Introduction

This book is about the wonderful, strange world of social media as analyzed through the lenses of evolutionary biology and psychology. It’s also about how brands, advertisers, influencers, and anyone interested in understanding social media can create better content, drive better engagement, and strategize better campaigns. But I want to start this book with a brief story. It’s a story of intrigue, romance, adventure, and betrayal—of mythical creatures, magical powers, and unexplored continents. As you probably guessed, this is the story of my 12-year-old self playing a text-based online role-playing game, long before I’d ever heard the term “social media.”

Before World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, or Everquest, there was a genre of online game called a multiuser dungeon (MUD). A MUD was unlike any modern video game in that it had no graphics. The characters, the monsters, and everything that constituted the world of DragonRealms, my MUD of choice, was text based. As a player, entering a new area conjured intricate descriptions of environments, objects, weapons, armor, and most importantly, other characters. MUDs were the first genre to allow massive numbers of users to come together and discover each other in the world of the game.

In DragonRealms, players were expected to role-play as if they truly were part of that world. Players didn’t log out, for example. They “went to sleep.” Players never spoke in Internet slang or abbreviations. Instead, characters were expected to speak in full, grammatically correct sentences—or, if not grammatically correct, in language that reflected the character being role-played. Players didn’t “lol.” Their characters laughed. And because this happened solely through text, the experience was that of a massive fantasy novel being told through the perspectives of thousands of players and being written right before our eyes. And yes, if you are wondering, I was am a massive dork.

One night, I logged in to my character, who was stealthy and adept at hiding in the game. Hiding was a skill that could be improved over time so that lower-level players could not perceive the hider in the same room. My in-game love interest was sitting in the room in which I had just “woken up,” and she was not alone. Gasp! My Ryonia was kissing another man! I stood up from the computer and paced around my parents’ office. As an awkward preteen, I hadn’t really experienced heartbreak in the outside world, but here it was.

Even in my emotionally raw state, I understood this to be an absurd proposition. I was not this character. I only played the character online. However, I had seriously underestimated the amount of self I had invested into this online world. Simply by interfacing with people’s characters through my character, I’d gone from feeling like an addict about to get his fix (read: happy) to feeling depressed, betrayed, and heartbroken. While, logically, I could reconcile that this was all very silly, my emotions were not so easily persuaded.

While it took me some time to recover, this experience and emotional fallout led me to a healthy questioning of what it meant to play a character online. What was meant to be a fantastical, fictional character was also a part of me. It was a different “me” than the “me” on AOL Instant Messenger, and it was different from the offline “me” too. But this silly character was, indeed, part of me. Not only were my online and offline personas disjointed, my online persona itself had subdivisions and splinters, depending on with whom I was interacting and where.

I tell this story not to brag about how successful I was in my early love life but to illustrate that in the Internet age, even as young people, we’re required to understand very nuanced differences in whom we are expected to be online depending on the context. Social media is not unlike DragonRealms. The characters we play are based on us, but they’re usually not representative of our full, complex, offline selves. Our online selves and our offline selves are intimately entangled, even if it’s not always clear how. Part of this book aims to clarify that very question: what is the relationship between our various online selves?

Social media represents new psychological territory for us. For our brains, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit are real places. We don’t just log on to social media. We navigate through it. Throughout this book, you’ll see me refer to what people are like “in” different social media spaces rather than “on” them because I believe that’s a more accurate way to think about our relationship to social media psychologically.

These social media platforms aren’t just websites we visit or apps we open. They’re places we enter. If we’re interested in engaging people in these spaces, we need to become accustomed to their cultural norms. When we attend a happy hour with our coworkers, we’re probably slightly different versions of ourselves than when we go to a music festival with our friends or we are home for Thanksgiving dinner with our families. Likewise, the person we play on Facebook and the person we represent on Twitter may be very different characters. The way we relate to a piece of content on Reddit is likely very different from how we’d relate to that same content on LinkedIn. But enough about that, let’s talk about me.

I’ve been an Internet dork for about as long as I can remember, and I’ve worked in social media marketing since the industry became an industry. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted a computer like my dad’s, so I saved up my allowance and did extra chores for four years until I could buy my own—a refurbished lemon of a laptop bought off the Best Buy floor. In high school, I regularly got in trouble for Photoshopping teachers and other students into memes. When I started working in public relations, I volunteered to help make some last-minute social creative for a client that generated a few thousand organic shares, and I was quickly moved from the new business team on which I was hired to a group of digital specialists. Since then, I’ve built social creative and strategy teams at major agencies and platforms such as Ketchum Public Relations, Energy BBDO, and Reddit.

For many of my clients, I’ve achieved orders of magnitude better engagement, and many have been able to attribute their improved engagement to tangible business results. My campaigns have performed in the top 5 percent of third-party Facebook studies for at-shelf sales, and I have helped brands become top performers in Pinterest’s advertising alpha. When I joined Reddit in 2016 to build their brand strategy team, I wrote the brand engagement playbook for what many advertisers consider to be the most skeptical community on the Internet. Today, Kantar Millward Brown reports 2.8× better aided awareness, 2× better brand favorability, and 16 percent better purchase intent for campaigns run on Reddit as compared to average.

This book will combine the psychological research and theories that underpin my approach to social media marketing with real brand examples and case studies. For legal reasons and to protect brands’ proprietary information, I’ve removed information about my role in specific examples, but about half of these campaigns are my concepts and executions in action.

Social media feels very new to us, and in many ways, it is. It hasn’t been around for long, especially in the grand scheme of human evolution. But what isn’t new is us. From the content we share to the people we engage to the posts we like, the ways we express ourselves in social media are governed by the same psychological and biological processes that have dictated human social lives for millennia. In broad strokes, that’s what this book is about—understanding how social media fits into the innate, essential drives that have dictated our biological and cultural evolution as humans.

At the core of this book is a simple question: why is social media so compelling to us? To answer that question, we’ll begin in the world of evolutionary biology, in which the word meme was first coined. We’ll explore how ideas themselves act like genetic replicators to spread throughout social media, and we’ll reverse engineer some of the important qualities that share-driving content tends to exhibit. Then, we’ll look to the work of Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, whose Id, Ego, and Superego model has unique application to understanding the different personas we wear online. Finally, we’ll explore a more modern understanding of neuroanatomy to explain broader-level trends in how people form and represent their opinions and themselves in social media.

If you’re a marketer or advertiser reading this book, you may wonder why that question is so important. After all, the eyeballs are on social media—isn’t that all we really need to know? The truth is that in order to effectively reach people in different social media environments, we need to understand what value they derive from participating in those social networks in the first place. Putting on a headdress and donning body glitter may be an effective way to integrate naturally into a music festival, but it’s probably not how we want to approach someone at an office happy hour. Social media etiquette is equally nuanced, but it does not have the obvious physical social cues to tell us when we err. By understanding the contexts in which we hope to reach people, we’ll make more efficient use of our media buys, establish more thoughtful strategies, develop better creative, and in the end, deliver more effective marketing.