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Contagious: Why Things Catch On

How Does a Thing Become Contagious? Word-of-Mouth.

Jonah Berger is well-qualified to discuss why and how “things”—whether they’re products, ideas, news stories—catch on. He does it excellently in his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Why do some things go viral and some wither into obscurity? For Berger, it all boils down to word-of-mouth.

Berger claims that word-of-mouth is much, much more powerful than traditional marketing because of credibility.

For example, if one sees a commercial for a Dyson vacuum cleaner, it’s not very credible. Why? Because Dyson made the commercial. But if their best friend rants and raves about their Dyson vacuum cleaner, then it is credible, because their friend has nothing at stake. If Dyson goes bankrupt, it doesn’t affect them. If Dyson becomes the #1 vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t affect them.

Word-of-mouth, he says, is the primary factory for 20-50% of all purchasing decisions because we’re heavily influenced by our peers. We’re social animals, after all. We’re constantly sharing news, videos, information, ideas. We share more than 16,000 words per day with people around us.

Word-of-mouth is also more targeted. Try as they might, companies aren’t very good at targeting, which I agree with. It’s tough. Berger uses a great example to illustrate this point. Even if a skiing company advertises their new skis in a premier skiing magazine, what are the chances that those who see the ad are in need of new skis, and aren’t already loyal to a different brand? So much advertising money is wasted on people who’ve already made up their mind. Conversely, nobody would try to persuade a friend to buy a pair of skis if they already own a pair. This reminds me of recent news about Senator Cruz’s presidential campaign, that described how his grassroots operation is focusing heavily on getting voters to talk to each other, since peers are more credible than the Cruz campaign.

But pure word-of-mouth isn’t enough, of course. The product must meet or all of some of these requirements: it must be high-quality, functional (or even more functional than its competitors), competitively-priced. At the end of the day, people just like things that are better and more effective.

Many think social media—but social media is only responsible for 7% of Word of Mouth. Really. That surprised me.

So, what makes things go viral and cause word-of-mouth? It’s not social media, which Berger estimates is only responsible for seven percent of word-of-mouth. I present to you…

The Six Principles of Contagiousness

1.       Social currency. How does it make people look to talk about said thing? Smart, dumb, rich, sharp? For example, Snapple saw a major change in their marketing when they changed the jokes under their bottle caps into remarkable facts. People couldn’t help but share the facts with people around them. They were conversation-starters, and made the Snapple drinker seem smart and interesting.

2.       Triggers. How often is the product or idea triggered? Funnily, an example Berger uses is Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” a song so bad it was good. It spread like wildfire. But it was able to sustain contagiousness because it had an inherent trigger—every Friday, YouTube searches for it spiked.

3.       Emotion. Contagious content must evoke an emotion, and the most potent emotion, Berger found, is awe. He found that articles that inspired awe were 30 percent more likely to make The New York Times’ most e-mailed article list. Content that inspires excitement, amusement (humor), anger, and anxiety also worked well.

4.       Public. How public is the item? Accessible? As Berger says, “A key factor in driving products to catch on is public visibility. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.” An example of this is the iconic apple logo plastered on every product, without a name.

5.       Practical. How practical is the item or idea? Is it something that must be used often? People love to share practical information, whether it’s to help friends save time or money, be more effective workers, or loving parents/spouses/siblings/etc. Two examples that came to mind to me while reading this chapter were the wildly popular websites Lifehacker and Thought Catalog. Lifehacker provides practical solutions to little problems. Thought Catalog provides life advice in short blog posts.

6.       Stories. What is the story behind the product? People love stories. “Stories are the original form of entertainment,” says Berger. And “narratives are inherently more engrossing than basic facts.” I couldn’t agree more. When I think of the most popular, charismatic people I know, they’re often great at telling stories. When they’re doing it, people listen with rapt attention. That’s why great business tell stories: Apple started in a garage; Land’s End has remarkable customer service; Dove cares about “real beauty.”

What Berger Can’t Explain

While I think so many of Berger’s observations are backed up by data, and anecdotal evidence, I think one glaring point to be made here is the unpredictability of contagiousness. I disagree with Berger that contagiousness can be so predictable.  A book that sums up this idea very well is The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. How come there are some things that have gone viral that don’t fit his criteria? What about all the products and news stories that do fit the criteria but go nowhere? To his credit, Berger doesn’t claim to have all the answers and admits some uncertainty. Trying to break down contagiousness is difficult. I agree.

When I think about this book in relation to Your Brand, I couldn’t help but laugh a little. That book is primarily focused on making businesses more social media-friendly, yet Berger says social media makes up only 7 percent of word-of-mouth transmission, which is quite meager. But what these two books have in common is that they recognize businesses must engage with the world--they cannot just sell to the world.

Llamaste, Inc.

Speaking of businesses, Contagious contains a lot of practical advice for my client, Llamaste, Inc. Here’s an outline of how the Six Principles of Contagiousness apply to their business:

1. Social Currency: Llamaste, Inc. has this going for them. Yoga is seen as a healthy, sophisticated activity. This can make their customers seem to have these traits when they talk about the company. They should work more to encourage their customers to share pictures of them doing yoga on social media.

2. Triggers: This is tougher for them, since people usually just do yoga 1-2 times a week (or even less), so they won’t be seeing their Llamaste, Inc. products very often or thinking about them very often--only when they do yoga.

3. Emotion: According to Berger, the most viral emotions are excitement, humor, anxiety, and anger--these emotions often aren’t found in yoga. Yoga is more likely elicit contentment, comfort, achievement, serenity, calmness. But, their name is a pun, so they could use this humorous aspect of their business to elicit laughs, which people remember.

4. Public: Yoga bags and mats aren’t very public--they’re mainly just seen in-class, or on the way to or from yoga class. They could become more visible my making or selling clothing, like Lululemon. 

5. Practical: Yoga equipment is very practical, but only to a small segment of the population (though it’s growing). It’s not a universal human need, like food, cleaning supplies, or toilet paper, so the practicality argument is hard to make. But it is very practical for yoga practitioners. 

6. Stories: Do a better job of telling both the origin story of the company, but also developing stories of the company and its customers. This can be done through advertising and social media, as well as traditional media.

I’m thankful for the chance to read Jonah Berger’s excellent social science book Contagious. I think businesses, as well as organizations, lawmakers, and more could benefit from using the princples Berger talks about it. I look forward to employing them in my own work and life.

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Your Brand: The Next Media Company by Michael Brito

Over the course of the last decade, social media has transformed how businesses operate. To survive in this content-saturated, fast-paced market, companies must not only become active on social media, but have a comprehensive “social business strategy,” according to Michael Brito in his new book Your Brand: The Next Media Company.

A social business is more than just one that has a social brand. A social business is one that uses social media, both externally and internally, to encourage collaborations across departments and empower employees to engage with customers.

First, businesses must understand their customer, and the influential nature of each customer. Marketing is no longer top-down, in the sense that a company creates an advertisement to market their newest product and then they watch the money roll in. Now more than ever, businesses can learn about their customers by using innovative web vendors, such as Keyhole, which can look at your social media fan demographics and give insightful information such as what they talk about among themselves, which topics they care about, and what websites they share from. With this information, businesses can provide content that is relevant and engaging to their customer. It’s vital for businesses to do this background research, because the attention span of customers is short, and they live in a content-saturated online economy.

Businesses must also understand that social media impacts their internal practices. They must come up with systems to address new concerns—both good and bad—that social media has brought to the business world, such as: what employees can and cannot post, how to use social media during a communications crisis, technology selection and adoption, consistent social media practices, and more.

Once you’ve determined this, your business must create what Brito calls a Social Business Center of Excellence. This center will consist of your editorial team that shapes your brand how it will appear to the world, and how customers will engage with it. Brito gives examples of institutions excelling at creating these centers. One was Gatorade, which utilizes a large conference room in their marketing department to display six large LED screens, streaming social media and blogs related to their product, as well as competitors.

Next, a true social business has to empower employees, customers, and partners to engage and “feed the content engine.” First it starts with employees who, if engaged organically and authentically, can be great brand ambassadors. Social businesses must also understand that empowering customers to engage is key, since surveys show people can be heavily influenced by their peers, even more so than company employees. Empowering customers at this level means several things: post contests, polls and research questions; ask for them to upload content about your brand; or post about upcoming events.

The remainder of the book is related to the challenges of content marketing. Businesses can’t just come up with an idea and employ it, they must think carefully about how it might be perceived by their customers, traditional media, and internally. Will it be seen as authentic or inauthentic? Engaging or boring? The book is rich with examples from Fortune 500 companies and various institutions that highlight these challenges. The remainder of the book is also dedicated not just to creating your content, but executing it—the nuts and bolts—which are quite interesting—and how to structure your organization to perform as efficiently and creatively as possible.

While Brito goes quite in-depth in Your Brand, I do think there is too much repetition. The chapters on Social Business Center of Excellence and the Social Business Command Center were redundant, and could’ve been rolled into one larger chapter. I also felt that chapter 11, which covers how to govern the structure of your social media team, could’ve been folder into chapter 4 (or vice versa) since they both are about how to make a social business operate smoothly for employees.

I also felt that sometimes the writing contained too much jargon and could be intimidating for someone just diving into the concept of a social business. This was especially true with highlighting vendors.

I found Brito’s wealth of examples—from major companies to universities to vendors—incredibly helpful. This book can give even the most experienced social business advocates examples to help their company or program.

I also think Brito is right-on that businesses simply can’t just post on Twitter and Facebook and expect it to go well. They need to methodically plan out how their social media engine will engage with employees, partners, and customers, and how this new age of social media can impact their internal business. Policies must be set in place to engage employees, but also make clear what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate.

Llamaste, Inc. has limitless opportunities to become a true social business:

Their social media presence seems disjointed—there isn’t clear design unity among social media channels, and there is no Facebook page. This could be solved by having a strong editorial team, with a graphic designer included, to craft the narrative they want to present to the world.  They should also set policies as to how employees can use social media on behalf of the company.

Have an employee—likely the CEO or social media manager—be the face of the brand on social media. This would empower other employees, too.

Some ways to engage with their customers could be:

Creating a hashtag and asking people to post with their bag and yoga equipment, and then RT’ing/sharing those posts

Give more context—most of the Instagram posts are all hashtags. Rather they should explain the photos, ask questions, and more.

Once these basics are honed, I think Llamaste, Inc. would then be in a good place to create a Social Business Center of Excellence and begin exploring beyond social media, such as creating a thorough converged media plan.