Going Viral (Emotion)jacomaraisdotcom.wordpress.com /2014/10/02/going-viral-emotion/

In the book “Contagious” they researched thousands of the moste-mailed articles from the New York Times to find out why anarticle goes viral. One of the reasons they discovered was thatwhen emotion is evoked it can lead to the article going viral, butnot all emotions. Some of these findings might surprise you. Justby simply stirring any emotion won’t guarantee you a viral article.The one thing that seems to be present in all the viral articles wasawe. That is the one emotion that came up time after timethroughout the research. People love to share things that they findawe inspiring. That explained why so many scientific pieces wentviral, because it leaves people in awe. A photo that captured asneeze went crazy on the internet , while a top celebrity’s newhairstyle had very little effect. That is the power of inspiring awe inyour article. Some other emotions that had the same effect wasanxiety and anger. Any emotion that activates physiological arousal should do the trick. When we care, weshare. Google had a great promotion called “Parisian love” , it showed how a guy used Google search tofind a girl he saw in a Paris Café and at the end of the “story” he finds her and love all thanks to Google.Google took something as unemotional as a search engine and attached emotion to it. Remember to focuson feelings when you create an article or video if your aim is to make it go viral. A final story I love whereemotion was used to get the job done was with the “United Breaks Guitars” incident. A band flew to a gigwith United Airlines and as the disembarked they could see on the runway how the baggage handlers werejust throwing their guitar cases and handling them very carelessly. Sure enough when the band took theirguitars out one of them were broken. They tried everything to get the airline to reimburse them, but to noavail. That is when the singer decided to write a song about it and post it on Youtube. The song went viraland it cost United a bunch of money in the process. Go have a look at the video, it’s really good. Useemotion in your quest to go viral and you will reach that goal faster than with most other things. A good ruleof thumb is to concentrate on “awe” , that is the one emotion that works more than most others. Visit us athttp://jacomarais.com/traffic if you are looking for more interesting ways to generate free targeted traffic toyour website.