Contagious: Why Things Catch On (19 page)

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Making the public private is particularly important for things that people may not have originally felt comfortable talking about. Take online dating. Many people have tried it, but it is still somewhat stigmatized in the culture at large. And part of this stigma is due to the fact that people are unaware that many people they know have tried it. Online dating is relatively private behavior, so to help it catch on, online dating companies need to make people more aware how many others are doing it. Similar issues pop up in other domains. The makers of Viagra coined the term “ED” (erectile dysfunction) to get people more comfortable talking about what was once a private issue. Many colleges started a “wear jeans if you’re gay” day, in part just to raise awareness and discussion for the LGBT community.

5.
Practical Value

If you had to pick someone to make a viral video, Ken Craig probably wouldn’t be your first choice. Most viral videos are made by adolescents and watched by adolescents. Crazy tricks someone did on his motorcycle or cartoon characters edited to look as if they are dancing to rap songs. Things young people love.

But Ken Craig is eighty-six years old. And the video that went viral? It’s about shucking corn.

Ken was born on a farm in Oklahoma, one of five brothers and sisters. His family’s livelihood was built around growing cotton. They also kept a garden to grow things for the family to eat. And among those things was corn. Ken’s been eating corn since the 1920s. He’s eaten everything from corn casserole and corn chowder to corn fritters and corn salad. One of his favorite ways to eat corn is straight off the cob. Nice and fresh.

But if you’ve ever eaten corn on the cob you know that there are two problems. In addition to kernels getting stuck in your teeth, there are those pesky threadlike strands (called corn silk) that always seem stuck to the corn. A couple of strong pulls and you can easily peel the husk off, but the silk seems to cling on for
dear life. You can rub the corn, carefully pick at it with tweezers, or try almost anything else you like, but whatever you do there always seem to be a couple of wayward silk strands left over.

And this is where Ken comes in.

Like most eighty-six-year-olds, Ken’s not really into the Internet. He doesn’t have a blog, a channel on YouTube, or any sort of online presence. In fact, to this day he has made only one YouTube video. Ever.

A couple of years ago, Ken’s daughter-in-law was over at his house making dinner. She had almost finished cooking the main dish, and when it got close to time to eat, she told him that the corn was ready to be shucked. Okay, Ken said, but let me show you a little trick.

He took unshucked ears of corn and tossed them in a microwave. Four minutes an ear. Once they were done, he took a kitchen knife and cut a half inch or so off the bottom. Then he grabbed the husk at the top of the corn, gave it a quick couple of shakes, and out popped the ear of corn. Clean as a whistle. No silk.

His daughter-in-law was so impressed she said they’d have to make a video to send to her daughter who was teaching English in Korea. So the next day she shot a clip of Ken in his kitchen, talking through his trick for clean ears of corn. To make it easier for her daughter to see, she posted it on YouTube. And along the way she sent the clip to a couple of friends.

Well, those friends sent it to a couple of friends, who also sent it to a couple of friends. Soon Ken’s “Clean Ears Everytime” video took off. It collected more than 5 million views.

But unlike most viral videos that skew toward young people, this one skewed in the opposite direction. Topping the charts of the videos viewed most by people above the age of fifty-five. In
fact, the video might have spread even faster if more senior citizens were online.

Why did people share this video?

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A couple of years ago I went hiking with my brother in the mountains of North Carolina. He was wrapping up a tough year of medical school, and I needed a break from work, so we met at Raleigh-Durham Airport and drove west. Past the Tar Heel blue of Chapel Hill, past the once tobacco-saturated city of Winston-Salem, and all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains that hug the westernmost portion of the state. The next morning we woke up early, packed food for the day, and set out on a winding mountain ridge path that led to the top of a majestic plateau.

The main reason people go hiking is to get away from it all. To escape from the hustle and bustle of the city and to immerse themselves in nature. No billboards, no traffic, no advertising, just you and nature.

But that morning while we were hiking in the woods, we came across the most peculiar thing. As we rounded the bend on a downhill portion of the trail there was a group of hikers in front of us. We walked behind them for a couple of minutes, and being a curious guy, I happened to eavesdrop on their conversation. I thought they might be talking about the beautiful weather, or the long descent we had just covered.

But they weren’t.

They were talking about vacuum cleaners.

Whether one particular model was really worth its premium price, and whether another model would do the job just as well.

Vacuum cleaners? There were thousands of other things these hikers could have talked about. Where to stop for lunch,
the rushing sixty-foot falls they had just passed, even politics. But vacuum cleaners?

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It’s not easy to explain Ken Craig’s viral corn video using the dimensions we’ve talked about so far in this book, but it’s even harder to explain the hikers chatting about vacuum cleaners. They weren’t talking about anything particularly remarkable, so Social Currency wasn’t playing much of a role. While there are lots of cues for vacuums in the home, or even in a city, there aren’t many Triggers for vacuum cleaners in the forest. Finally, while a clever campaign could figure out how to make vacuum cleaners more Emotional, the hikers were just having a basic conversation about features different vacuums offered. So what was driving them to talk?

The answer is simple. People like to pass along practical, useful information. News others can use.

In the context of Triggers or hidden bars like Please Don’t Tell, practical value may not seem like the sexiest or most exciting concept. Some might even say it’s obvious or intuitive. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not consequential. When writer and editor William F. Buckley Jr. was asked which single book he would take with him to a desert island, his reply was straightforward: “A book on shipbuilding.”

Useful things are important.

Further, as the stories of Ken’s corn and the vacuum-discussing hikers illustrate, people don’t just value practical information, they share it. Offering practical value helps make things contagious.

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People share practically valuable information to help others. Whether by saving a friend time or ensuring a colleague saves
a couple of bucks next time he goes to the supermarket, useful information helps.

In this way, sharing practically valuable content is like a modern-day barn raising. Barns are large and costly structures that are difficult for one family to pay for or to assemble by itself. So in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, communities would collectively build a barn for one of their members. People would get together, volunteer their time, and help their neighbor. Next time around, the barn would be built for someone else. You can think of it as an early version of the current prosocial ideal of “pay it forward.”

Today, these direct opportunities to help others are fewer and farther between. Modern suburban life has distanced us from our friends and neighbors. We live at the end of long driveways or high up in apartment buildings, often barely getting to know the person next door. Many people move away from their families for work or school, reducing face-to-face contact with our strongest social ties. Hired labor has taken the place of community barn raising.

But sharing something useful with others is a quick and easy way to help them out. Even if we’re not in the same place. Parents can send their kids helpful advice even if they are hundreds of miles away. Passing along useful things also strengthens social bonds. If we know our friends are into cooking, sending them a new recipe we found brings us closer together. Our friends see we know and care about them, we feel good for being helpful, and the sharing cements our friendship.

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. Sure, sharing useful things benefits the sharer as well. Helping others feels good. It
even reflects positively on the sharer, providing a bit of Social Currency. But at its core, sharing practical value is about helping others. The Emotions chapter noted that when we care, we share. But the opposite is also true. Sharing is caring.

You can think about sharing practical value as akin to advice. People talk about which retirement plan is cheapest and which politician will balance the budget. Which medicine cures a cold and which vegetable has the most beta carotene. Think about the last time you made a decision that required you to gather and sift through large amounts of information. You probably asked one or more people what you should do. And they probably either shared their opinion or sent you a link to a website that helped you out.

So what makes something seem practically valuable enough to pass along?

SAVING A COUPLE OF BUCKS

When most people think about practical value, saving money is one of the first things that comes to mind—getting something for less than its original price or getting more of something than you usually would for the same price.

Websites like Groupon and LivingSocial have built business models around offering consumers discounts on everything from pedicures to pilot lessons.

One of the biggest drivers of whether people share promotional offers is whether the offer seems like a good deal. If we see an amazing deal we can’t help but talk about it or pass it on to someone we think would find it useful. If the offer is just okay, though, we keep it to ourselves.

So what determines whether or not a promotional offer seems like a good deal?

Not surprisingly, the size of the discount influences how good a deal seems. Saving a hundred dollars, for example, tends to be more exciting than saving one dollar. Saving 50 percent is more exciting than saving 10 percent. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to realize that people like (and share) bigger discounts more than smaller ones.

But it’s actually more complicated than that. Consider what you would do in the following example:

Scenario A:
Imagine you’re at a store looking to buy a new barbecue grill. You find a Weber Q 320 grill that looks pretty good, and to your delight it’s also on sale. Originally priced at $350, it is now marked down to $250.

Would you buy this barbecue grill or drive to another store to look at others? Take a second to think about your answer. Got it? Okay, let’s do the exercise again for a different retailer.

Scenario B
: Imagine you’re at a store looking to buy a new barbecue grill. You find a Weber Q 320 grill that looks pretty good and to your delight it’s also on sale. Originally priced at $255, it is now marked down to $240.

What would you do in this case? Would you buy this barbecue grill or drive to another store to look at others? Wait until you have an answer and then read on.

If you’re like most people, scenario A looked pretty good. One hundred dollars off a barbecue grill and it’s a model you like? Seems like a good deal. You probably said you’d buy it rather than keep looking.

Scenario B, however, probably didn’t look so good. After all,
it’s only fifteen dollars off, nowhere near as good as the first deal. You probably said you’d keep looking rather than buy that one.

I found similar results when I gave each scenario to one hundred different people. While 75 percent of the people who received scenario A said they’d buy the grill rather than keep looking, only 22 percent of people who received scenario B said they’d buy the grill.

This all makes perfect sense—until you think about the final price at each store. Both stores were selling the same grill. So if anything, people should have been more likely to say they would buy it at the store where the price was lower (scenario B). But they weren’t. In fact, the opposite happened. More people said they would purchase the grill in scenario A, even though they would have had to pay a higher price ($250 rather than $240) to get it. What gives?

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEALS

On a cold, wintry day in December 2002, Daniel Kahneman walked onstage to address a packed lecture hall at Sweden’s Stockholm University. The audience was filled with Swedish diplomats, dignitaries, and some of the world’s most prominent academics. Kahneman was there to give a talk on bounded rationality, a new perspective on intuitive judgment and choice. He had given related talks over the years, but this one was slightly different. Kahneman was in Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The Nobel Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious awards and is given to researchers who have contributed great insight to their disciplines. Albert Einstein received a Nobel Prize for his work on theoretical physics. Watson and Crick received
a Nobel in medicine for their work on the structure of DNA. In economics, the Nobel Prize is awarded to a person whose research has had a large impact on advancing economic thinking.

But Kahneman isn’t an economist. He is a psychologist.

Kahneman received the Nobel for his work with Amos Tversky on what they called “prospect theory.” The theory is amazingly rich, but at its core, it’s based on a very basic idea. The way people actually make decisions often violates standard economic assumptions about how they
should
make decisions. Judgments and decisions are not always rational or optimal. Instead, they are based on psychological principles of how people perceive and process information. Just as perceptual processes influence whether we see a particular sweater as red or view an object on the horizon as far away, they also influence whether a price seems high or a deal seems good. Along with Richard Thaler’s work, Kahneman and Tversky’s research is some of the earliest studying what we now think of as “behavioral economics.”