenever necessary and that’s the natural result of a DIY system where one is personally in charge of everything. Sometimes, we tend to see themselves more as writers and less as executive editors.

We are more occupied with the process of developing an article idea, writing the blog post and then doing some minor editing to correct inaccurate usage of grammar, spelling or punctuation. To us, editorial work mainly involves prepping a post for eventual publication.