Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way.There are three ways to do that:<ol><li>Find inner remarkability;</li><li>Leverage game mechanics; </li><li>Make people feel like insiders. </li></ol>

1. Social Currency

<ul><li>Good game mechanics keep people engaged, motivated, and always wanting more. </li><li>We all enjoy achieving things. Tangible evidence of our progress makes us feel good.</li><li>So discrete markers motivate us to work harder, especially when we get close to achieving them. </li><li>Game mechanics also motivate us on an inter personal level by encouraging social comparison. </li><li>People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others. </li></ul>

Leverage Game Mechanics

<ul><li>Triggers not only get people talking, they keep them talking.</li><li>Think about whether the message will be triggered by the everyday environments of the target audience. </li><li>Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists. </li><li>The more something is triggered, the more it will be top of mind, and the more successful it will become. </li><li>Top of mind means tip of tongue. </li></ul>

2. Triggers 

<ul><li>Marketing messages tend to focus on information. </li><li>Rather than harping on features or facts, we need to focus on feelings; the underlying emotions that motivate people to action. </li><li>More anger or more humor led to more sharing. </li><li>Emotions drive people to action. They make us laugh, shout, and cry, and they make us talk, share, and buy. </li><li>But people are less likely to talk about or share things that make them content because contentment decreases arousal. </li></ul>

3. Emotion 

<ul><li>Setting a higher reference point made the first deal seem better even though the price was higher overall. </li><li>By mentioning $100 or $200 as the price you might expect to pay, the infomercial sets a high reference point, making the final price of $39.99 seem like a steal. </li><li>Deals seem more appealing when they highlight incredible value. </li><li>Restricting availability through scarcity and exclusivity makes things seem more valuable. </li></ul>

5. Practical Value 

<ol><li>If the product’s price is less than $100, percentage discounts will seem larger.</li><li>If the product’s price is more than $100, the opposite is true. Numerical discounts will seem larger.</li></ol>Take a $2,000 laptop. While a 10 percent discount may seem like a relatively small number, it immediately seems much bigger when translated into dollars ($200).

The Rule of 100 

The six principles or STEPPS, drive things to catch on.  <ol><li>Social Currency: We share things that make us look good. </li><li>Triggers: Top of mind = tip of tongue  </li><li>Emotion: When we care, we share. </li><li>Public: Built to show, built to grow. </li><li>Practical Value: News you can use. </li><li>Stories: Information travels under the guise of idle chatter. </li></ol>

STEPPS

<ul><li>Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate.</li><li>The famous phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just the human tendency to imitate.</li><li>If something is built to show, it’s built to grow. </li><li>Television shows use canned laugh tracks for this reason: people are more likely to laugh when they hear others laughing. </li><li>Behavior is public and Thoughts are private. </li></ul>

4. Public 

<ul><li>Scarcity and exclusivity help products catch on by making them seem more desirable.</li><li>If something is difficult to obtain, people assume that it must be worth the effort.</li><li>If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique, high status. </li><li>If something is unavailable or sold out, people often infer that lots of other people must like it, and so it must be pretty good.</li></ul>

Make People Feel Like Insiders

<ul><li>People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. </li><li>Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember. </li><li>Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. </li><li>They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement. </li></ul>

6. Stories 

"Virality isn’t born, it’s made."

Sharing extraordinary, novel, or entertaining stories or ads makes people seem more extraordinary, novel, and entertaining.<ul><li>Can the product do something no one would have thought possible (such as blend iPhone like Blendtec)?</li><li>Are the consequences of the idea or issue more extreme than people ever could have imagined? </li></ul>

Find Inner Remarkability

This book explains what makes content contagious. By “content,” I mean stories, news, information, Products, ideas, messages and videos. 

The New York Times bestseller that explains why certain products and ideas become popular. “Jonah Berger knows more about what makes information ‘go viral’ than anyone in the world.” —Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness What makes things popular? If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He’s studied why New York Times articles make the paper’s own Most E-mailed list, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In Contagious, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheesesteak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the most boring products there is: a blender. Contagious provides specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread—for designing messages, advertisements, and content that people will share. Whether you’re a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.

JONAH BERGER

Similar ideas

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

Resilience is a skill