Didier Mormesse gives us a run down of the CNN Global Research Study
Made Social on 30 September 2010 | View Comments
Didier, the continental flavour of the day, was telling us a story about a story. Interesting.
The objective of the project Didier was talking about was to explore the power of recommendation and value of shared news from an advertising perspective. They wanted to demonstrate how influencers drive traffic to news through shared links and how their endoresement of these news stories increase the engagement of advertising embedded within them.
This was an exclusive for Social Collective as it was the first time Didier presented the findings.
They had 5 key questions:
- How does news sharing happening today
- What content is being shared
- What are the key drivers of sharing
- What is the emotional engagement with shared news
- What does it mean for brand advertisers
Didier showed a great presentation that explains how they conducted the global study, which we’ll share here later. The participants were aged 25 to 65 and were online users who engage in sharing stories at least once a month.
How is news shared today?
Typically people share 13 stories a week, but receive approximately double that in their network. They only read around 14 stories, the same number they share. A small number of these sharers share a majority of the content, 27% of them account for 87% of news stories shared (so the 80/20 rule applies here). There are differences in motivations for sharing. In Europe and the US people had altruistic motivations (if it’s of interest, if it makes people laugh etc). In Asia Pacific the motivation was around attention getting (status broadcasting). The platforms they were using were split thus: 43% social media, 12% IM, 15% SMS and 30% email. The typical characteristics of the CNN sharers were: more senior, active contributors who have a more global outlook.
What type of content is shared?
55% of articles had text and still images, 38% articles had video embedded and 7% from photo galleries. They found that every CNN user who shares brings around 5 new unique users to the site. CNN sharing generates more than twice the industry average uplift in unique visitors via shared links. In the business section of CNN, 57% of visitors came from sharing, which drove the strongest traffic for sharing. One story had 82% of its total traffic through sharing alone. One Paris based individual created 5,200 unique visitors for CNN, creating a wide and deep sharing tree.
What are the key drivers of content sharing?
They turned to semiotics to understand and break down the cultural codes that motivate sharing, looking at the underlying message, the narrative style and thematic content. When it comes to the narrative, 65% of the stories were ‘the next chapter, 19% were ‘breaking news’ and 16% were ‘quirky funny’. The top five content archetypes represent 40% of all visitors arriving via shared links.
What is the emotional engagement with shared content?
Watch this space, this is due to be released (I know, I wanted to see this too).
What does it mean for brand advertisers?
They ran a global online survey that looked at ads placed within news content shared by friends across a range of platforms. They found significant global uplifts in brand metrics driven by shared news.
To sum up:
They have an active community of news sharers.
They understand the process of what makes content shareable.
They can substantiate the value of shared news from an advertising perspective.
We hope to share this presentation here soon as it has some highly interesting data and findings that I couldn’t capture here.
@GemmaWent, Founder of Red Cube Marketing and Social Collective Live Blogger
