Our Burning Question:

How Do Humans Connect Over Content?

A statistical and ethnographic analysis of people and relationships as revealed by the weird and wonderful things that get shared online. 

Over the past year, a team of 17 strategists, creatives, analysts and brand managers from the Strategy Collective at TRG have contributed to a – admittedly somewhat unorthodox – project to better understand people.

The concept was simple: help explain why some social videos seem to connect more with people than others.  

The team rose to the challenge and over the course of the year found all manner of weird, wonderful, beautiful moments that seem to resonate with people when they are shared on social platforms. Our approach would allow us to take advantage of both algorithmic factors as well as simple human judgment to lightly curate moments that connected – with the team personally, or seemed to catch a nerve with a group in their feeds.  By having a wide group of contributors we hoped to mitigate some of the echo-chambers and personal taste that would make people’s feeds look too similar. 

As a result, we created and published 68 distinct “episodes” with compilations these clips – presented without judgment or commentary. The net effect is a wonderfully eclectic mix of observations, anecdotes, moments captured, emotions shared, and straight-up-oddities that reflect the wide range of human experiences that people identify with and are fascinated by.  In the end we had 1,198 distinct clips and more than 8 hours of footage to diagnose what was at the heart of the videos that spoke to people. 

An acknowledgment:

We probably should divulge that while we’re sharing the global, academic, and hopefully widely useful perspective view now, the day-to-day value that this project creates for us is far less academic. Content from HAWW makes it’s way into briefings for our creative teams, poignant insights to share with clients, and opportunities to reframe expectations for what “good content” looks with our production partners. Grounding people in simple human truths doesn’t need a deeper analytical framework – connection can be simpler than that.   

But with the benefit of the longer-view, we uncovered several global insights into how people connect – what makes the difference in why some videos resonate more than others.