Contagious: Why Things Catch On (2 page)

The same thing can be said for videos on YouTube. There’s no difference in price (all are free to watch), and few videos receive any advertising or marketing push. And although some videos have higher production values, most that go viral are blurred and out of focus, shot by an amateur on an inexpensive camera or cell phone.
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So if quality, price, and advertising don’t explain why one first name becomes more popular than another, or why one You-Tube video gets more views, what does?

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION

Social influence and word of mouth. People love to share stories, news, and information with those around them. We tell our friends about great vacation destinations, chat with our neighbors about good deals, and gossip with coworkers about potential layoffs. We write online reviews about movies, share rumors on Facebook, and tweet about recipes we just tried.
People share more than 16,000 words per day and every hour there are more than
100 million conversations about brands.

But word of mouth is not just frequent, it’s also important. The things others tell us, e-mail us, and text us have a significant impact on what we think, read, buy, and do.
We try websites our neighbors recommend, read books our relatives praise, and vote for candidates our friends endorse.
Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.

Consequently, social influence has a huge impact on whether
products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. A word-of-mouth conversation by a new customer leads to an almost
$200 increase in restaurant sales. A five-star review on Amazon.com leads to approximately
twenty more books sold than a one-star review.
Doctors are more likely to prescribe a new drug if other doctors they know have prescribed it.
People are more likely to quit smoking if their friends quit and get fatter if their friends become obese. In fact,
while traditional advertising is still useful, word of mouth from everyday Joes and Janes is at least ten times more effective.

Word of mouth is more effective than traditional advertising for two key reasons. First, it’s more persuasive. Advertisements usually tell us how great a product is. You’ve heard it all—how nine out of ten dentists recommend Crest or how no other detergent will get your clothes as clean as Tide.

But because ads will always argue that their products are the best, they’re not really credible. Ever seen a Crest ad say that only one out of ten dentists prefers Crest? Or that four of the other nine think Crest will rot your teeth?

Our friends, however, tend to tell it to us straight. If they thought Crest did a good job, they’ll say that. But they’d also tell us if Crest tasted bad or failed to whiten their teeth. Their objectivity, coupled with their candidness, make us much more likely to trust, listen to, and believe our friends.

Second, word of mouth is more targeted. Companies try to advertise in ways that allow them to reach the largest number of interested customers. Take a company that sells skis. Television ads during the nightly news probably wouldn’t be very efficient because many of the viewers don’t ski. So the company might advertise in a ski magazine, or on the back of lift tickets to a popular slope. But while this would ensure that most people who see the
ad like skiing, the company would still end up wasting money because lots of those people don’t need new skis.

Word of mouth, on the other hand, is naturally directed toward an interested audience. We don’t share a news story or recommendation with everyone we know. Rather, we tend to select particular people who we think would find that given piece of information most relevant. We’re not going to tell a friend about a new pair of skis if we know the friend hates skiing. And we’re not going to tell a friend who doesn’t have kids about the best way to change a diaper. Word of mouth tends to reach people who are actually interested in the thing being discussed. No wonder
customers referred by their friends spend more, shop faster, and are more profitable overall.

A particularly nice example of how word of mouth improves targeting came to me in the mail a few years ago. Every so often publishers will send me free books. Usually they’re related to marketing and the publisher hopes that if I’m given a free copy, I’ll be more likely to assign the book to my students (and sell them a bunch of copies in the process).

But a few years ago, one company did something slightly different. It sent me two copies of the same book.

Now, unless I’m mistaken, there’s no reason for me to read the second copy, once I’ve read the first. But these publishers had a different goal in mind. They sent a note explaining why they thought the book would be good for my students, but they also mentioned that they sent a second copy so that I could pass it along to a colleague who might be interested.

That’s how word of mouth helps with targeting. Rather than sending books to everyone, the publishers got me, and others, to do the targeting for them. Just like a searchlight, each recipient of the double mailing would look through his or her personal social
network, find the person that the book would be most relevant for, and pass it along.

GENERATING WORD OF MOUTH

But want to know the best thing about word of mouth? It’s available to everyone. From Fortune 500 companies trying to increase sales to corner restaurants trying to fill tables. And from nonprofits trying to fight obesity to newbie politicians trying to get elected. Word of mouth helps things catch on. Word of mouth even helps B2B companies get new clients from existing ones. And it doesn’t require millions of dollars spent on advertising. It just requires getting people to talk.

The challenge, though, is how to do that.

From start-ups to starlets, people have embraced social media as the wave of the future. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other channels are seen as ways to cultivate a following and engage consumers. Brands post ads, aspiring musicians post videos, and small businesses post deals. Companies and organizations have fallen over themselves in their rush to jump on the buzz marketing bandwagon. The logic is straightforward. If they can get people to talk about their idea or share their content, it will spread through social networks like a virus, making their product or idea instantly popular along the way.

But there are two issues with this approach: the focus and the execution.

Help me out with a quick pop quiz. What percent of word of mouth do you think happens online? In other words, what percent of chatter happens over social media, blogs, e-mail, and chat rooms?

If you’re like most people you probably guessed something
around 50 or 60 percent. Some people guess upward of 70 percent and some guess much lower, but after having asked this question of hundreds of students and executives, I find that the average is around 50 percent.

And that number makes sense. After all, social media have certainly exploded as of late.
Millions of people use these sites every day, and billions of pieces of content get shared every month. These technologies have made it faster and easier to share things quickly with a broad group of people.

But 50 percent is wrong.

Not even close.

The actual number is 7 percent. Not 47 percent, not 27 percent, but 7 percent. Research by the Keller Fay Group finds that only 7 percent of word of mouth happens online.

Most people are extremely surprised when they hear that number. “But that’s way too low,” they protest. “People spend a huge amount of time online!” And that’s true. People do spend a good bit of time online.
Close to two hours a day by some estimates. But we forget that people also spend a lot of time offline. More than eight times as much, in fact. And that creates a lot more time for offline conversations.

We also tend to overestimate online word of mouth because it’s easier to see. Social media sites provide a handy record of all the clips, comments, and other content we share online. So when we look at it, it seems like a lot. But we don’t think as much about all the offline conversations we had over that same time period because we can’t easily see them. There is no recording of the chat we had with Susan after lunch or the conversation we had with Tim while waiting for the kids to be done with practice. But while they may not be as easy to see, they still have an important impact on our behavior.

Further, while one might think that online word of mouth reaches more people, that’s not always the case. Sure, online conversations
could
reach more people. After all, while face-to-face conversations tend to be one-on-one, or among a small handful of people,
the average tweet or Facebook status update is sent to more than one hundred people. But not all of these potential recipients will actually see every message. People are inundated with online content, so they don’t have the time to read every tweet, message, or update sent their way. A quick exercise among my students, for example, showed that less than 10 percent of their friends responded to a message they posted. Most Twitter posts reach even fewer. Online conversations
could
reach a much larger audience, but given that offline conversations may be more in-depth, it’s unclear that social media is the better way to go.

So the first issue with all the hype around social media is that people tend to ignore the importance of offline word of mouth, even though
offline discussions are more prevalent, and potentially even more impactful, than online ones.

The second issue is that Facebook and Twitter are technologies, not strategies. Word-of-mouth marketing is effective only if people actually talk. Public health officials can tweet daily bulletins about safe sex, but if but no one passes them along, the campaign will fail. Just putting up a Facebook page or tweeting doesn’t mean anyone will notice or spread the word. Fifty percent of YouTube videos have fewer than five hundred views.
Only one-third of 1 percent get more than 1 million.

Harnessing the power of word of mouth, online or offline, requires understanding why people talk and why some things get talked about and shared more than others. The psychology of sharing. The science of social transmission.

The next time you’re chatting at a party or grabbing a bite to
eat with a coworker, imagine being a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on your conversation. You might end up chatting about a new movie or gossiping about a colleague. You might trade stories about vacation, mention someone’s new baby, or complain about the unusually warm weather.

Why? You could have talked about anything. There are millions of different topics, ideas, products, and stories you could have discussed. Why did you talk about those things in particular? Why that specific story, movie, or coworker rather than a different one?

Certain stories are more contagious, and certain rumors are more infectious. Some online content goes viral while other content never gets passed on. Some products get a good deal of word of mouth, while others go unmentioned. Why? What causes certain products, ideas, and behaviors to be talked about more?

That’s what this book is about.

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One common intuition is that generating word of mouth is all about finding the right people. That certain special individuals are just more influential than others. In
The Tipping Point
, for example, Malcolm Gladwell argues that social epidemics are driven “
by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people” whom he calls mavens, connectors, and salesmen. Others suggest that “
one in 10 Americans tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy.” Marketers spend millions of dollars trying to find these so-called opinion leaders and get them to endorse their products. Political campaigns look for the “influentials” to support their side.

The notion is that anything these special people touch will turn to gold. If they adopt or talk about a product or idea, it will become popular.

But conventional wisdom is wrong. Yes, we all know people who are really persuasive, and yes, some people have more friends than others. But in most cases that doesn’t make them any more influential in spreading information or
making things go viral.

Further, by focusing so much on the messenger, we’ve neglected a much more obvious driver of sharing: the message.

To use an analogy, think about jokes. We all have friends who are better joke tellers than we are. Whenever they tell a joke the room bursts out laughing.

But jokes also vary. Some jokes are so funny that it doesn’t matter who tells them. Everyone laughs even if the person sharing the joke isn’t all that funny. Contagious content is like that—so inherently viral that it spreads regardless of who is doing the talking. Regardless of whether the messengers are really persuasive or not and regardless of whether they have ten friends or ten thousand.

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So what about a message makes people want to pass it on?

Not surprisingly, social media “gurus” and word-of-mouth practitioners have made lots of guesses. One prevalent theory is that virality is completely random—that it’s impossible to predict whether a given video or piece of content will be highly shared. Other people conjecture based on case studies and anecdotes. Because so many of the most popular YouTube videos are either funny or cute—involving babies or kittens—you commonly hear that humor or cuteness is a key ingredient for virality.

But these “theories” ignore the fact that many funny or cute videos never take off. Sure, some cat clips get millions of views, but those are the outliers, not the norm. Most get less than a few dozen.

You may as well observe that Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Bill
Cosby are all famous and conclude that changing your name to Bill is the route to fame and fortune. Although the initial observation is correct, the conclusion is patently ludicrous. By merely looking at a handful of viral hits, people miss the fact that many of those features also exist in content that failed to attract any audience whatsoever. To fully understand what causes people to share things, you have to look at both successes and failures. And whether, more often than not, certain characteristics are linked to success.