Contagious: Why Things Catch On

There are three ways to do that: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; and (3) make people feel like insiders.

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.

EXERCISE MAKES PEOPLE SHARE

PLEASE DON’T TELL? WELL, OKAY. MAYBE JUST ONE PERSON . . .

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION

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.

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.

WHAT MAKES FOR AN EFFECTIVE TRIGGER?

LEARNING THROUGH STORIES