Page 43 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

networks as a type of social currency to demonstrate that I too am part of this TV
series cult. It wasn’t a conscious act, but the content I consumed and shared
subtly became part of my identity. For me, Breaking Bad became wearable
content. It was a piece of my identity like my jeans or favorite sweater.

Consuming and sharing content normally creates an emotional benefit, not a
financial one. Can you see why this presents a colossal obstacle, as companies
try to use content to create financial benefits for themselves instead of emotional
benefits for their readers? Doesn’t this completely overturn the traditional
business view of what content should accomplish?

A generation of “me-formers”

Those emotion-focused conversations are already out there by the millions.
About 50 percent of what people talk about on social media is “me” focused.6
It’s more than just vanity. Studies show we’re literally hard-wired to talk about
ourselves. Harvard neuroscientists Jason Mitchell and Diana Tamir7 discovered
that disclosing information about ourselves is intrinsically rewarding. They
found that sharing personal opinions activates the same brain circuits that
respond to rewards like food and money. In another study by these researchers,
they demonstrated that the power to share about ourselves is so important people
are actually willing to pay money to do it.

Before the social media era, research into everyday conversation revealed
that a third of it was devoted to oneself, but today that topic has become an
obsession. Rutgers University researchers classify 80 percent of Twitter users as
“me-formers” who tweet mainly about themselves.8

How can your company join that conversation? How do you ride this wave of
euphoric “me-talk” and get your content, products, and brands into that powerful
dialogue?

One of the best books on this topic (and one of the best recent business
books, period) is Contagious by Dr. Jonah Berger. This important book is based
on a research paper9 Berger wrote with Katherine Milkman of The University of
Pennsylvania.

In Contagious, Berger establishes three key strategies to help create social
currency—the wearable content—that gives people a way to make themselves
look good while promoting you and your ideas along the way.

1. Identify your inner remarkability.
Did you know that vending machines kill four times as many people each year