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

His point was that ideas evolve like genes do, and their success is based on their ability to spread, not on the benefit they provide to their hosts.

The person must be exposed to your content. This means that the person has to be following you on Twitter, be a fan of your page on Facebook, subscribe to your email list, and so on. The person must become aware of your specific piece of content (the idea you want to spread). He has to read your tweet or open your email message. The person must be

But we need to decide if we are going to leave the future of social media to magical tonics, or if we are going to use science and data to discover what really works to motivate people.

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

The warnings are far more contagious than the actual viruses. Just like virus warnings, any information that can protect readers from harm, like a great deals website preventing people from paying too much for a product, will get shared as a form of self-defense.

you should not be afraid to identify yourself authoritatively. Tell people why they should listen to you. In that same study, I found that Twitter users with the confidence to use words like “official,” “founder,” “author,” and “expert” to describe themselves also had more followers than the average. Don’t feel limited to using the term “guru.”

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.

At each step, you can change the numbers in your favor: Increase the number of people exposed to your content. Get more email-list subscribers or Twitter followers. Create attention-grabbing content. Do lots of testing on your subject lines to increase open rates. Include powerful calls to action.