JONAH BERGER: A way to
make this video viral?
We could make it more
emotionally arousing.
Or we could play really
loud or exciting music.
SPEAKER: Let's remix it.
[CLUB MUSIC]
JONAH BERGER: I could
say something really
provocative or controversial.
Everything Gladwell
said is wrong.
People want to hear the rest
of the video to figure out why.
Because controversy
encourages discussion, right?
It gets people to share things.
I'm Jonah Berger.
I'm a professor of marketing
at the Wharton School
and author of Contagious,
Why Things Catch On.
The book is Contagious,
Why Things Catch On,
and it's all about how
companies, individuals,
and organizations
can get word of mouth
to help their products
and ideas become popular.
I see life as a laboratory.
You can look around and
see people doing something
and wonder, well,
why does that happen?
And my job as a psychologist
or as a consumer psychologist
is to understand
those questions.
There's a guy who follows
me on Twitter who's-- he has
a reasonably large following.
And [INAUDIBLE] he was like,
oh, can I get that deal?
Because I mentioned on Twitter.
Like some people are really,
really excited about this.
And so I think this
definitely has social currency
for some people.
I think other people are
going to feel like this.
LAINIE HUSTON: Going viral
has been a concept that's
happened since ancient times.
It isn't something
that is new just
because Twitter and Facebook
are now tools that we can use.
ALEX CHAHIN: It's a science.
It boils down to several
distinct discrete variables
that you can pull and toy with
in order to make something
have a greater success
of being viral.
JONAH BERGER: I was in college,
and as grandmothers often do,
my grandmother would send
me newspaper articles.
And one summer, she
sent me an article
about a book called
The Tipping Point.
It brought together psychology,
and sociology, and marketing
in a way that had never really
been brought together before.
But it wasn't necessarily
backed up with hard data.
It was a good amount of opinion
and correlational evidence.
But as we all know,
correlation doesn't necessarily
equal causation.
Why do people talk
about and share things?
Why are certain things
shared more than others?
That's not even in
The Tipping Point.
There's no section
on what makes things
more viral or more talkable.
And so I really started
to wonder, well,
why do we share some
things rather than others?
So Rebecca Black's
song has been called
the worst song of all time.
[REBECCA BLACK, "FRIDAY]
REBECCA BLACK: (SINGING)
It's Friday Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
JONAH BERGER: Yet even
though it's so bad,
it's gotten over
300 million views.
And so lots of
people wonder, well,
why is this song that
everybody hates doing so well?
And so if you look at
the data, you actually
see something sort
of interesting.
You see a spike every week
on a certain day of the week.
And when you look at it closely,
you notice that it's Friday.
REBECCA BLACK:
(SINGING) Thursday
Today it is Friday
JONAH BERGER: So this
song is equally bad
every day of the week.
It's equally bad Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
But Friday is a ready
reminder, a trigger
to make us think
about that song.
REBECCA BLACK: (SINGING)
through the weekend
JONAH BERGER: So in
a contagious world,
I think we'll see fewer
advertisements and more
interpersonal communication,
less money spent on how can we
interrupt consumers
from their television
show or their
favorite radio program
and shove an ad in their face,
so they'll pay attention to us.
And more, well, how can
we get their friends
to tell them about this product?
I think if you're
a small company,
this book is great news.
You might have thought that you
need a celebrity to talk about,
or you need some big blogger
to tweet about your restaurant
or it's not going
to become popular.
What this book
shows is how anyone
can apply these principles
to help their idea catch on.
If you're a big company, I think
you need to change direction
a little bit.
You need to stop focusing
on finding special people
and think more about how to
create content that's going
to be more likely to be shared.