Making a post or tweet ‘go viral’ has become the internet equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone. Just as medieval alchemists labored over bubbling jars trying to find the magic formula to transmute base metal into gold, so modern marketers struggle over bubbling keyboards (OK,not quite) to find the right combination of words, images and ideas that makes people want to share content with everyone they know online. But we have things medieval alchemists didn’t have, like soap and teeth, but also like collaborations between analyser BuzzSumo and Content Marketers Fractl, who got together to analyse shares of over a million articles to find out what everyone should be doing to turn the base metal of a status update into viral gold.

1: Match the mood to the network

Different social networks have different ‘moods.’ LinkedIn is prevailingly positive: complaints don’t get much traction, but 70% of its top-shared articles were positive, while for Twitter, only 40% were positive, with 46% being negative and 14% neutral. On Facebook, still by far the biggest social network, the mood appears a bit negative – 47% negative, in fact, 36% positive and 17% neutral. (Once you correct for BuzzFeed and Upworthy’s relentless cheeriness it’s even darker: 30% positive, 57% negative.)

2: Facebook is where the sharing (mostly) happens

Facebook has about 62% of all the users of the top 5 social media platforms, but sees a disproportionate 82% of the shares. Either users are more engaged with Facebook, more likely to share content or possibly both: it’s not just that there are so many of them. Twitter has disproportionate virality too: it’s about the same size as LinkedIn but sees about four times as many shares.

3: Getting shared isn’t easy…

In fact,the vast majority of the most successful publishers manage only about 5, 000 shares per piece on average. Who does significantly better? Only Upworthy and BuzzFeed – but getting shares is basically their whole reason to exist. They do have some techniques we can all follow to get better results though…
4: Mystery and suspense, surprise and a twist in the tail

Posts that contain gems of unexpected information, or that trigger the ‘information gap’ effect (you won’t believe what that is) do best. We get hooked on stories quickly and the best simple narratives are already being told in headlines, making us want to click on them to find out how the story ends. This is in large part how BuzzFeed does it, though other factors like addressing news stories and social concerns is a part of their method too.

5: If you’re not killing it on every social network, that’s OK

…neither is anyone else. Most companies are really only succeeding on one or two social networks and for the majority, even that is a struggle. For marketers, it makes sense to figure out which networks clients stand to gain most from and focus, rather than trying to dominate across all networks.

There’s a million trends in tech for business. Not only could you not follow them, most of them are,by the law of averages, going to lead nowhere. Remember Iridium, or Microsoft Bob? No? Exactly. But some of the trends we’re watching now are actually seismic shifts in the way the tech landscape supports business. Here are five that deserve to have you on board.

1: Lock the Door!

…before the horse bolts. In a world where malware and cyber-attacks are the rule not the exception, you will be attacked, so get prepared. Verizon found in a survey earlier this year that the most popular type of cyberattack is one that could affect small businesses, not just giants. Get the best cybersecurity system you can afford.

2: Take Your Business Mobile

By 2017, mobile ecommerce will be worth almost ten times what it was worth in 2012. It’s going to be a $114 billion market- and yet, 93% of small and medium business’ websites don’t work on mobile. To succeed in a marketplace where the same customer might view your site on three or four different devices, you need a responsive website that looks great on everything.

3: Take Your Payments Mobile Too!

In 2013, 15% of smartphone users worldwide payed for something with their smartphone. And as an online payment system battle between Apple and Google gets underway and PayPal and BitCoin exemplify two radically different models, we don’t know exactly which form of mobile payment is going to triumph. But we do know that mobile payments are set to become ubiquitous.

4: Get Professional About Being Social

If you’re restricting your contact with your customers to those occasions when they actually ring you up or walk into your premises you’re leaving a lot on the table. At the same time, while customers now expect social media interaction, these networks aren’t the panaceas they once seemed. Generating organic reach is getting harder and harder,and while they’ve never cost money by comparison with traditional marketing channels social media networks have always been a time suck. Hire a professional to manage your company’s social media presence and get the most out of it.

5: Small Businesses Need Big Data

All businesses collect huge quantities of data now. When processes are digitised records are generated automatically so there’s little effort involved in generating the information in the first place, but the effort you put into analysing it yields real rewards. You’ll see patterns in customer behavior or responses to your efforts that will show you where to go next. That’s big data in action, and it’s not just for big businesses.

CIOs and IT professionals are under pressure from all quarters.In an increasingly fast-paced environment they’re struggling to implement more compex IT solutions on one hand and fend off a range of security threats with the other. What are their key concerns?

CIOs are seeing their job scopes continue to expand and develop, but they share a small number of key concerns. Overwhelmingly, research indicates, they’re thinking about just a few key things – but they’re thinking about them a lot.

The big concerns for CIOs are virtualisation and security. Protiviti’s 2015 IT Priorities Survey found that, of the 1000-plus CIOs, IT VPs and IT directors who responded, 86% cited virtualisation as this year’s ‘most significant’ concern.

Why? Well, for well over half of the companies polled, they expected to undergo a major IT transformation starting this year, but which they expect to last a year or longer. That transformation is likely to leave IT staff architecting and implementing complex systems in partnership with new companies or alone – all while keeping the lights on at the same time. The three main reasons IT staff gave for undergoing IT transformations were cost and simplification at 64%, new functionality at 55% and service assurance at 48%. These concerns, and the benefits that virtualization can bring, are likely to be magnified for smaller enterprises, with the slashed TCO offered by virtualization making more of a difference to a smaller balance sheet. Whether an SMB opts to repurpose existing servers for virtualization or look for a fully managed solution, or something in between, it’s an issue the majority of IT leaders will have to decide on going forward.

The other major concern for IT leaders is security, with 83% citing malware and virus threats as their main concern and the same number pointing instead to data breach and privacy laws. Proviti’s managing director, Jonathan Wyatt, commented: ‘gone are the days when information security and data privacy issues are viewed as just technical issues,’ arguing that they now called into play questions of ‘critical business policy, governance, compliance and communications that must be addressed across the enterprise.’ That’s probably why many CIOs and IT leaders were working to extend and strengthen their internal relationships, reaching out to C-level and senior executives, boards of directors and business-unit leaders. One result of the changes in IT implementation might be a more integrated approach to data handling, security and infrastructure across the whole enterprise.

Other major concerns for IT leaders included enterprise architecture, at 81%, and patch management, pointing to the ‘cleft stick’ many IT staff find themselves in: running to keep up means they struggle to implement newer, more efficient and secure solutions.

What stands between your data and disaster? You do.

IT disasters cost US businesses $1.2 trillion every year. Worldwide, the total is $6.2 trillion. And more of that comes from so-called ‘silent disasters’ software bugs or malware and hardware failures than you’d think. Everyone thinks about preparing for floods or hurricanes, because they’re high-profile and high-impact. Fact is, they’re also low-probability.

And with leaking, hacking and security risks riding front-of-mind for so many, it’s easy to forget that many of the the disasters that put your whole company IT system up on blocks are just that – accidents. It really doesn’t matter, after all, where they come from. What matters is how you respond to them.

1: Plan For Disaster

Anticipate likely problems before they arise. No, you can’t get ready for everything – but you can build data loss templates that reflect the most likely threats you face. Map out two to four of the most likely scenarios and base your preparations on those. Look at the data losses you’ve suffered in the past, or those that affected other enterprises in your business vertical and geographic location, and build on that knowledge to prepare.

2: Make Sure You Have the Right Tools

Ensure that the processes and technology to deal with the treats you’ve identified are in place. Have backup and recovery, snapshot and replication capacity ready for when it;’s needed. A good disaster recovery plan will need all these in place to cover any eventuality. Augment their efficacy and prevent overuse by building in a monitoring tool that’s sensitive and accurate, with a low number of false positives.

3: Test It!

Just like a fire alarm system is only as good as the last fire drill, so a data recovery plan, too, is only as good as its last test. When was the last time you tested yours? If the last time you tested your data recovery plan, the solution involved switching out a blown valve, you need to step up testing. Otherwise you just think you’re ready – when you need your data recovery plan the most, it might let you down.

With a resiliency plan in place, you’ll be equipped to hit the ground running if disaster does strike, as well as being more likely to catch internal problems like ailing hardware or buggy programs in the bud, before they can trigger a disaster.

IT techs need to be ready when the IoT lands. It’s estimated that well over 20bn devices will be a part of the IoT, ranging from consumer goods like toasters to complex sensor arrays in smart homes and vehicles. The volume of data created by this network will be gigantic, requiring a rethink from organizations in terms of how they view, manage, store, and even think about data.

Getting Ready for IoT

Over the next decade, the growth in the number of IoT networks will be very large and very fast. Every industry vertical will be involved, because no-one will be able to afford to turn down the benefits associated with IoT. Its effects will be felt everywhere from manufacturing to healthcare, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

Re-evaluate Database Architecture and Data Management Strategies

Right now, most companies have a core database that houses transactional data. IoT data won’t replace that, but it won’t behave the same way either. Look for solutions that will support multiple deployment scenarios. Your database technology should be capable of scaling up and down, to be device-agnostic while having the potential to accommodate a huge amount of data.

Remember: Not Every Database Will Cope With IoT

You need to select a database that’s built to cope with the volume, velocity and variety of data that’s going to come to you from IoT sources. Time-series and geospatial-oriented databases will cope far better than general purpose databases.

Deploy Data Management Technology

Consider the potential value of deploying data management technology both within the network and on its borders. As the volume of data generated by IoT networks grows this is likely to become an unavoidable necessity, and those enterprises that implement data management, processing, and analysis will have a significant advantage in that, while they might not have more data than their competitors, they will have more useable data.

There’s More to IoT Than Coping With The Data

At first glance, IoT seems to offer one main challenge: how to cope with all that data. But how well companies emerge from the early days of IoT is going to depend more on how they respond to some other challenges, including the access IoT will grant to new markets and new applications within existing markets. As the number of devices capable of gathering and sharing data grows, so more and more enterprises will find it cost-effective to leverage the increase.