Six Principles of Contagiousness (STEPPS)-First Part
Why some brands or people’s contents can be popular in the network but someone’s can’t? Professor Jonah Berger from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania spent a decade to answer this question. He gives a course “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” which specially focus on exploring this issue. And such information now becomes a book. The book explains what makes content “contagious” which he means likely to spread, and Berger gives out six principles of Contagiousness. The six principles are:
1. Social Currency
2. Triggers
3. Emotions
4. Public
5. Practical Value
6. Stories
These are six key STEPPS.
Original post by John Haydon
Here, I will share some of my understanding of these principles.
First, Social Currency. Currency means value, what value? I think it is how people see others in their eyes. Then, what they are wanting to be in others’ eyes can be valuable? Basically, I think knowing cool things. So, when we are creating contents, we need to meet people’s needs which let them think they are cool when they share our contents. We build their expectations then let audiences willing to stand with us and share our contents.
There is a good example. Around Chinese people, there is a very popular social media platform called WeChat. People can chat through the app and there is a feature calls “Moments”, people can share their thinking, feelings, life activities and many things just like a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I followed a writer whose article normally have 5000 views. When iPhone 6 came out, Apple became a popular topic again. He wrote an article “Maybe, Jobs Wrote the Most Famous Movie Review in the World”. This article had 47000 views which way more than his other articles. Why? Because this article made people feel they were cool when they shared the article. One of my friends shared the article in his moments but he even didn’t read the content. He told me, it is cool to share such article at such moment.
Second, Triggers. To my understanding, it is to design a specific environment that will activate customers or audiences’ inner feeling, let customers and audiences connect the product or thought we want to spread with such environment. In this way, once people in a certain environment, they will think of our product and ideas, and great thoughts will cause great spread.
Also, there is another example from WeChat. I followed a public account on WeChat which calls “Logical Thinking”. This account will release a 60-second voice message to followers a specific topic about the current popular issue with great contents and points every single morning for about 3-4 years. Now, this public account stops releasing voice message and became just release word contents about some topics every morning. But you can see there are still many new followers follow this account and followers still share topics in the morning. So, the importance is, the 4 years every day voice message release gave followers a very deep impression that every morning voice message activates followers’ inner feeling. When it is morning time, followers want to check what “Logical Thinking” released, then comments and share.
Original post by Danny
Also, here is a video about Berger talk about Triggers.
Third, Emotions. Like the book said, when we care, we share. Some emotional events will increase people's desire to share, also some emotional events will undermine people's desire to share. So, we need to choose positive emotional events that can inspire people to actively share to spread. But, sometimes, negative emotional events will also ignite people inner feeling to share. Most of the time we all know how to and try to spread positive emotion. Like spread jokes, fail videos and many others. But how negative emotional events works? Recently, shooting on the music festival in Las Vegas is definitely a negative emotional event. I feel sad, people around me feel sad and everyone feels sad. Then, you spread out the sad, others will care.
I think here is an example to explain. I randomly select a person on Twitter that recently posted something about Las Vegas gun shooting. This post got way more of retweets and likes compares to her other posts. The Twitter’s owner is Jackie Valley with 2825 followers.
Tweet about Las Vegas Shooting
Normal Tweets
(I just use this Las Vegas shooting as an example, I truly feel sorry for those people who were dead and injured, I hope such thing will never happen again.)
So, that’s all about the first part of six principles of Contagiousness. Next week, I will continue to share my learnings with the rest three principles: Public, Practical Value and Stores.