Contagious: Why Things Catch On

• Social Currency: Does talking about your product or idea make people look good? Can you find the inner remarkability? Leverage game mechanics? Make people feel like insiders?
• Triggers: Consider the context. What cues make people think about your product or idea? How can you grow the habitat and make it come to mind more often?
• Emotion: Focus on feelings. Does talking about your product or idea generate emotion? How can you kindle the fire?
• Public: Does your product or idea advertise itself? Can people see when others are using it? If not, how can you make the private public? Can you create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people use it?
• Practical Value: Does talking about your product or idea help people help others? How can you highlight incredible value, packaging your knowledge and expertise into useful information others will want to disseminate?
• Stories: What is your Trojan Horse? Is your product or idea embedded in a broader narrative that people want to share? Is the story not only viral, but also valuable?

If you want to craft contagious content, try to build your own Trojan Horse. But make sure you think about valuable virality. Make sure the information you want people to remember and transmit is critical to the narrative. Sure, you can make your narrative funny, surprising, or entertaining. But if people don’t connect the content back to you, it’s not going to help you very much. Even if it goes viral.

Around 70 percent of the story details were lost in the first five to six transmissions.

Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.

The key is to not only make something viral, but also make it valuable to the sponsoring company or organization. Not just virality but valuable virality.

Roller-skating babies are cute, but they have nothing to do with Evian. So people shared the clip, but that didn’t benefit the brand.

There’s a big difference between people talking about content and people talking about the company, organization, or person that created that content.

When trying to generate word of mouth, many people forget one important detail. They focus so much on getting people to talk that they ignore the part that really matters: what people are talking about.

Provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement.

People don’t talk about Jared because they want to help Subway, but Subway still benefits because it is part of the narrative. Listeners learn about Jared, but they also learn about Subway along the way. They learn that

1. while Subway might seem like fast food, it actually offers a number of healthy options.
2. So healthy that someone could lose weight by eating them.
3. A lot of weight. Further,
4. someone could eat mostly Subway sandwiches for three months and still come back for more. So the food must be pretty tasty. Listeners learn all this about Subway, even though people tell the story because of Jared.

By encasing the lesson in a story, these early writers ensured that it would be passed along—and perhaps even be believed more wholeheartedly than if the lesson’s words were spoken simply and plainly. That’s because people don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

Just because people can share with more people doesn’t mean they will. In fact, narrower content may actually be more likely to be shared because it reminds people of a specific friend or family member and makes them feel compelled to pass it along. You might have a lot of friends who like American food or football. But because so many people are interested in that type of thing, no one person strongly comes to mind when you come across related content. In contrast, you may have only one friend who cares about Ethiopian restaurants or water polo, but if you read an article about those topics you think about your friend right away. And because it seems so uniquely perfect for her, you feel you have to share it.

In thinking about why some useful content gets shared more, a couple of points are worth noting. The first is how the information is packaged. Vanguard doesn’t send out a rambling four-page e-mail with twenty-five advice links about fifteen different topics. It sends out a short, one-page note, with a key header article and three or four main links below it. It’s easy to see what the main points are, and if you want to find out more, you can simply click on the links.

While broadly relevant content could be shared more, content that is obviously relevant to a narrow audience may actually be more viral.

Useful information, then, is another form of practical value. Helping people do things they want to do, or encouraging them to do things they should do. Faster, better, and easier.

One last point about promotional offers is that the practical value is more effective the easier it is for people to see. Take the shopper discount cards that you get at your local grocery store or pharmacy. These cards are certainly useful. They save consumers money and sometimes even give them free gifts if they have accumulated enough purchases. But one problem is that the practical value is not very visible. The only information people get about how much they saved is hidden among a half dozen other pieces of information on a lengthy receipt. And given that most people don’t show their receipts to others, it’s unlikely that anyone but the person who used the card will see how much they saved. That makes it less likely that the information will be contagious.

Take Will It Blend? and the hundred-dollar cheesesteak at Barclay Prime. Both stories evoke emotions like surprise or amazement: Who would have thought a blender could tear through an iPhone, or that a cheesesteak would cost anywhere near a hundred dollars? Both stories are also pretty remarkable, so they make the teller look cool for passing them on. And both offer useful information: it’s always helpful to know about products that work well or restaurants that have great food.

But as the Blendtec story shows, even regular everyday products and ideas can generate lots of word-of-mouth if someone figures out the right way to do it. Regardless of how plain or boring a product or idea may seem, there are ways to make it contagious.

By focusing so much on the messenger, we’ve neglected a much more obvious driver of sharing: the message.

Yes, we all know people who are really persuasive, and yes, some people have more friends than others. But in most cases that doesn’t make them any more influential in spreading information or making things go viral.

One common intuition is that generating word of mouth is all about finding the right people. That certain special individuals are just more influential than others.

Word-of-mouth marketing is effective only if people actually talk. Public health officials can tweet daily bulletins about safe sex, but if but no one passes them along, the campaign will fail. Just putting up a Facebook page or tweeting doesn’t mean anyone will notice or spread the word.

The first issue with all the hype around social media is that people tend to ignore the importance of offline word of mouth, even though offline discussions are more prevalent, and potentially even more impactful, than online ones.

Research by the Keller Fay Group finds that only 7 percent of word of mouth happens online.

From start-ups to starlets, people have embraced social media as the wave of the future. But there are two issues with this approach: the focus and the execution.

Word of mouth tends to reach people who are actually interested in the thing being discussed. No wonder customers referred by their friends spend more, shop faster, and are more profitable overall.

Our friends tend to tell it to us straight. If they thought Crest did a good job, they’ll say that. But they’d also tell us if Crest tasted bad or failed to whiten their teeth. Their objectivity, coupled with their candidness, make us much more likely to trust, listen to, and believe our friends.

A word-of-mouth conversation by a new customer leads to an almost $200 increase in restaurant sales. While traditional advertising is still useful, word of mouth from everyday Joes and Janes is at least ten times more effective.

Word of mouth is not just frequent, it’s also important. The things others tell us, e-mail us, and text us have a significant impact on what we think, read, buy, and do. We try websites our neighbors recommend, read books our relatives praise, and vote for candidates our friends endorse. Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.

Advertising also plays a role. Consumers need to know about something before they can buy it. So people tend to think that the more they spend on advertising, the more likely something will become popular. Want to get people to eat more vegetables? Spending more on ads should increase the number of people who hear your message and buy broccoli.

Another reason products catch on is attractive pricing. Not surprisingly, most people prefer paying less rather than more. So if two very similar products are competing, the cheaper one often wins out. Or if a company cuts its prices in half, that tends to help sales.

One reason some products and ideas become popular is that they are just plain better. We tend to prefer websites that are easier to use, drugs that are more effective, and scientific theories that are true rather than false. So when something comes along that offers better functionality or does a better job, people tend to switch to it.