She danced in an airport.  She was sporting red pants, a gray shirt, and ear buds pumping a jam.  She danced like no one was watching. Of course it was the baggage claim area at LAX, so there were plenty of people to watch.  Many simply ignored her, while a few were aghast, and cast glances that said as much. However, she wasn’t dancing for a couple hundred passengers awaiting luggage… she was dancing for 4.6 million YouTube watchers.  The message?  This girl has some serious confidence. The video is clearly a promotion for the lady-friendly site HelloGiggles.  It also clearly struck a nerve and went viral.  More importantly, it tells us something about creating good content:  write content like nobody’s reading and create content like nobody’s watching.

Sign of Good Content

In corporate circles, content cycles through an endless maze of revisions and approvals.  Videos are edited and polished.  One syllable words are the center of much agonizing: words are altered or replaced with key words.

This is all in an effort to create the perfect, pithy pitch that will captivate information consumers and compel them to share on social networks.

More often than not, these cycles have the opposite effect.  They strip out the emotion, tone down the personality and leave the content seemingly edgy, but not too edgy.  Seemingly edgy isn’t enough and creative ideas are crushed before they even have the opportunity to compete for traction.

In the comments of a controversial blog post on social PR, Geoff Livingston wrote, “I was afraid to press publish, which is usually the sure sign of a post worth publishing!”  Even Livingston might agree, we can write with emotion, still be diplomatic and appeal to the people that matter to us most.

Everyone desires serious confidence.

Two Sides of Content

Content marketing has come of age.  It’s the new branding, it’s earned 12% of marketing budgets, it’s becoming an arms race,  which means like the “Force” in Star Wars, it has a dark side.

However it doesn’t take a Jedi or mind tricks to produce content that moves.  It just takes a little confidence, some music, a flip cam, and an unlikely venue for videography, for one lady to appeal to strike a chord to a massive following.

If she had taken the offline social cues – the eye-rolls – from those nearby, she might never had made an internet sensation.   Fortunately she did, and the subsequent online social clues tell a dramatically different story.

Long-winded Emotion Moves Content

longer and emotional pieces have a greater tendency to go viral

My contention for emotion and for the unvarnished viewpoint in content marketing isn’t simply my opinion or based solely on my experience.  There’s data to back this claim up.

In a post for SEOmoz titled, Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof, Carson Ward points to academic research that draws an important conclusion:  longer and emotional pieces

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