We’ve been fooled. The big growth of facebook, of instagram, the rise of famous influencers and big internet stars fooled us into thinking that yes, it could be easy even for me.

That when you say something, the world will listen, more than ever, more than before.

You can send an email and everyone will read it and act accordingly, you can share a link to your website or an article and it will boom, and we just need to ask each of our coworkers and they will share it too, and it’ll be popular, we will be popular.

I would like to think it’s this way. Even when today I received yet another email asking me to “share” something I didn’t know anything about, something I didn’t care and I didn’t have passion for.
To share a prewritten message, with no rules, to everyone.

But what sharing is, really?
My guess is that the internet faded the whole idea of sharing, now it’s a click of a button, but what do you share in real life?
Well, let’s say you have an hobby, do you always share it with everyone? Not always, and if you ask someone to share your hobby with other people do you expect them to do it?
Obviously not.
Sharing is intimate, the internet made it public, but it’s still intimate. A sharing works when there’s a definite message, a context, a passion, and a target audience ready to listen.
It’s not a click, it’s a whole world.

And what about attention? Do the things we share in real life create a deep sense of attention in our friends? Do everything we share have this result?
No, unless we’re really good at advertising them, and even so if we do it too frequently we might simply lose this edge.

Sharing, asking for attention, is a complex matter. It requires knowledge to trigger that interest, to move people to help you into spreading the word, sharing the message.
What are you sharing? Why are you passionate about it?

We can’t copy/paste it, if we do we lose our touch, our humanity and the message is just a big chain of useless repetitions.
What makes a great share different is context, humanity, targeting to the right people, is selecting a subset, making it special, so that the people that really care can listen to us.

There’s no way we can ignite growth by blind repetition, by asking people to share a link without a reason, without a deep passion or interest into the content. We must be involved, interested, passionate. We must add our touch and message and we must select the people we want to share i to. 

Because not all friends are the friends you’d share your passion with.