The New York Times recently published an article (appropriately titled, Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome) discussing an interesting study about what makes a column more likely to be shared online.  Run by University of Pennsylvania,

“[Researchers intensively tracked] the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.”

In the end, the study concludes:

“People preferred articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked intellectually challenging topics. Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe.

They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way. It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.

Incredibly interesting, Oh wise Doctors of behavioral economy…and yet, I have to say, not all that surprising.

In fact, for me this reflected what most of us consider the tell-tale signs of an infectious personality. And by this I mean an actual human being. Not a brand/product/television/celebrity or any other marketing permutations of personality. No, I mean an actual skin-and-bones, thinking, breathing, I-just-want-to-get-to-know-you-better person.

Would we all agree that some of the most awe-inspiring people we know exhibit the same qualities as these most shared articles? Can we agree that these people probably “force you to see the world in a different way”? That they “broaden the mind”? That they tend to have an outlook that is “more positive” or optimistic and “less negative”? Are these the people that we actively talk about and want to introduce to other people? Does just knowing them make us feel better about oursevles? Or at least raise our profile in our social circles?

If that’s the case, why is it so novel to us that a really interesting, awe-inspiring piece of content would be something we feel compelled to share: it only seems natural, right?

These parallels only reinforced a reoccurring thought of mine: shouldn’t we be consciously looking deeper into our innate social tendencies to figure out our “new” digital ones?

The same question crossed my mind when the great Rachel Tipograph brought my attention to this recent study about what defines influence on Twitter.  It concludes that the level of one’s influence in Twitter, currently our most used digital knowledge sharing medium, has less to do with the amount of followers they’ve accrued but more to do with the role that they play within their community of followers. Here’s what they say:

[The Boston University study] examined whether people who were most effective at transmitting information through a social network corresponded to high [numbers of followers]. And in many cases, this wasn’t true. Instead, the structure of a network and where people were placed within it were just as important.

Again, right here we begin to see that social and behavioral trends we exhibit in real life, are becoming *astonishlgly* true for digital as well. The article goes on to elaborate on that point:

Imagine this scenario: You’re [a popular] person for your workplace, connected to lots of pals. But if your friend network is confined to just one of your company’s divisions, then you personally may be poor at communicating to the greater network. Now imagine someone who’s not as well-connected as you, but sits in a strategically significant spot within the network instead—though their influence may seem less, it could actually be much greater: They might be friends with the right sort of people.

And there we have it. Common social sense mirroring our digital behaviors. This is not a new thought, nor is it rocket science.  The funny thing is, both articles couch this as “surprising!” information.

Let’s think about that for a minute. Did we really need these studies to prove to us that awe-inspiring information is something we are compelled to share? Or that the value of our relationships, not the mere number of people we’ve met, is how trust, and thus information sharing, happens? Probably not. Offline, we know these things intuitively, so why are we so sluggish to apply them digitally?

Much thought has been given to how brands need to be socially transparent, but that is just one behavior.  To reach new behaviors, brands and companies need not be afraid of thinking according to social intuitiveness.

We, as patient advisors of these brands, also need to be fearless in this regard. We need to push them to embrace that intuitive state. To me, this means we should be more agressive about overcoming the idea that “real world” thoughts, behaviors and relationships are somehow different or even irrelevant to our digital ones.

Let’s start with having the balls to cite real life behavioral studies when pitching new concepts, not just pulling out the handy digital consumer behavioral studies about clicks and friend requests.  Metrics, in particular, is a good way to begin that conversation.  Tim Malbon has done some great thinking in this area, stressing that we should “try and measure ‘outcome” rather than ‘output’”.

Note how he suggests we evolve how we think about digital metrics by swapping mathematical concepts for interpersonal ones. A numerical “output” now becomes the “outcome” of a relationship. These small shifts in our every day vocabulary is where we begin and it is where we need to keep going. In short, we need to begin talking - consciously talking - about the digital experience in the exact same terms we we talk about our “offline experience”.

We need to revisit the basics and impart this wisdom to our clients the way our parents passed down lessons in social behavior to us. The sooner we recall our universally shared lessons about the harmful homogeny of the “clique”, the sooner we can guide brands to rise above the harmful homogeny of the “click”.

And yet, passing down social rules of thumb from generation to generation is again NOT rocket science. It is social wisdom, it is the intuitive force that creates culture. “Digital” or “Online” or “Media” are no excuse for us to completely loose what millions of years have taught us about how to interact, create, live. We are humans, we already have culture; the digital world is not separate from this culture, and so this new digital chapter should be informed by the previous “real life” chapter, treating it as the foundation that it is.

In order to achieve this we need to look backwards and internally before we look forwards and externally.  We need to trust our pre-existing social intuition to inform our digital tools. We need to innovate based upon what we already know about human interactions, community structure, relationships. We need to rely on this intuitive social knowledge to be smarter and more innovative about our “digital” selves. As brands, civilizations, humans.

Another way to bring it into perspective: the last time we cared so much about the sheer “numbers of our clan” we were still fighting each other with spears and sleeping ten to a cave to stay warm.  In the “offline” world of interactions we’ve come a long way since then, so here’s a cry for us to look to our collective human culture and get us out of the digital stone ages.