Sharing: The Art and Science of Social Sharing

Do you create content for your business?

Want to encourage people to share it?

To explore the art and science of social sharing, I interview Bryan Kramer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Bryan Kramer, a social strategist and founder of PureMatter, a social media agency. His first book is Human to Human and his newest book is Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy.

Bryan will explore social sharing and what marketers need to know.

You'll discover the different types of people who share, as well as mistakes people make when sharing.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Sharing
Why Bryan wrote Shareology

Bryan explains that he started working on Shareology before he wrote Human to Human. "H2H was a surprise baby," Bryan says.

He set Shareology aside and continued with the other, because the Human to Human philosophy seemed to resonate more. Plus, he says, Human to Human provides the best platform used for sharing and not the other way around.

Shareology, which is two years in the making, is the study of how, what, where, when and why people and brands share. As a self-proclaimed anthropologist, Bryan has a lot of interest in the subject.

Bryan says he always asks his audience what class they took on sharing. In kindergarten, kids learn how to share their toys, but that's about it. It's a skill people learn on top of school, and is part of some classes, like communications, but is not a focus.

Social sharing comes in many different flavors, he explains. Meerkat and Periscope are new flavors, but there are so many more. Shareology focuses on the evolution of sharing: the past, present and future.

Listen to the show to learn how people shared articles before social media.

Why people share

For the book Bryan did more than 250 interviews with executives, marketers and social media people, as well as professors of linguistics, psychology, sociology and so on, with the question "why people share" in mind.

The answer came down to one thing: connection. People all have the desire to reach out and connect with other people, whether it's through sharing content and having someone reply back or by sharing other people's content and helping them out.

These are the six types of people who share:

Altruist: Someone who shares something specific about one topic all the time.
Careerist: Someone who wants to become a thought leader in their own industry, so they can see their career grow.
Hipster: Someone who likes to try things for the first time and share it faster than everyone else.
Boomerang: Someone who asks a question so they can receive a comment only to reply. (This can be a troll, but not necessarily. It can be a positive or a negative situation.)
Connector: Someone who likes to connect one or more persons to each other.
Selective: This is the observer, which some people call a lurker. The majority of the internet observes and then selectively picks pieces to direct or private message other people.

Bryan says, while people ebb and flow between different types, we all tend to lean toward one. For example, tech evangelist Robert Scoble is primarily a Hipster, but it doesn't mean he isn't a Careerist or a Selective too.

Bryan also touches on the future of sharing.

Bryan interviewed the chief scientist of Watson Analytics and learned the computer system Watson (the computer that defeated the other players in Jeopardy!) will be able to tweet in such a way that you'll never know if it's a person or a computer...