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JONAH BERGER: A way to
make this video viral?

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We could make it more
emotionally arousing.

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Or we could play really
loud or exciting music.

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SPEAKER: Let's remix it.

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[CLUB MUSIC]

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JONAH BERGER: I could
say something really

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provocative or controversial.

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Everything Gladwell
said is wrong.

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People want to hear the rest
of the video to figure out why.

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Because controversy
encourages discussion, right?

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It gets people to share things.

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I'm Jonah Berger.

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I'm a professor of marketing
at the Wharton School

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and author of Contagious,
Why Things Catch On.

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The book is Contagious,
Why Things Catch On,

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and it's all about how
companies, individuals,

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and organizations
can get word of mouth

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to help their products
and ideas become popular.

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I see life as a laboratory.

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You can look around and
see people doing something

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and wonder, well,
why does that happen?

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And my job as a psychologist
or as a consumer psychologist

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is to understand
those questions.

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There's a guy who follows
me on Twitter who's-- he has

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a reasonably large following.

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And [INAUDIBLE] he was like,
oh, can I get that deal?

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Because I mentioned on Twitter.

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Like some people are really,
really excited about this.

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And so I think this
definitely has social currency

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for some people.

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I think other people are
going to feel like this.

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LAINIE HUSTON: Going viral
has been a concept that's

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happened since ancient times.

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It isn't something
that is new just

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because Twitter and Facebook
are now tools that we can use.

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ALEX CHAHIN: It's a science.

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It boils down to several
distinct discrete variables

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that you can pull and toy with
in order to make something

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have a greater success
of being viral.

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JONAH BERGER: I was in college,
and as grandmothers often do,

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my grandmother would send
me newspaper articles.

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And one summer, she
sent me an article

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about a book called
The Tipping Point.

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It brought together psychology,
and sociology, and marketing

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in a way that had never really
been brought together before.

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But it wasn't necessarily
backed up with hard data.

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It was a good amount of opinion
and correlational evidence.

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But as we all know,
correlation doesn't necessarily

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equal causation.

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Why do people talk
about and share things?

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Why are certain things
shared more than others?

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That's not even in
The Tipping Point.

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There's no section
on what makes things

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more viral or more talkable.

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And so I really started
to wonder, well,

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why do we share some
things rather than others?

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So Rebecca Black's
song has been called

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the worst song of all time.

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[REBECCA BLACK, "FRIDAY]

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REBECCA BLACK: (SINGING)
It's Friday Friday

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Gotta get down on Friday

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JONAH BERGER: Yet even
though it's so bad,

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it's gotten over
300 million views.

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And so lots of
people wonder, well,

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why is this song that
everybody hates doing so well?

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And so if you look at
the data, you actually

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see something sort
of interesting.

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You see a spike every week
on a certain day of the week.

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And when you look at it closely,
you notice that it's Friday.

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REBECCA BLACK:
(SINGING) Thursday

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Today it is Friday

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JONAH BERGER: So this
song is equally bad

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every day of the week.

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It's equally bad Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

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But Friday is a ready
reminder, a trigger

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to make us think
about that song.

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REBECCA BLACK: (SINGING)
through the weekend

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JONAH BERGER: So in
a contagious world,

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I think we'll see fewer
advertisements and more

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interpersonal communication,
less money spent on how can we

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interrupt consumers
from their television

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show or their
favorite radio program

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and shove an ad in their face,
so they'll pay attention to us.

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And more, well, how can
we get their friends

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to tell them about this product?

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I think if you're
a small company,

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this book is great news.

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You might have thought that you
need a celebrity to talk about,

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or you need some big blogger
to tweet about your restaurant

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or it's not going
to become popular.

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What this book
shows is how anyone

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can apply these principles
to help their idea catch on.

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If you're a big company, I think
you need to change direction

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a little bit.

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You need to stop focusing
on finding special people

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and think more about how to
create content that's going

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to be more likely to be shared.

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