Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when im angry... or would I?

Typically, making your customers angry is a No-No. I seem to remember something about "The customer is always right" and what not. Something about a happy customer is a happy home right? Wait. That's happy wife, happy life. I haven't quite gotten there yet, so my apologies. Anyway, it turns out a little bit of anger is just what the doctor ordered.

According to a very interesting study by a group at Beihang University in China anger is the most influential emotion in Chinese social media. Now, I don't want to butcher the description of the highly scientific methods they used in study so let's just say that they collected some pretty big data over a six month period. 70 million tweets kind of big. Coming from a 200+ tweet guy(and I consider myself fairly active) that is a lot of tweets. They studied how often the recipient of a message containing a certain emotion would pass that message along. What they found was that messages containing the lousy, good for nuthin, no-fun emotions of sadness and disgust were rarely passed along while the much more enjoyable emotion of joy was passed along at a much higher rate. But what they didn't expect was that anger was the most impressive social media jumper at an average rate of 3 "hops" or "degrees". Even though the Real Housewives are saddening and disgusting at times the drama is real(well the jury is still out) and people are weirdly drawn to it. Insert lame Fergie joke(No no drama, we don't want no drama).


Of course, this research has only been done in China and would need to be done in the western world if it were to be applied to marketing campaigns in the US. Also, figuring out how to get your target market riled up just enough and the right way would be a challenge as well. Obviously if you want to make a splash in social media you have to get everyone talking about you. Unfortunately, for now, anger seems to be the best way to do that.

Article: Most Influential Emotions on Social Networks Revealed  http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519306/most-influential-emotions-on-social-networks-revealed/

Research link: arxiv.org/abs/1309.2402: Anger is More Influential Than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo