The socialisation of media has made sharing online news second nature. Some items go viral while others get left alone. A study of stories appearing on the New York Times website has attempted to show what motivates people to share news. Why do some stories spread their wings across our inboxes and others stay rooted to their homepage and quietly disappear?

Pennsylvania State University researchers Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman have suggested that readers most want to share articles that inspire ‘awe’. The study argues that awe encourages virality because “awe inducing stimuli also tend to be entertaining [and are] particularly likely to drive people to talk to others to understand how they feel.”

The study found that positive news was shared more frequently than negative. Our Metrica Numbers research shows that more good news is written about our clients than bad, suggesting that positive news is more attractive to both journalists and readers.

We will soon be publishing the results of our ongoing research into the social media debate about the UK’s political parties in anticipation of the forthcoming general election. This has shown that the reverse is true in politics than in the wider debate about brands. There is more negative comment about political parties than positive. This is likely to be because political parties are not just products or brands, despite how they market themselves, they inspire an emotional response in those who choose to write about them. We will be publishing these results soon and throughout the campaign.

Is a well shared story the same as a good news story? Not necessarily. A widely read but not widely shared story is still influential and more so, a story that isn’t necessarily widely read but is read by the right people, is heavily influential. Understanding what drives virality is useful in helping to understand what catches a readers’ attention, though this research doesn’t mean that communicators need to ‘awe’ their audience every time to be successful.

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A recent PR Week piece entitled, "Recruitment consultants find digital skills in short supply within PR industry," has highlighted again the percieved disconnect between traditional PR and the digital skills needed to operate in the 'new' social world. 

The clients we work with in social media absolutely buck this supposed trend so it seems that it is just taking a while to filter through the whole industry.  The piece is good feedback, however, on the areas that are lacking. 

Metrica will be at the Social Media World Forum talking about these very things.  Be great to see some of you there. 

There have been a number of interesting developments recently as search and social media continue to work closer with each other.

Microsoft's Bing, trying to steal a march on Google, recently launched a beta of BingTweets - a search engine that blends real time twitter results with Bing's web search too.  It's a very useful site.  

A search for example for PR Measurement will pull up Metrica in Bing's web search, but wont necessarily mention us in the Twitter feed.  Search for PR measurement jobs however and Metrica appears both in Bing's web page results, as well as the twitter feed showing the chatter around our search for a great sales exec (full job spec in case you're interested: Metrica sales exec role).  

Bing's approach blends a decent web search with the immediacy of a twitter search. Bringing the information together definitely beats having to do a manual search on both a web search engine and twitter.

The benefits of blending search and social networks are not lost on the major search engines. Traditional search is already starting to feel like yesterday's industry. More than ever people are looking to find relevant and up to date information from conversations that are happening now.  

As a result, all of the major search engines are looking for ways to encourage and engage on-line communities. Yahoo has recently redesigned it's homepage to embrace web 2.0 style personalised content. (Incidentally in another sign that the old world is changing, it has also recently become the last of the major players to announce that it will no longer be supporting the meta tag 'keyword' in its search results).

Google's not resting on its laurels either.  As Jeremiah Owyang explains, rather than trying to create their own social network portal (like Facebook or Myspace), Google is looking to envelope the social web with Google profiles, Gmail, Sidewiki (already covered on Metrica's Measurement Matters) and Wave. Instead of having their own URL, Google will be enabling every online activity to be a social one run through their own platform. That said, early reviews of Wave from it's intial beta users are that it's 'impressive but useless."

Back to Bingtweets, and some people have noticed that in the last 24 hours it has started to behave a little erratically from a stability point of view. This has coincided with Twitter also having issues which has suggested that behind the scenes, Bing and Twitter are about to sign a major search deal. This would make sense to Bing as it looks to make its search more relevant and 'real-time' and would make sense for Twitter too as it continues to look for ways to monetise without irritating its army of users with adverts. Watch this space.

Either way, it's just one more wake up call to the PR industry that it's time to embrace new challenges and techniques as social media continues to change the way public relations is planned, implemented and measured. 

In the UK everyone has an opinion on Marmite.  (A yeast based "nutritious savoury spread that contains B vitamins, enjoyable in a sandwich, on toast bread or even as a cooking ingredient" for those of you who may not have heard of it).  You either love it or hate it. The marketeers at Marmite know this all too well and for a number of years now have run quirky campaigns playing up to this.  

Marmite's homepage even directs visitors to one of two main areas - for those who think it's 'perfect' and for those who think it's 'horrid'.

Now it seems Kraft, the makers of a similar Australian product, Vegemite, are discovering for themselves the polarisation that these types of spreads seem to generate. Earlier in the summer, Kraft held an online competition to name their new 'cheesy' (flavour not style!) spread.   The result was iSnack 2.0

I'm not sure how this name came to be the one selected from 48,000 entries, but it wouldn't need a focus group to realise that this is a name that was likely to cause a disconnect with consumers.  After all, it's a spread, not a web application!  Apparently, Kraft felt that "the winning entry was chosen for its personal call to action..."  Despite more than 3 million jars of the new product being sold in quick time, the public backlash was so vociferous - largely through social media forums - that Kraft has announced it will be changing the name.

This time they have embraced Web 2.0 techniques and, harnessing social media and viral communication, have run an online poll with a small selection of more suitable names for the public to vote on.  The results are going to be announced tomorrow (Wednesday 7th October).  Will the public love it or hate it?  

It strikes me that either way its launch has been a success.  It's created an awful lot of publicity for the new product and what must be Vegemite's ultimate measure of success and ROI - sales - don't seem to be doing too badly as a result.  As Tom O'Donnell from the Australian Institute of Sales Marketing and Management says: "they couldn't have bought the advertising space which the interest in this name has generated''.

As for me?  Well I still prefer Marmite.