We've talked about social currency, we've talked about triggers, and to continue talking through the steps. Next we're going to talk about emotion and to do that, I want to tell you a story of a dog named Ruby. I'm an avid cyclist, not a motorcyclist, but a bicyclist. And I love going on long rides in the suburbs of Philadelphia. One winter, a couple of years ago, I was riding my bike through a big park north of the city when I noticed a really cute dog running in circles around the parking lot. Now, I'm a dog lover, I didn't have a dog at the time, but dogs always make me happy. So I looked at the dog sort of wistfully and then I noticed that there were no cars in the parking lot, so I got sort of worried someone's lost their dog, no. So I put the brakes on my bike and I walked over, I had my cellphone on me, I said, well I'll call the number on the dog's collar and someone will come pick up the dog. When I walked over the dog, the dog was super happy, dog's off an arm jumping up, putting her paws on my leg, panting really happily. It's a really nice, happy, cute dog. But then I noticed that it didn't have a collar on. That was my second piece of concern and then I noticed looking closer that it had sores all over its body and its ribs were sucked in. Someone had basically left this dog in the park to fend for itself. Now at the time, I love dogs, but I couldn't have one in my apartment building didn't allow it. So I called up my local animal shelter and I said, hey guys, I've got this dog, can you come find it a good home? And they said, sure we can come pick up the dog, but we're pretty full at the moment. We might have to kill the dog. I said hold on, I'm not going to let you pick up this dog so you can kill it. So with the help of a friend, we tried to nurse the dog back to health. We snuck it in the apartment building, we gave it its shots. We gave it a lot of flea and tick medicine, gave it about five or six baths until it smelled a little bit better. We had to find somebody to adopt the dog. So I sent an email out to all my friends titled very simply in the subject line, free dog, it's got its shots, it's at my house, it's ready to go. Now good news, somebody came and picked up that dog, but it wasn't someone I emailed and it wasn't someone they forwarded the message to. It was another degree of separation. That message was so powerful that someone shared it to someone else who shared it to someone else and eventually someone picked up Ruby and gave her a good home. Why did so many people share that message and would they have been as likely to share that message, for example, if it was a similar one advertising something different, hey, friends and family free couch, it's at my house. It's got its shots, it's ready to go, come pick it up as you can think. You'd probably be very willing to share the dog message. But probably not so much the coach message. And the reason is emotion when we care, the more we care, the more likely we are to share. So here I want to show you a great example of a company getting people emotional about something that's difficult to get emotional about. You might think, well certain things are naturally emotional. Of course, dogs are easy to get people to care about. But what if I'm trying to get people to care about something that's not so emotional begin with. So here's a great example about how Google got people to care about online search. [MUSIC] >> [FOREIGN] [MUSIC] [SOUND] >> Hello? [MUSIC] >> [FOREIGN] [MUSIC] Now that's quite a powerful message. And if you think about it, it's core. It's about something we don't care a lot about or don't think a lot about online search. Google is coming out with a new version of their search technology and they were trying to think about how to get people more engaged. They were thinking about doing a search today or doing different sort of how to videos, but they ended up trying a motion for one of the first times ever and it was so successful to them that they've done it to this day. This piece of content I showed you has over 10 million views and subsequent efforts by the company have been even more successful. And the point is that people can't help but follow this story and get emotionally involved. Google got them to care about online search and because of that they shared. Now one question this brings up though is that are all emotions driving people to share, might certain emotions be more effective than others. When we tend to think about emotions, we tend to divide them into two types positive emotions and negative emotions. And you might say, as we've talked about already people would be happy to share positive emotions, but avoid sharing negative ones. You get promoted at the office when something good happens, you get really excited, you'll tell others. You get something bad, you get fired, your kid doesn't do well in school, you're less likely to tell others. But in fact, there are some examples of people sharing negative emotions. There's a great website called Del Hell where people go to share their negative experiences with Dell Computer. They're not happy, they're angry, they're pissed off yet. People can't help but share those experiences. So are all emotions equally likely to be shared or some emotions shared more than others? Well to find out, we did a big analysis of online content. We looked at six months of newspaper articles for one of the most popular newspapers in the world, the New York Times. And we measure different characteristics of content to see whether all emotions increased sharing. We found that sure a motion in general tends to increase sharing and sure positive motion tends to increase sharing more than negative emotion. Articles that made people feel good, tended to be shared more than articles that made people feel bad. But it was actually more complicated than that. We looked at certain types of emotions, emotions like sadness, anger, and anxiety. All those emotions are negative, feeling sad doesn't feel good and feeling anger anxiety also feels pretty bad. But we found something interesting, while sadness decreased people's likely of sharing the articles, the more sad a piece of content made people the less likely they were to share it. Anger and anxiety actually made people more likely to share. And the reason very simply is arousal or activation. Anger and anxiety actually increased sharing. And one question is why? Why did some negative emotions increase sharing while other negative emotions decrease sharing? Well importantly, emotions differ on one other dimension beyond just whether they're positive or negative. Usually we think about positive emotions like excitement, humor, inspiration, surprise or contentment and negative emotions. Things like anger, anxiety or sadness. But there's another dimension on which emotions differ as well. How activating or physiologically arousing they are. Some emotions like anger, anxiety are activating while other emotions like sadness or deactivating. Think for example what you do when your anger anxious, you're fired up, you're pissed off. You want to do something, you want to throw something, you want to yell at someone, you want to take an action. When we're sad, we sort of want to curl up in a ball and do nothing. You want to watch our favorite movie or be with family and friends, you want to eat a comfort food. And sure enough, that activation causes people to share as well. All higher arousal or activating emotions encourage people to share while all lower arousal or deactivating emotions, discourage sharing. So what does that mean? How can we apply that finding? Well, first, it's not enough just to make people feel good. Too often companies say, well, as long as people are on the right side of positive, they like us more than they dislike us, then we're doing okay. But too many companies make their customers feel content, not activated, not excited, not surprised, not inspired. Content is not going to make us want to share. You walk out of an exercise class, you walk out of going along a long run or going to the gym, you feel good, you feel positive, but you don't want to do very much. You're content, but you're not activated. How can we excite our customers? How can we surprise and delight them and drive them to action? And on the negative side, sure, negative emotions tend not to be good, but certain negative emotions are more powerful than others. When people feel angry or anxious, they're more likely to share than when they feel sad. And I think this is quite important because it helps us explain a lot of the things we see in the world. We see lots of funny videos on YouTube and you might say, okay, people share funny things. We see lots of angry political rants and we might say, well people share things when they're angry. We might think those two things are very different, but they're actually very similar. Whether we're laughing, whether something is funny, or whether we're angry in both cases were fired up and were more likely to share. And second it's not enough just to make content that has functional information in it. We have to find that emotional core as we talked about earlier and think about using those high arousal emotions to get people to share. Lots of emotions will stick, but only certain emotions will get people to spread your message. And using those spread herbal contagious emotions will get them to pass on your ideas.
