Does Active Social Sharing work for Engineering Marketers?

I’m really curious about the power of active social sharing for marketing to engineers.

If you don’t know what social sharing is, it happens when people who are reading your content decide to share it with their followers.  Buttons like these on a content page allow people to share with a single click.

The buttons in the example above support “passive” social sharing.  They help by giving people an easy way to share.  You’ll see buttons sort of like these on this blog.

But lately we’ve been reading that you should also have active sharing.  Active sharing means that you ask people to share once they’ve consumed your content. 

For example, say somebody downloads a white paper on your web site. Once you’ve captured this lead, you would then ask the person to share the white paper with their networks.  You could make the ask on the web page, or in a follow up email. 

At ENGINEERING.com we don’t push our audience towards active sharing.  But we are thinking about it.  How about you?