Author: Jonah Berger

ISBN: 978-1471111709

Why do some products, services or ideas get viral, while the others fall into oblivion?

EXCERPTS

[The author initially explains that all viral products, services or ideas had at least one attribute set forth by this book. BUT, there are many more that had one or more of such attributes but nevertheless failed to go viral. That means that there is still a lot unknown as to why some things go viral and some don't. In my opinion it has to do with catching the right moment is society when latter is susceptioble to the presented product/ service/ idea. As Scott Adams would put it; "It makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck."]

But although quality, price, and advertising contribute to products and ideas being successful, they don’t explain the whole story.

But 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.

Word of mouth is more effective than traditional advertising for two key reasons. First, it’s more persuasive. Advertisements usually tell us how great a product is. But because ads will always argue that their products are the best, they’re not really credible. Our friends, however, 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.

Word of mouth is naturally directed toward an interested audience. We don’t share a news story or recommendation with everyone we know. Rather, we tend to select particular people who we think would find that given piece of information most relevant. We’re not going to tell a friend about a new pair of skis if we know the friend hates skiing. And we’re not going to tell a friend who doesn’t have kids about the best way to change a diaper. 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.

They sent a note explaining why they thought the book would be good for my students, but they also mentioned that they sent a second copy so that I could pass it along to a colleague who might be interested. That’s how word of mouth helps with targeting. Rather than sending books to everyone, the publishers got me, and others, to do the targeting for them. Just like a searchlight, each recipient of the double mailing would look through his or her personal social network, find the person that the book would be most relevant for, and pass it along.

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

Contagious content is like that—so inherently viral that it spreads regardless of who is doing the talking.

Regardless of how plain or boring a product or idea may seem, there are ways to make it contagious.

Principle 1: Social Currency

How does it make people look to talk about a product or idea? Most people would rather look smart than dumb, rich than poor, and cool than geeky. Just like the clothes we wear and the cars we drive, what we talk about influences how others see us. It’s social currency.

So to get people talking we need to craft messages that help them achieve these desired impressions. We need to find our inner remarkability and make people feel like insiders.

Principle 2: Triggers

We need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue.

Principle 3: Emotion

When we care, we share. So how can we craft messages and ideas that make people feel something? Naturally contagious content usually evokes some sort of emotion. Blending an iPhone is surprising. A potential tax hike is infuriating. Emotional things often get shared. So rather than harping on function, we need to focus on feelings. But as we’ll discuss, some emotions increase sharing, while others actually decrease it. So we need to pick the right emotions to evoke. We need to kindle the fire. Sometimes even negative emotions may be useful.

Principle 4: Public

Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. So we need to make our products and ideas more public.

Principle 5: Practical Value

How can we craft content that seems useful? People like to help others, so if we can show them how our products or ideas will save time, improve health, or save money, they’ll spread the word. But given how inundated people are with information, we need to make our message stand out. We need to understand what makes something seem like a particularly good deal. We need to highlight the incredible value of what we offer—monetarily and otherwise. And we need to package our knowledge and expertise so that people can easily pass it on.

Principle 6: Stories

What broader narrative can we wrap our idea in? People don’t just share information, they tell stories.

So we need to build our own Trojan horses, embedding our products and ideas in stories that people want to tell. But we need to do more than just tell a great story. We need to make virality valuable. We need to make our message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell the story without it.

Not all six ingredients are required to make a product or idea contagious. Sure, the more the better, but it’s not as though a product that is Public will fail because it’s not wrapped in a Story.

Word of mouth, then, is a prime tool for making a good impression.

So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social currency. Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way. There are three ways to do that:

  1. find inner remarkability;
  2. leverage game mechanics; and
  3. make people feel like insiders.

Did you know that frowning burns more calories than smiling? That an ant can lift fifty times its own weight? You probably didn’t. But people share these and similar Snapple facts because they are remarkable. And talking about remarkable things provides social currency.

Remarkable things are defined as unusual, extraordinary, or worthy of notice or attention. Something can be remarkable because it is novel, surprising, extreme, or just plain interesting. But the most important aspect of remarkable things is that they are worthy of remark. Worthy of mention.

One way to generate surprise is by breaking a pattern people have come to expect. [Schwarzenegger: Break the rules not the law.]

People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others.

After all, what good is status if no one else knows you have it? But every time he proudly shares his status, he’s also spreading the word about Delta. And this is how game mechanics boosts word of mouth. People are talking because they want to show off their achievements, but along the way they talk about the brands (Delta or Twitter) or domains (golf or the SAT) where they achieved.

But if a product or idea doesn’t automatically do that, it needs to be “gamified.” Metrics need to be created or recorded that let people see where they stand—for example, icons for how much they have contributed to a community message board or different colored tickets for season ticket holders.

Giving awards works on a similar principle. Recipients of awards love boasting about them—it gives them the opportunity to tell others how great they are. But along the way they have to mention who gave them the award.

Both used scarcity and exclusivity to make customers feel like insiders.

Scarcity is about how much of something is offered. Scarce things are less available because of high demand, limited production, or restrictions on the time or place you can acquire them.

Exclusivity is also about availability, but in a different way. Exclusive things are accessible only to people who meet particular criteria.

Access is by invitation only, so you have to know an existing user.

Scarcity and exclusivity help products catch on by making them seem more desirable. If something is difficult to obtain, people assume that it must be worth the effort. If something is unavailable or sold out, people often infer that lots of other people must like it, and so it must be pretty good (something we’ll talk more about in the Public chapter).

This limited availability makes us feel like we have to act now. If we don’t we might miss the opportunity even if we might not have otherwise wanted the opportunity in the first place.

Scarcity and exclusivity boost word of mouth by making people feel like insiders. If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique, high status. And because of that they’ll not only like a product or service more, but tell others about it. Why? Because telling others makes them look good. Having insider knowledge is social currency.

Managers often default to monetary incentives when trying to motivate employees. Some gift or other perk to get people to take action. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. Lots of people will refer a friend if you pay them a hundred dollars to do so. Offer people the chance to win a gold Lamborghini and they’ll do almost anything. But as with many monetary incentives, handing out gold Lamborghinis is costly. Furthermore, as soon as you pay people for doing something, you crowd out their intrinsic motivation. People are happy to talk about companies and products they like, and millions of people do it for free every day, without prompting. But as soon as you offer to pay people to refer other customers, any interest they had in doing it for free will disappear. Customers’ decisions to share or not will no longer be based on how much they like a product or service. Instead, the quality and quantity of buzz will be proportional to the money they receive.

Using scarcity and exclusivity early on and then relaxing the restrictions later is a particularly good way to build demand.

Yes, marketing. To Dave, marketing isn’t about trying to convince people to purchase things they don’t want or need. Marketing is about tapping into their genuine enthusiasm for products and services that they find useful. Or fun. Or beautiful. Marketing is about spreading the love.

Competitors can even be used as a trigger. How can public health organizations compete against the marketing strength of better-funded rivals like cigarette companies? One way to combat this inequality is to transform a weakness into a strength: by making a rival’s message act as a trigger for your own. A famous antismoking campaign, for example, spoofed Marlboro’s iconic ads by captioning a picture of one Marlboro cowboy talking to another with the words: “Bob, I’ve got emphysema.” So now whenever people see a Marlboro ad, it triggers them to think about the antismoking message. Researchers call this strategy the poison parasite because it slyly injects “poison” (your message) into a rival’s message by making it a trigger for your own.

More interesting articles were 25 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. More useful articles were 30 percent more likely to make the list.

Health and education articles were highly shared.

You are amazed. You are humbled. You feel elevated. This is awe.

Awe is the sense of wonder and amazement that occurs when someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, sublimity, or might. It’s the experience of confronting something greater than yourself. Awe expands one’s frame of reference and drives self-transcendence. It encompasses admiration and inspiration and can be evoked by everything from great works of art or music to religious transformations, from breathtaking natural landscapes to human feats of daring and discovery.

Awe-inspiring articles were 30 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list.

Articles that evoked anger or anxiety were more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list.

Some emotions, like anger and anxiety, are high-arousal. When we’re angry we yell at customer service representatives. When we’re anxious we check and recheck things. Positive emotions also generate arousal. Take excitement. When we feel excited we want to do something rather than sit still. The same is true for awe. When inspired by awe we can’t help wanting to tell people what happened. Other emotions, however, have the opposite effect: they stifle action.

Anger and anxiety lead people to share because, like awe, they are high-arousal emotions. They kindle the fire, activate people, and drive them to take action.

When trying to use emotions to drive sharing, remember to pick ones that kindle the fire: select high-arousal emotions that drive people to action. On the positive side, excite people or inspire them by showing them how they can make a difference. On the negative side, make people mad, not sad. Make sure the polar bear story gets them fired up.

If most students were uncomfortable with the drinking culture, then why was it happening in the first place? Why were students drinking so much if they don’t actually like it? Because behavior is public and thoughts are private.

At the end of the talk, the speaker probably asked the audience if anyone had any questions. The response? Silence. But not because everyone else understood the presentation. The others were probably just as bewildered as you were. But while they would have liked to raise their hands, they didn’t because each one is worried that he or she is the only person who didn’t understand. Why? Because no one else was asking questions. No one saw any public signal that others were confused so everyone keeps his doubts to him- or herself. Because behavior is public and thoughts are private.

The Movember Foundation succeeded because they figured out how to make the private public. They figured out how to take support for an abstract cause—something not typically observable—and make it something that everyone can see. For the thirty days of November people who sport a moustache effectively become walking, talking billboards for the cause.

If people can’t see what others are choosing and doing, they can’t imitate them.

Solving this problem requires making the private public. Generating public signals for private choices, actions, and opinions. Taking what was once an unobservable thought or behavior and transforming it into a more observable one.

But the creators of Hotmail did more than just create a great product. They also cleverly leveraged observability to help their product catch on. Every e-mail sent from a Hotmail account was like a short plug for the growing brand. At the bottom was a message and link that simply said “Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com.” Every time current Hotmail customers sent an e-mail, they also sent prospective customers a bit of social proof—an implicit endorsement for this previously unknown service.

But because most devices came with black headphones, Apple’s white headphone cords stood out. By advertising themselves, the headphones made it easy to see how many other people were switching away from the traditional Walkman and adopting the iPod. This was visible social proof that suggested the iPod was a good product and made potential adopters feel more comfortable about purchasing it as well. Shapes, sounds, and a host of other distinctive characteristics can also help products advertise themselves. Pringles come in a unique tube. Computers using the Microsoft operating system make a distinctive sound when they boot up.

Take voting. It’s hard to get people to turn out to vote. They have to figure out where their polling stations are located, take the morning off from work, and stand in line, sometimes for hours, until they get the chance to cast their ballots. But these hurdles are compounded by the fact that voting is a private act. Unless you actually happen to see all the people who go to the polls, you have no idea how many other people decided voting was worth the effort. So there is not much social proof. But in the 1980s election officials came up with a nice way to make voting more observable: the “I Voted” sticker. Simple enough, but by creating behavioral residue, the sticker made the private act of voting much more public, even after people left the polling station. It provided a ready reminder that today is the day to vote, others are doing it, and you should too.

Behavioral residue exists for all types of products and ideas. Tiffany, Victoria’s Secret, and a host of other retailers give customers disposable shopping bags to carry their purchases home. But because of the Social Currency associated with some of these retailers, many consumers reuse the bags rather than tossing them. They use the Victoria’s Secret bags to carry their gym clothes, toss their lunch into a Tiffany bag, or use Bloomingdale’s famous medium brown bag to carry papers around town. People even reuse bags from restaurants, discount stores, and other places that are not status symbols.

Clothing retailer Lululemon takes this idea one step further. Rather than make paper bags that are relatively durable, it makes shopping bags that are hard to throw away.

But some of these giveaways provide better behavioral residue than others. Giving away a makeup carrying case is fine, but women usually apply makeup in the privacy of their bathrooms, so it doesn’t make the brand that observable. Coffee mugs and gym bags might be used less frequently, but their use is more publicly visible.

People posting their opinions and behavior online also provide behavioral residue. Reviews, blogs, posts, or other sorts of content all leave evidence that others can find later. For this reason, many businesses and organizations encourage people to Like them—or their content—on Facebook. By simply clicking the Like button, people not only show their affinity with a product, idea, or organization, they also help spread the word that something is good or worth paying attention to. ABC News found that installing these buttons boosted its Facebook traffic by 250 percent.

As with many powerful tools, making things more public can have unintended consequences when not applied carefully. If you want to get people not to do something, don’t tell them that lots of their peers are doing it.

It’s been said that when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another. We look to others for information about what is right or good to do in a given situation, and this social proof shapes everything from the products we buy to the candidates we vote for.

The main reason people go hiking is to get away from it all. To escape from the hustle and bustle of the city and to immerse themselves in nature. No billboards, no traffic, no advertising, just you and nature.

People don’t just value practical information, they share it. Offering practical value helps make things contagious.

People share practically valuable information to help others. Whether by saving a friend time or ensuring a colleague saves a couple of bucks next time he goes to the supermarket, useful information helps.

If Social Currency is about information senders and how sharing makes them look, Practical Value is mostly about the information receiver. It’s about saving people time or money, or helping them have good experiences. Sure, sharing useful things benefits the sharer as well. Helping others feels good. It even reflects positively on the sharer, providing a bit of Social Currency. But at its core, sharing practical value is about helping others. The Emotions chapter noted that when we care, we share. But the opposite is also true. Sharing is caring.

So what makes something seem practically valuable enough to pass along?

When most people think about practical value, saving money is one of the first things that comes to mind—getting something for less than its original price or getting more of something than you usually would for the same price.

One of the main tenets of prospect theory is that people don’t evaluate things in absolute terms. They evaluate them relative to a comparison standard, or “reference point.”

As prospect theory illustrates, one key factor in highlighting incredible value is what people expect. Promotional offers that seem surprising or surpass expectations are more likely to be shared. This can be because the actual deal itself exceeds expectations (for example, the percentage off is so unbelievable) or because the way the deal is framed makes it seem that way. Another factor that affects whether deals seem valuable is their availability. Somewhat counterintuitively, making promotions more restrictive can actually make them more effective.

Take timing or frequency. Putting something on sale can make it seem like a good deal. But if a product is always on sale people start to adjust their expectations.

Offers that are available for only a limited time seem more appealing because of the restriction. Just like making a product scarce, the fact that a deal won’t be around forever makes people feel that it must be a really good one.

Quantity limits work the same way. Retailers sometimes create limits around the number of a given discounted item a given customer can buy. “One per household” or “Limit three per customer.” You might think that by making it harder for people to get as many as they want these restrictions would hurt demand. But they actually have the opposite effect by making the promotion seem like an even better deal. “Wow, if I can only get one of these, it must mean that the deal is so good that the store is worried about running out of them. Better get one fast!” Indeed, research finds that quantity purchase limits increase sales by more than 50 percent.

Even restricting who has access can make a promotional offer seem better.

Hotels reward loyal members with “exclusive” hotel rates and restaurants have “soft openings” for a certain clientele. These offers seem special. This boosts sharing not only by increasing Social Currency, but also by making the deal itself seem better. Like restrictions on quantity or timing, the mere fact that not everyone can get access to this promotion makes it seem more valuable. This increases Practical Value, which in turn, boosts sharing.

Another framing factor that impacts practical value is how promotional offers are expressed. Some offers are expressed in dollars off, or absolute discounts ($5 or $50 off). Other offers are expressed in percentage off, or relative discounts (5 percent or 50 percent off).

Researchers find that whether a discount seems larger as money or percentage off depends on the original price. For low-priced products, like books or groceries, price reductions seem more significant when they are framed in percentage terms. Twenty percent off that $25 shirt seems like a better deal than $5 off. For high-priced products, however, the opposite is true. For things like laptops or other big-ticket items, framing price reductions in dollar terms (rather than percentage terms) makes them seem like a better offer. The laptop seems like a better deal when it is $200 off rather than 10 percent off.

A simple way to figure out which discount frame seems larger is by using something called the Rule of 100. If the product’s price is less than $100, the Rule of 100 says that percentage discounts will seem larger. If the product’s price is more than $100, the opposite is true. Numerical discounts will seem larger.

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.

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. Many of the most viral articles on The New York Times and other websites have a similar structure. Five ways to lose weight. Ten dating tips for the New Year. The next time you’re waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, take a look at the magazines and you’ll see the same idea being applied. Short lists focused around a key topic.

You might think that content that has a broader audience is more likely to be shared. A piece about football should be shared more than one about water polo; a review about a new American restaurant should be passed on more than a review of a new Ethiopian place. After all, people have way more friends with whom they could share the article, so shouldn’t it end up reaching more people overall? The problem with this assumption, though, is that 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.

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

Of the six principles of contagiousness that we discuss in the book, Practical Value may be the easiest to apply. Some products and ideas already have lots of Social Currency, but to build it into a video for a blender takes some energy and creativity. Figuring out how to create Triggers also requires some effort, as does evoking emotion. But finding Practical Value isn’t hard. Almost every product or idea imaginable has something useful about it. Whether it saves people money, makes them happier, improves health, or saves them time, all of these things are news you can use. So thinking about why people gravitate to our product or idea in the first place will give us a good sense of the underlying practical value.

The harder part is cutting through the clutter. There are lots of good restaurants and helpful websites, so we need to make our product or idea stand out. We need to highlight incredible value and use the Rule of 100. Like Vanguard, we need to package our knowledge and expertise so that people learn about us while they pass it along. We need to make it clear why our product or idea is so useful that people just have to spread the word.

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.

Remarkable customer service. Customer service the way it is supposed to be. My cousin was so impressed he just had to tell me what happened.

The Jared story is so entertaining that people bring it up even when they’re not talking about weight loss. The amount of weight he lost is impressive, but even more astonishing is the fact that he lost it eating Subway sandwiches. A guy loses 245 pounds eating fast food? The summary alone is enough to draw people in. The story gets shared for many of the reasons we talked about in prior chapters. It’s remarkable (Social Currency), evokes surprise and amazement (Emotion), and provides useful information about healthy fast food (Practical Value).

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. That’s the problem with creating content that is unrelated to the product or idea it is meant to promote. There’s a big difference between people talking about content and people talking about the company, organization, or person that created that content.

In trying to craft contagious content, valuable virality is critical. That means making the idea or desired benefit a key part of the narrative. It’s like the plot of a good detective story. Some details are critical to the narrative and some are extraneous.

The importance of these different types of details becomes even clearer when people retell the story.

But which details people remember and retell? It isn’t random. Critical details stick around, while irrelevant ones drop out.

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. [Example in book: video of a naked man running during a match into the field with GoldenPalace.com emblazoned across his chest. Such video will be viral but people won't share what was written on his chest. It is not critical to the narrative!]

The same six principles, or STEPPS, drive things to catch on.

  • Social Currency; We share things that make us look good,
  • Triggers; Top of mind, tip of tongue,
  • Emotion; When we care, we share,
  • Public; Built to show, built to grow,
  • Practical; Value News you can use,
  • Stories; Information travels under the guise of idle chatter.

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?

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