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There’s a popular belief that you can’t plan for your content to go viral. But nothing can be further from the truth. Because the root of virality actually stems from one of the most common of shared human experiences, dating back to those hunter-gatherer days: emotion. Emotion is how we share information with others. It is our first “language”. But unlike verbal language, emotion plays by a different set of rules. Emotional “dialogues” are automatic, implicit, and occur without thinking. And unlike talking or writing, you don’t choose when to start and end these conversations. It is an involuntary chain reaction to certain cues (aka triggers) in the environment.
My goal here is to show that the act of “going viral” is not the random, accidental or mysterious process so commonly held. On the contrary, virality occurs in systemic and predictable ways driven by universal laws of nature. This emotional contagion, “the rapid spread of emotion from one person through a group” is not unlike the ripple effect of fear, which saved the lives of our hunter-gatherer forbears.[1]
Imagine you’re a hunter-gatherer living on the savannahs of Africa hundreds of thousands of years before now. You live and work in a group of tightly knit people that include your kin. You know the individuals in your tribe personally and trust them implicitly, despite never speaking a single word amongst one another. That’s because you’re living in an age where language has not yet evolved. Verbal communication simply isn’t possible.
Now put yourself in the bare feet of that hunter as he heads out into the bush with his tribe, looking to ambush a nervous herd of fleet-footed wildebeest. As you hide in the tall grass, you catch a glimpse of a well-camouflaged saber-toothed cat ready to pounce. Without being able to say a word, how would communicate this critical life-threatening information to your brethren?
You would have no choice but to let your emotions do the talking. The preying tiger would trigger a feeling of intense fear, which nearby hunters would automatically sense upon seeing your eyes widen and your eyebrows raise. They would then start looking for the threat themselves. Those hunters would in turn reflexively share their fear with the next hunter, and so on, until everyone in the network had gotten the memo – the implicit message signaling a nearby predator. The tribe would survive.
You’ve just observed a prehistoric example of “going viral.”
If we don’t begin to understand why things go viral, we will not only miss critical opportunities but face dire consequences because virality is no longer a sporadic head-scratching novelty, it has massive cultural influence and is a potent political tool with broad sweeping implications. Whether you’re the Chief Marketing Officer of a multi-billion-dollar organization, a content creator, or just another confused citizen wondering how Twitter has turned our world upside down, I plan to demonstrate that though “going viral” is a natural phenomenon that spreads organically, it can be controlled by the types of messages you introduce into the (social media) environment.
So how can we focus content creation to arouse the highest levels of emotional sensibility and shareability? We need to begin rethinking how we plan strategies for content creation. In our hyper-connected, emotionally sensitive reality, the traditional rules of marketing no longer apply. That’s because there is a big difference between planning to communicate a message (which remains the goal of marketers) and planning to trigger an emotional response that effortlessly flows into action.
The ability to induce an emotional state is directly related to what psychologists refer to as the “suggestibility” of an audience, or the “emotional characteristic where ideas or attitudes of another person are accepted without criticism.”[2] When our critical mind becomes overwhelmed with strong feelings, our suggestibility increases and we are much less likely to reject an idea and more likely to adopt and share it.
Over the last few years, I have conducted numerous research studies to determine what drove viral messaging, and as my team and I discovered, users of social media are still motivated by the same basic human needs and desires as those hunter-gatherers back on the African savannah. Because just as we experienced out in the open grasslands, and today in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, we pay attention to the things that are important to our survival and to our success as humans.
From this research, I determined that all viral content emerges from six functional components based upon fundamental human needs that are designed by natural selection to solve the adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I call these six basic evolutionary human needs The Six S’s to Success, i.e., Survival, Surprise, Sustenance, Sex, Small Fry and Status.
As I discovered through our research, there are certain messaging areas that are too powerful to ignore – because they can’t be ignored. Our emotions lead us at every turn by directing our focus, creating meaning, and assigning value to the plethora of content on the Internet, and around us, that overloads our critical minds – and every day, that content continues to shape our world… for better or worse.
Today I will introduce the first S, i.e., Survival. Just as it did in the African plains, we make decisions based on one primary motive – to stay alive – which is why death (or the fear of it) drives so much of our attention.
That’s because we are survival machines. Have you ever found yourself gawking at a horrible car crash despite your own rational understanding of the horrors you might witness? We stop dead in our tracks when we encounter messages of death, because our number one purpose in life is to live. This reaction is so automatic it reliably creates traffic on both directions of the highway just as it can reliably drive organic traffic to your website and social channels. The primal fear-based decision to stare death in the face is not driven by choice, at least not consciously, much like we don’t choose the weather that caused the crash in the first place.
So when you see people on social media doing incredibly dumb and deadly things that don’t make sense just to get attention, remember rational thought has little to do with why things go viral. Whether it involves eating toxic Tide pods, jumping out of moving cars listening to Drake’s “In My Feelings”, driving cars blindfolded Bird Box style or even the bogus Momo challenge that supposedly encourages kids to kill themselves, remember that our emotions are driving us and we’re just passengers along for the ride.
If you would like to learn more about how to make your brand or content go viral, check out INTENTLA.
Or check out my book: Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing
Or follow me on Twitter.
