The Core

I think we have to go beyond sharing to daring. The next generation of companies needs to help people really achieve things. Right now we have a great sharing info system, but it’s still very passive. For the advertising community, sharing is very much just a tactic that ends up falling back on all these old ideas of interruption.

The general direction that mobile technology is going is all gearing up towards using your body as a data field and create all kinds of metrics for you. I think that it’s potentially quite dangerous because, as with all software, there would be data leakage and that kind of data could potentially be used in a harmful way or completely incorrect. Say you have a rare condition that could affect your job prospects, you could be retargeted – essentially all of that data could be sold and put you in a compromising position.

The thing that I like about Peretti’s advice is that he’s not just telling us to write tactical articles that are designed to be shared because they hit some kind of emotional trigger—the kind of strategies that make clickbait so effective. Clearly that stuff works, but I would argue Peretti’s strategy points to something content marketers too often forget: that the audience comes first. How big or small that audience doesn’t really matter, because the real test of content is whether anyone is paying attention at all.

BuzzFeed’s strategy is proof of a theory that’s been put forward by papers about Google and Twitter, namely, that news travels faster in smaller groups. And the source of a message is just as crucial to its delivery as the content itself.

For example, Duncan Watts wrote a research paper for Yahoo entitled, “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter,” the major takeaway of which was that, despite the openness of social networks, people actually tended to talk to their own peers (and by extension, their audiences) rather than broadcast to the entire Twittersphere. His research found that celebrities tended to follow other celebrities, bloggers followed other bloggers, and media companies followed other media companies. Furthermore, the amount of content that diffused through the network was created by a remarkably small number of users, and it was usually opinion leaders that triangulated the key stories for their audiences.