Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

Nielsen released an incredibly interesting study yesterday detailing exactly what people do all day and it will come as no surprise that social media is eating up more and more of people’s time.
What’s particularly interesting is that people are not just using these pages as a repository for their identities, they are sharing all the other content they find on the Web on their social media profiles. Though the content they share does have a wide net, the vast majority of it is pop culture. As detailed in an analysis by Dan Zarrella for Hubspot, unless you are in a movie, TV show, or band, you are barely getting any love at all:
 
 
Why do people so regularly share content that’s so personal to them? What is it about entertainment that is so compelling that people not only consume the content, but share it on social media sites in such a reliable way?
Entertainment is a universal language that people can use to define themselves in a way that is totally understandable by their peers and the world. It’s both shorthand for entire volumes of meaning, and an opportunity to connect with others around you. And, thanks to social media, it’s also far more granular than we had ever thought of before.
In pitching Entertonement, I love to talk about all the sound bites we have on the site. To make it personal, the first thing I ask people is to name their favorite movie or TV show. Whenever I have done this, however, there is always a five second pause during which people’s faces have a flash of terror. Initially I was confused; everyone has a favorite show, why would it be an issue to talk about it? Eventually, I realized what was happening – people are hesitant to talk about what they love because they know what they love defines them.
My co-founder coined the term “shippers”: people who align themselves with seeing a certain relationship happening.  Some famous examples include Mulder/Scully (X-Files), Ross/Rachel (Friends), Dawson/Pacey & Joey (Dawson’s Creek), Edward/Jacob & Bella (Twilight). These relationships represent completely different fan bases, and despite the fans being completely different in every way, you find the same behavior: people willing to spend millions of words online debating every minutia of these shows like they were talking about their own families. Why? It is not just because the fans feel passion for the story, it’s because who they align themselves with says something about their digital persona in a way that is universally understood.
 
How does this apply to your business? First, the story you tell must be epic. People are more than willing to latch on to your team and be your advocates. But it is not enough to just relate the experiences you had in building your products, releasing your services and managing the day-to-day. Though this will endear yourself to your customers and fans, what really empowers them is the ability to see themselves in what you’re doing. The more that you enable them to express themselves, the more they will want to represent you because, in doing so, they’re representing themselves. Second, you must help them latch onto THE THING. That thing, that special thing, the thing that you know makes your business different than everyone else out there. It does not matter whether it is the way your business packages widgets, or handles customer support, or develops software that makes you special – every business has something, and it is your job to show your customers those unique facets, and help them embrace it. The more specialized it is and the more passion shows through, the stronger your customers will adopt that THING, and make it part of themselves. When that happens, you just recruited an army of individual marketers.
To loop back to the earlier question people share entertainment because it is universal and ubiquitous – people have a simple and easy way to both reinforces a definition of themselves and allows them to represent that definition to the world. People, consciously or not, want to align themselves with “the cause”, and the more specific, and the more it represents them, the better. The world of entertainment is realizing this power, and making it happen through a myriad of ways – but they are not the only ones with this power. Every business out there represents somebody; let all the personalities of your business out to the world, and those people will come to you.
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