Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas

Some of the most contagious brands serve as boxes of crayons, not rubber stamps. Brands that provide their users with a vocabulary and tools that allow them to play with and remix their own ideas succeed because these brands step back and let evolution do what it does best. Examples include campaigns like “South Park Yourself,” which lets users cus

Memory isn’t a big problem anymore. You have to be able only to copy and paste a link, not remember an entire epic poem. The change in the environment has introduced a different selection pressure into the mental landscape: attention. There are now so many ideas floating around the Web, they fight for simple awareness.

Normal people communicated with their voices, and in order to be able to retell an idea or story orally, you have to be able to remember it. The oral tradition and Homeric poems reflect this limitation. They’re composed of clichéd phrases and mnemonic devices.

the AIDA concept. It represents the steps in a purchasing decision: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. The attention of the customer must be attracted, interest must be raised, desire must be established, and finally, the act of purchasing must be completed.

OODA is an initialism in which the letters stand for the four stages in the combat decision-making process: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. In every situation, an individual first observes his surroundings and gathers information, then orients this data with his previous experiences. He then decides the best path of action, and finally, he acts.

A little basic math will show us that seeding our idea to a small number of people and expecting it to take over the world is not realistic. If we have an idea with an R0 of 0.1—which is higher than any idea I’ve ever studied—and we seed it to ten people, those ten will infect only a single new person, and in the next generation the outbreak will d

By blending these two seemingly discrete interests, I had created what I call “combined relevance.” When someone who was into both of those things, or knew someone who was, saw my absinthe spoon gadget, he knew it was right up his alley and he had to have one. And he had to tell all of his likeminded friends about it.

Evolution is how contagious ideas are created in the wild. Where there are lots of different ideas, and there is competition for mind space, only the most effective ideas will win. Social media platforms are the most powerful memetic petri dishes in history, nurturing the growth and spread of virulent ideas, because of the plethora of ideas, the si

Don’t get hung up on long-form content, and don’t polish yet. Instead, focus on building as many variations of your ideas as possible.