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.