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.

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.

An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.

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

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

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.”

Because of the Web and social media, everyone now has the power to type out his ideas and spread them to millions of people. Memory isn’t a big problem anymore.

Fill knowledge gaps with your ideas.

If your ideas reinforce my reputation, I’ll share them.