- Wein didn’t create just another cheesesteak, he created a conversation piece. - Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. - Research by the Keller Fay Group finds that only 7 percent of word of mouth happens online. Most people are extremely surprised when they hear that number. “But that’s way too low,” they protest. “People spend a huge amount of time online!” And that’s true. People do spend a good bit of time online. Close to two hours a day by some estimates. But we forget that people also spend a lot of time offline. More than eight times as much, in fact. And that creates a lot more time for offline conversations. - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">So 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. The second issue is that Facebook and Twitter are technologies, not strategies. Word-of-mouth marketing is effective only if people actually talk.</mark> - The Blendtec story demonstrates one of the key takeaways of contagious content. Virality isn’t born, it’s made. And that is good news indeed. - 6 Principles - 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. - Principle 2: Triggers How do we remind people to talk about our products and ideas? Triggers are stimuli that prompt people to think about related things. - 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. - Principle 4: Public Can people see when others are using our product or engaging in our desired behavior? - 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 read the word. - Principle 6: Stories What broader narrative can we wrap our idea in? People don’t just share information, they tell stories. - As it turns out, if something is supposed to be secret, people might well be more likely to talk about. The reason? Social currency. People share things that make them look good to others. - Why do people talk so much about their own attitudes and experiences? It’s more than just vanity; we’re actually wired to find it pleasurable. Harvard neuroscientists Jason Mitchell and Diana Tamir found that - disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. - 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 - that: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; and (3) make people feel like insiders. - 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. - less than 10 percent of miles are redeemed every year. Experts estimate that as many as 10 trillion frequent flier miles are sitting in accounts, unused. Enough to travel to the moon and back 19.4 million times. That’s a lot of miles. So if they’re not actually using them, why are people so passionate about clocking up miles? Because it’s a fun game. - 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. - 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. - “Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads,” argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate. Unfortunately, he’s wrong. And so is everyone else who subscribes to the interest-is-king theory. And lest you think this contradicts what we talked about in the previous chapter about Social Currency, read on. People talk about Cheerios more than Disney World. The reason? Triggers. - Every day, the average American engages in more than sixteen word-of-mouth episodes, separate conversations where they say something positive or negative about an organization, brand, product, or service. - As we suspected, interesting products received more immediate word of mouth than boring products. This reinforces what we talked about in the Social Currency chapter: interesting things are entertaining and reflect positively on the person talking about them. But interesting products did not sustain high levels of word-of-mouth activity over time. Interesting products didn’t get any more ongoing word of mouth than boring ones. - Most conversations can be described as small talk. We chat with parents at our kids’ soccer games or schmooze with coworkers in the break room. These conversations are less about finding interesting things to say to make us look good than they are about filling conversational space. We don’t want to sit there silently, so we talk about something. Anything. Our goal isn’t necessarily to prove that we are interesting, funny, or intelligent. We just want to say something to keep the conversation going. Anything to prove that we’re not terrible conversationalists. So what do we talk about? Whatever is top of mind is a good place to start. If something is accessible, it’s usually relevant to the situation at hand. Did you read about the new bridge construction? What did you think about the game last night? We talk about these topics because they are going on in the surrounding environment. - Triggers can help products and ideas catch on, but some stimuli are better triggers than others. As we discussed, one key factor is how frequently the stimulus occurs. Hot chocolate would also have fitted really well with Kit Kat, and the sweet beverage might have even complemented the chocolate bar’s flavor better than coffee. But coffee is a more effective trigger because people think about and see it much more frequently. - 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. - science articles, like Denise Grady’s piece about the cough, made the Most E-Mailed list more than politics, fashion, or business news. Why? It turns out that science articles frequently chronicle - novations and discoveries that evoke a particular emotion in readers. That emotion? Awe. - Awe-inspiring articles were 30 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. Articles previously judged to have low Social Currency and Practical Value—Grady’s cough piece or an article suggesting that gorillas may, like humans, grieve when losing loved ones—nevertheless made the Most E-Mailed list because of the awe they inspired. - The answer was definitive: positive articles were more likely to be highly shared than negative ones. Stories about things like newcomers falling in love with New York City were, on average, 13 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list than pieces that detailed things like the death of a popular bookeeper. - If it were true that people share positive content and avoid sharing negative content, then anger and anxiety should, like sadness, reduce sharing. But this wasn’t the case. In fact, it was the opposite. - psychologists have argued that emotions can also be classified based on a second dimension. That of activation, or physiological arousal. - Rather than harping on features or facts, we need to focus on feelings; the underlying emotions that activate people to action. - Among students who had been instructed to jog, 75 percent shared the article—more than twice as many as the students who had been in the “relaxed” group. Thus any sort of arousal, whether from emotional or physical sources, and even arousal due to the situation itself (rather than content), can boost transmission. - Whether it’s a digital product, like Google, or a physical product, like sneakers, you should make something that will move people. People don’t want to feel like they’re being told something—they want to be entertained, they want to be moved. - Jobs realized that seeing others do something makes people more likely to do it themselves. But the key word here is “seeing.” If it’s hard to see what others are doing, it’s hard to imitate it. Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate. Thus a key factor in driving products to catch on is public visibility. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow. - People often imitate those around them. They dress in the same styles as their friends, pick entrées preferred by other diners, and reuse hotel towels more when they think others are doing the same. People are more likely to vote if their spouse votes, more likely to quit smoking if their friends quit, and more likely to get fat if their friends become obese. Whether making trivial choices like what brand of coffee to buy or important decisions like paying their taxes, people tend to conform to what others are doing. Television shows use canned laugh tracks for this reason: people are more likely to laugh when they hear others laughing. - 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. - 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. - The way people actually make decisions often violates standard economic assumptions about how they should make decisions. Judgments and decisions are not always rational or optimal. Instead, they are based on psychological principles of how people perceive and process information. Just as perceptual processes influence whether we see a particular sweater as red or view an object on the horizon as far away, they also influence whether a price seems high or a deal seems good. - Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember. - And that is the magic of stories. Information travels under the guise of what seems like idle chatter. - Dove got people talking by starting a conversation about beauty norms—but the brand was smuggled in as part of the discussion. By creating an emotional story, Dove created a vessel that carried its brand along for the ride. - Marketing experts talk about “the fool in the pool” as one of the worst guerrilla marketing failures of all time. Usually they deride it for having disrupted the competition and ruining the moment for athletes who had trained all their lives. They also point out that it led to Bensimhon being arrested and fined. These are all good reasons to consider Bensimhon’s belly flop, well, a flop. But I’d like to add another one to the list. The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote. Yes, people talked about the stunt, but they didn’t talk about the casino. - 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. - 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. So build a Social Currency–laden, Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable Trojan Horse, but don’t forget to hide your message inside. Make sure your desired information is so embedded into the plot that people won’t tell the story without Recap and questions to consider - 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?