We just held our inaugural business-to-business meeting looking at our content engagement strategies and what it really means to be a thought leader (and whether that’s even the right goal).

Not surprisingly, when talking about current challenges, we had lots of conversation around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

For Marketing to support that, one thing we need to do is engineer our content to make people want to share it.  But how?

It turns out two Wharton professors already looked at what makes people share, with an investigation of what makes people share New York Times articles.  Independent readers described articles using a number of adjectives, and then the professors looked at how likely the articles were to be in the list of top shared articles.

Short answer?  The most shared articles are those that inspire awe.

(In case you’re interested — number two: things that inspire anger, three: practical utility, four: emotionality, tied for five: anxiety and surprise, bringing in the rear: positivity.  Things that inspire sadness are much less likely to be shared.  You can find much more in the – ironically – widely shared New York Times article about the paper here)

What does it mean to be awe-inspiring?  In the New York Times, this generally meant it was a complicated, intellectual article about science, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”  As one of the authors says, “You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

At the highest level, here’s how the authors defined awe-inspiring: “Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.”

From a practical, B2B marketing perspective, what does this mean?  More points for commercial teaching as a strategy.  What ‘awe-inspiring’ means in a consumer context is that they’ve learned something new and fascinating about their world.

What that means in a business context is they need to learn something new and fascinating about their business.  This requires a careful cocktail of surprising rational information about issues customers care about delivered with an emotional punch to grab attention.

If you do this, your customers will tell each other about your insights.

MLC members, check out one of our upcoming sessions to learn more about how to build an insight-driven content engagement strategy.

Related posts:

1. The Power of Fixed Numbers
2. Create a Marketing Trail of Breadcrumbs
3. Moving Beyond Advocate Enablement
4. Improve Message Consistency In Just 3 Steps
5. Content that Builds Credibility