Brand Challenge: Is There a ‘Recipe’ for Going Viral?

• It’s every marketer’s dream to see a campaign go viral. However, earning the engagement of a passionate audience can be difficult for many brands, and viral successes like Volvo’s “Epic Split” campaign featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme can be hard — if not impossible — to replicate. For brands looking to get an audience’s attention, is there a recipe for success? According to Kelli Wisuri, an evangelist at Google, and Gopi Kallayil, the firm’s chief evangelist for brand marketing, there is a simple answer to that question: “Brands that meet consumers on their own terms succeed in getting greater reach and engagement.” In the following opinion piece, Wisuri and Kallayil explain why that’s so. 

Psy was a completely unknown Korean pop star until the summer of 2012, when he released his smash hit single, “Gangnam Style.” Since then, the music video has shattered all records by becoming the single most watched video of all time, reaching more than two billion views in May 2014. 

Two billion is a huge number. There are more than two billion people on the entire planet with access to the Internet, so it’s the equivalent of every person on the Internet having watched this video once. 

Whether you find Gangnam Style endearing or annoying, the reach of Psy’s video is a unique accomplishment in the history of humanity — and it’s not just rock stars like Psy and Justin Bieber who are achieving such astronomical numbers. Home videos like “Charlie Bit Me” have earned hundreds of millions of views. Video game commentators accumulate tens of millions of followers and billions of views. Even brand marketers are getting in on the action. 

Last year, Volvo’s “Epic Split” campaign featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme racked up almost 75 million views. Meanwhile, the season finale of Game of Thrones, HBO’s most popular show of all time, had a total viewership of just 18.6 million.  

Virgin Airline’s cheeky flight safety announcement video has been viewed 10 million times on YouTube, a feat that doesn’t sound impressive until you realize that all 10 million views happened not while viewers were strapped in their seats on a plane, but while they were sitting on their couches at home. Every marketer hopes that their next campaign magically goes viral, but successes like Volvo’s and Virgin’s aren’t easy to replicate.

Every marketer wants an engaged, passionate audience. Every marketer hopes that their next campaign magically goes viral, but successes like Volvo’s and Virgin’s aren’t easy to replicate.

Which begs the question: If you are a brand trying to get your audience’s attention, is there a recipe for success?  

While there’s no magic formula, there is a simple answer: Brands that meet consumers on their own terms succeed in getting greater reach and engagement.  Twitter In our experience, there are three fundamental changes in consumer expectations that digitally savvy brands understand.  

By Invitation Only

The first change in consumer expectations is that consumers want to engage with brands, but only when they invite those brands into their life. The relationship between brands and consumers is becoming more intimate as brands get physically closer to the consumer. When a consumer experiences a brand’s ad on TV, that brand’s message is 15 feet or so away. On a desktop computer, the same message is three feet away from the consumer. On a laptop, the distance shrinks to a foot or two; the brand often literally sits on the consumer’s lap. And on a mobile phone, a brand’s message is inches from the consumer’s eyeball. It’s a very personal and intimate space, so it’s no surprise that consumers are saying to brands, “Do not market to me unless I invite you in!”

Digital media is quickly moving us from a world of ambush marketing to permission-based marketing. Twitter  In the traditional model of brand marketing, advertisers waited for the pivotal moment in the big game or series finale to ambush consumers with their brand message, and consumers paid attention because they had no choice — if they wanted to see the rest of the game or TV show, they had to sit through the commercial break. 

But in the digital world, consumers have increasing control over the media they consume. Every consumer is armed with a powerful new gesture called the “swipe.” If consumers don’t like a brand’s content or ad, with a flick of the finger, they can simply swipe it away into oblivion. And this behavior isn’t limited to the digital world. Consumers may not be able to “swipe” away a boring TV commercial, but they can turn their attention elsewhere, checking Facebook on their phone or watching YouTube videos on their second screen.

So what are savvy brands doing to thrive in this world of permission-based marketing? They’re acquiring permissions from consumers. 

Starbucks, one of the world’s savviest digital marketers, acquires permissions in two ways. First, they’ve grown their social communities to include more than 50 million members. That’s 50 million people who have raised their hand on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, and said, “Starbucks, I like you as a brand. I give you permission to come into my life and communicate with me.”

Another way Starbucks takes advantage of permission-based marketing is through their mobile app. The app, which allows customers to order and pay for their lattes without waiting in line, is the most used mobile wallet app in America, beating out even PayPal. Starbucks’ app is a great way for the brand to engage with its audience, but to do so, customers must first invite the brand into their lives by downloading the mobile app.  :

Every brand seeking to build a strong online presence should ask first ask themselves, “Do we have a strategy to gain permissions from consumers?” 

Here We Are – Now, Entertain Us

Just because consumers invite a brand into their life doesn’t guarantee they’ll give the brand their attention. Consumers only pay attention to a fraction of the countless messages they receive from brands via email or Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest. Why? Because a consumer’s attention can’t possibly encompass the thousands of brand communications they’re exposed to each day. Consumers want to engage with brands, but only when they invite those brands into their life.

So what do brands need to do to earn consumer attention? The answer is simple: brands must provide value to consumers through their content, ads and campaigns. The most successful brands recognize that for consumers, value comes in three forms — entertainment, education, and utility.

Entertainment 

Volvo’s wildly successful 2013 “Epic Split” YouTube campaign was so good at earning consumer attention that it received almost 75 million views. How did Volvo do it? After all, they’re advertising a highly technical B2B product, and the Volvo brand — which stands for safety and precision — doesn’t obviously lend itself to a viral hit.

Volvo hit the attention jackpot by applying an age-old advertising rule to the new world of digital brand marketing: Entertain, and they will come. And amplify your message like crazy. 

Volvo created this gripping piece of content by taking advantage of the unique capabilities of the digital platform. The brand and their agency started by creating eleven roughly produced versions of their creative and publishing them to YouTube. Why? Volvo wanted to get real-time audience feedback to see which piece of content resonated best before investing large amounts of money in distribution. Data from YouTube revealed that Live Test 6 — the spot featuring Van Damme doing the splits — drove the most views, shares and buzz, so Volvo backed the campaign with additional paid media support to fuel its success.   

Volvo’s novel, clever use of entertainment on the digital platform not only hit the attention sweet spot but also drove bottom line business results. One month after launching the campaign, Volvo announced a 31% increase in truck sales.

Education 

Clinique faced a problem that’s all too familiar to most retail brands — diminishing traffic to their physical stores. How could Clinique educate customers about their products if they never visited Clinique’s makeup counters? 

Clinique turned to digital media to solve the problem. The brand invited 10 beauty bloggers to join them in a live, online video chat with Julia Cox, a Clinique beauty expert. During the Hangout, participants had the opportunity to ask Julia questions they might typically ask at a makeup counter.

Viewers willingly tuned in, devoting more than 15 minutes of their attention, because Clinique provided their audience with value in the form of education. 

But what’s even more interesting is what Clinique did to scale this content on the digital platform. They took the Hangout footage, sliced it into 10-15 second pieces of content, and then ran that content as permission-based, opt-in video ads. And guess what?

Because those ads were educational and authentic, they received 16 times higher view-through rate and ten times higher click-through rate than official product ads advertising the same exact product feature. Here Clinique hit two birds with one stone — permission-based advertising, and value through education — to drive real impact.

Utility 

Toyota recognized that the car-buying process intimidates and confuses many people, especially Millennials. So they decided to put consumers back in control of the process by re-imagining the buying experience online. 

The result, called the Toyota Collaborator, allows consumers to collaborate with friends online to build the car of their dreams, share their dream car on social networks, and most important, video chat with a local dealer to get their questions answered. Consumers can even take the car they’ve created on a virtual test drive using Google Street View. 

The Toyota Collaborator takes advantage of digital technology to solve some of the most stressful parts of buying a car: exploring features, consulting with friends or family, and making decisions — all in a high-pressured sales environment. 

As a result of the campaign, the time consumers spend on Toyota’s site has increased dramatically, and local dealers are clamoring to join the Collaborator pilot. If consumers don’t like a brand’s content or ad, with a flick of the finger, they can simply swipe it away into oblivion.

The Collaborator is a brilliant and successful piece of marketing, because it’s useful to consumers. By educating, or entertaining, or providing utility brands such as Toyota, Clinique and Volvo are earning the attention of large audiences and driving real business results. 

Brands Ignite, Customers Amplify

In the digital world, consumers understand they have power to impact a brand’s success and reputation. If a brand delights consumers, they’re willing to amplify the brand’s message. 

Ziploc is a utilitarian product that’s a staple of almost every household in America. It’s a useful product, but not the type of product you’d expect consumers to engage with and talk about online. And yet, a search for “Ziploc bag” on YouTube yields more than 16,000 videos, and not a single one of those videos was made by the brand itself. Instead, all 16,000-plus videos were made by consumers talking about the Ziploc brand. You can find videos demonstrating how to make ice cream and omelets using Ziploc bags, videos reviewing the product, and even videos that use Ziploc bags as a hook for entertainment. 

Consumer-generated content like this is brand amplification, and it’s a tool consumers use not only to reward brands that delight them, but to punish brands that disappoint them (as Comcast recently discovered when adisastrous customer service call went viral). 

So what are savvy brands doing? They’re harnessing the positive power of amplification (and minimizing the negative) by actively encouraging consumers to get involved. 

GoPro encourages its customers to upload user-generated content online. As a result, customers post approximately six thousand videos per day on YouTube with the word GoPro in its title or description. GoPro rewards customers for their participation by curating and redistributing customers “best of” UGC on their YouTube channel. The brand’s digital marketing prowess and deep understanding of consumer behavior online has helped GoPro become the fastest-growing camera company in the world.  

The Ultimatum

In the digital world, consumers don’t want to be ambushed by advertising; instead, they expect brands to advertise to them only when they grant brands permission to do so. Consumers expect brands to deliver something valuable in their messaging, whether its entertainment, education, or utility. And lastly, consumers know they have the power to amplify a brand’s message, and they expect to actively participate in doing so.  

The message is clear — to be successful in the digital era, brands must listen to the demands of their consumers when marketing to them: “Meet our expectations, or become irrelevant.”

6 Viral-Marketing Lessons to Learn From the Ice Bucket Challenge

Social feeds from across the country are chock-full of videos and photos of celebrities, inventors, CEOs, athletes and politicians all taking part in the most recent viral sensation: the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Whether you've laughed at your friend’s reaction to the ice cold water or taken the challenge yourself, postings about it are everywhere. This initiative has achieved something that's every marketer’s dream: goingviral and capturing wide attention across the nation in a month or two.

How did this simple initiative turn into a movement that has scored participation from some of the biggest names in the country, includingBill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Kobe Bryant, Oprah and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie?  

Related: What You Can Learn About Marketing From an 'Icy' Phenomenon

The Ice Bucket Challenge benefits the ALS Association, which is dedicated to raising funds to research a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis as well as caring for those with the disease. It gained steam with the participation of Beverly, Mass.-based Pete Frates, who since 2012 has had the illness (also called Lou Gehrig's disease).

Startups, established firms and marketers of all types can learn from the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge. Those trying to develop a viral campaign can take the following steps:

1. Identify the goal or cause.

The goal of the Ice Bucket Challenge has been to spread awareness and raise funds for ALS research and its success has exceeded initial expectations. The objective is simple and clear and the challenge doesn’t require much effort from participants: going online to donate or pouring a bucket of ice water over the head, or both.

Today’s consumers like simplicity and direct messaging. They typically won’t take the time to read through an entire article, newsletter or web page to understand a message. Marketers, simplicity is your friend.

2. Make it fun and easy.

Few things are funnier than seeing people have ice poured all over them and watching them cringe, scream or freeze in place. The web has been flooded with comical videos and images of those who have accepted the challenge.

People like to laugh, so keep members of your audience entertained with a video or photo that they would enjoy viewing. Keeping things lighthearted lets people connect with an organization on a human level and can encourage further engagement in an authentic way. 

3. Add immediacy.

Those asked to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge have only 24 hours to do so.

If you want an idea to flourish, keep the window of time brief to propel the process forward rapidly. By giving your audience a deadline, the initiative will become a greater priority. 

Related: 5 Social-Media Marketing Lessons From the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

4. Understand the power of multiplication.

The ALS challenge calls on participants to encourage three additional people to participate, thus creating a multiplier effect.

When possible, let consumers involved in an initiative have a chance to engage with their network so as to experience the joy of others joining in. The bonus for a marketer is bringing increased exposure to a company's brand. 

5. Share on many platforms.

News of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is being shared on many social-media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

If you’re hoping for an idea or campaign to go viral, make it easy for others to share updates across multiple platforms. Don’t give people a reason to not become involved. 

6. Give participants a chance to feel good.

Everyone loves to feel a little better about himself (or herself). The Ice Bucket Challenge raises funds for a medical cause, and no matter the size of a donation, participants can feel good because they're helping others in need.

Plus, the challenge gives participants a sense of unity: They are sharing positive feelings and a goal with the rich and famous.

Setting up an initiative like this lets participants also allows for an emotional connection with an organization and opens up an opportunity for conversation. 

Related: A Benign Virus: Your Company's Content Shared Across Social Media

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236843

President Obama: It Gets Better

It Gets Better: Dan and Terry

Dan Savage: How ‘It Gets Better’ Went Viral

Gay rights activist and syndicated columnist Dan Savage has been praised by many and even awarded a Webby Special Achievement Award for starting an online campaign that went viral.

In 2010, he launched the anti-bullying It Gets Better Project, which encourages people to upload YouTube videos to give hope to gay, lesbian, bisexual and questioning youth who are facing persecution at home and at school. From one video — made by Savage and his partner, Terry Miller — the project has grown to include more than 50,000 recordings, a book of essays, fundraising efforts and affiliated groups in Australia, Latin America, Denmark and Sweden.

But at a talk earlier this week, Savage admitted he’s something of a luddite. As proof, he pointed to his decision to use his personal e-mail address as the one attached to the YouTube account he opened to start It Gets Better. “People talk about what a tech-savvy genius I am, but I’m really a moron,” he said in a speech co-sponsored by Penn’s Center for Public Health Initiatives. “The first indication that [his video with Miller] touched a nerve was when the e-mails started to come in. Anytime anybody liked, friended, forwarded or left a comment, it generated an e-mail. The e-mails were coming in so fast they were cascading down the screen.”

Savage was prompted to start It Gets Better by a string of suicides in 2010 by teens who were bullied at school for being perceived to be gay. After writing about the death of Indiana teen Billy Lucas in his column, Savage noticed a comment from a reader who wished she had known Lucas and could have told him that as he became an adult, things would get better. “That comment, that phrase that things get better, really leapt out at me because it is true,” he said. “But I would never get an invitation to speak at a high school. I would never get an invitation to speak at a middle school unless the principal really, really wanted to get fired. I would never get to speak to the kid who really, really needs [to hear that].”

Then Savage realized that he was “waiting for an invitation that was no longer required. In the YouTube, Facebook era, I can sit in front of my computer and speak to LGBT youth.”

He and Miller recorded the first It Gets Better video in their living room — but no one has ever seen it. After watching the recording, the couple realized they were sending the wrong message. “We got it backward. We spoke for 15 minutes about bullying and spoke for one minute about joy,” Savage said. “We don’t need to tell LGBT kids what being bullied looks like or feels like. They know that.”

They tried again and put the second take up on YouTube with the goal of attracting 100 others to make videos of their own. “We thought if we got to 100 videos, we would have enough [diversity] that any LGBT kid could find someone close to them” in terms of race, ethnicity or part of the country, he said.

Then the e-mail deluge from the first night caused Savage’s computer to crash. In five days, 600 people had made and uploaded videos for inclusion on the It Gets Better YouTube channel. Savage and Miller felt obligated to watch each of those videos in its entirety, “so for five days we did nothing but watch videos and sob.” When the count hit 600, the YouTube channel had hit its capacity. But then an employee at Google backdated the account to 2004, which increased the channel’s capacity to 5,000. Eventually, a separate website was created to house videos for the project, including submissions from President Obama, actor Neil Patrick Harris and singer Ke$ha. “The goal wasn’t to have the biggest YouTube channel ever…. The goal wasn’t to get videos from celebrities,” Savage said. “The goal was to save lives, and we have done that.”

As an another example of his lack of tech savvy, Savage noted that he originally planned to ask people who wanted to submit It Gets Better videos to e-mail them directly to him, and he would then post each one on YouTube. The tech team at the magazine he works for advised against that, so instead each contributor had to create a YouTube account, upload their video to that account and then send Savage the link. That meant each contributor automatically received e-mails when viewers liked or commented on their posts. “It opened a conversation between LGBT adults and LGBT youth about their lives.”

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/dan-savage-how-it-gets-better-went-viral/

Why Things Catch On - Jonah Berger

‘Contagious’: Jonah Berger on Why Things Catch On

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/contagious-jonah-berger-on-why-things-catch-on/

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If you have watched and shared PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video or gone into an unknown restaurant simply because it was full of people and appeared to be popular, you have the basis for understanding what makes things go viral. In Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger‘s new book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, he identifies six principles that cause people to talk about and share an idea or product. Knowledge@Wharton recently sat down with Berger to learn more about his findings, including why people share cat memes, which organizations and individuals have conceived and implemented the most successful viral campaigns — from Blendtec to ‘Movember’ — and why making something contagious does not have to be expensive.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Jonah, thank you for being here today. Your book is all about what makes different products or ideas catch on. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions out there about why things go viral?

Berger: The easiest place to start would be cats. [If you ask], “Why do things go viral?” people usually give one of two answers. They say, “Oh, it’s random. It’s luck. It’s just chance.” Or they say, “It’s cats.” If you look on the web, there are viral cat pictures, so it must be cats that drive things to go viral.

There are definitely some cat things that become popular, but that really doesn’t tell us anything about why most things go viral. It doesn’t tell us why some cat videos are shared and others aren’t, and it doesn’t tell us why things that have nothing to do with cats go viral. It’s like noticing that Bill Gates, Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton are all names that start with “Bill” and deciding to name your child Bill because that will make them famous. It’s messing up correlation and causation.

What the book is all about is teasing apart the luck and random stuff, with science, and actually trying to understand what makes people talk about and share things.

Knowledge@Wharton: In the book, you actually outline a framework of six principles for why things catch on, using the STEPPS acronym. Can you describe those for us and discuss how you developed them?

Berger: The books talks about the six key steps to drive people to talk and share. STEPPS is an acronym for:

• Social currency:, It’s all about people talking about things to make themselves look good, rather than bad
• Triggers, which is all about the idea of “top of mind, tip of tongue.” We talk about things that are on the top of our heads.
• Ease for emotion: When we care, we share. The more we care about a piece of information or the more we’re feeling physiologically aroused, the more likely we pass something on.
• Public: When we can see other people doing something, we’re more likely to imitate it.
• Practical value: Basically, it’s the idea of news you can use. We share information to help others, to make them better off.
• Stories, or how we share things that are often wrapped up in stories or narratives.

Knowledge@Wharton: Which of these principles do you think are most difficult for companies or individuals to harness when they are trying to promote a product or an idea or just get something to catch on?

Berger: People often say, “Well, we have to do something crazy.” Guerilla marketing and viral marketing is about dressing people up in chicken suits and running down to the subway and handing out $100 bills. That will get attention. That’s really not the right answer. It is true that remarkable things get talked about and shared. But there are a lot of other drivers of sharing. One big thing we talk about is triggers — how cues in the environment remind us of related things and cause us to talk about them. If I said, “peanut butter,” you might think of “jelly.” If I said, “cat,” you might think of “dog.” Peanut butter is basically a little advertisement for jelly. It’s not actually there, but it reminds you of that related thing. Cues in the environment can remind us of products and ideas and make us talk about them more. Companies often don’t think about, “Well, what in the environment is going to remind consumers of my product or idea?”

Similarly, emotion. Companies recognize, “Hey, if we can get people to feel emotional, we’ll get them to talk and share.” Most companies get stuck because they say, “Well, hold on. Our product isn’t naturally emotional” or “Our product isn’t naturally remarkable — we just can’t do anything about it.” What the book is really about is showing both companies and individuals that anyone can craft contagious content. It’s not about having to have the right product. You have to think about what makes people talk about and share and then build that into your product or messaging. Any product can be remarkable. Any product can be emotional. Think about what makes people feel emotion or what makes them think something is remarkable, and then build that into your product or idea.

Knowledge@Wharton: There’s actually a great example of this in the book that has to do with blenders. Tell us about how the people at Blendtec made blenders fit this framework.

Berger: You could say new Apple products or hot cars or exciting Hollywood movies are naturally remarkable products. But who would talk about cement or toilet paper or a household appliance like a refrigerator or a blender? There’s nothing remarkable about a blender. But there’s a great example of a company, Blendtec, that actually made a blender video that’s gotten more than 10 million views…. They have a series of videos called “Will it blend?” — which has over 150 million views — where they stick all types of different things in a blender.

In my favorite video, for example, they stick an iPhone in the blender. They actually drop an iPhone in. They close the top, they press the button, and you watch the iPhone get torn up by this really, really strong blender. It gets reduced to shreds. Little shards of glass and all the other things that make up an iPhone. Lots of smoke. At the end of the day, it’s basically powder. Now you’ve never seen a blender tear an iPhone. You’ve never imagined that a blender could do that to an iPhone. Yet you see it, and it’s pure remarkability. You’re so amazed you have to share that with someone else because it’s so impressive. People share these videos, even though they are about a blender. The point at the end of the day is anyone can craft contagious content. Yes, they are selling a blender. Yes, a blender doesn’t seem like a remarkable product. But by finding the inner remarkability in their product, they got people to talk and share.

Knowledge@Wharton: What fascinated me about it was that the marketing director who had been hired realized that something they were doing every day — testing blenders — held opportunity for jumpstarting buzz for the firm.

Berger: Yes, George Wright, a new marketing hire, comes into the office. He notices a pile of sawdust on the floor on one of his first days at work. He asks, “Are we expanding the office? Why is there sawdust on the floor?” His colleague responds, “No, the CEO is doing what he does every day: trying to break blenders.” The CEO would take two-by-four pieces of wood, golf balls, Bic lighters and throw them in the blender to see if the blender was tough enough to withstand the punishment. He wanted to make a really strong blender.

George saw this and said, “This is a fantastic idea. This is gonna be a viral home run.” He took a $50 marketing budget — not $50 million, not $50,000 — but literally $50. Bought a white lab coat, some of those goofy glasses you often see people wear when they chop wood or something, and just filmed the CEO doing what the guy was already doing: trying to break blenders…. They distributed it to their mailing list, they distributed it to others, and it caught on like wildfire. People saw it, and they had to pass it on and share it with their friends.

It’s a great example of why it doesn’t take a huge marketing budget. It doesn’t take a marketing genius — though they are smart marketers — to think about this. What it takes is understanding the psychology behind social transmission — what makes us talk about and share things. Then by generating content or building in features of your products, you create that viral user growth.

Knowledge@Wharton: On the Internet, it’s often user-generated content that manages to generate giant page-view numbers and the viral sharing that many companies with much larger budgets and many more resources at their disposal would just die to have. What can companies learn from that?

Berger: Companies often think it’s about advertising [or about] creating a really slick message and putting it out there. [They think] it will be really persuasive. It’s more about being open, being authentic and letting consumers create their own content. But also, creating ads that build in an understanding of why people talk about and share things. People don’t want to share things that look like ads. They don’t want to look like they are a walking advertisement for a company. But they will share really engaging content, even if that content happens to relate to a brand.

A few years ago, Burger King had a great example on the web, the subservient chicken. You could go to this website, and you could type in whatever you wanted. This guy in a chicken suit would do whatever you typed in. For example, “Do a back flip,” and the guy in the chicken suit would do a back flip. “Hit a home run,” and he would look like he’s hitting a home run. But it wasn’t heavily-branded. It didn’t say, “Burger King, Burger King, buy Burger King” all over the page. The more you brand something, the more it looks like an ad, the less willing people are going to be to talk about and share it. You need to design content that’s like a Trojan horse. There’s an exterior to it that’s really exciting, remarkable and has social currency or practical value. But inside, you hide the brand or the benefit. “Will it blend” is a great example. It’s not a highly branded piece of content. People are watching it because they love to see this blender tear through things. But along the way, they’re learning about the brand. If, instead, they said, “Buy this blender. It’s fantastic. You’ll love it,” people wouldn’t share that with others, because it seems like an ad.

But that’s not just online. It also happens offline. There’s a great local Philly example of a restaurant here called “Barclay Prime,” that has a $100 cheesesteak. Now, you might sit there and ask, “$100 cheesesteak? What could be on a $100 cheesesteak?” Well, it’s everything from Kobe beef to lobster to truffles. It comes with a little bottle of champagne. It’s a remarkable product, particularly for Philly, where we often think about cheesesteaks. Again, people don’t want to seem like an advertisement for Barclay Prime, but they do love to talk about this remarkable product. Along the way, they talk about the brand. It’s about understanding what consumers like to talk about and then attaching your brand or your idea to a story that they want to share.

Knowledge@Wharton: You talked a little bit at the beginning about how a lot of people seem to think that going viral or becoming contagious is about luck, but that these six steps are what are really coming into play. For a company trying to harness these six steps, what kinds of issues do you see? How much do opposing market forces come into play? And what about sheer luck? Does luck have anything to do with it at all?

Berger: Imagine you’re a baseball player, and you’re hitting pretty well, but you want to raise your batting average. This book will show you how to raise your viral batting average. Can I guarantee you’ll be the next “Gangnam Style” with a billion views? Definitely not. I can’t guarantee that. But I can guarantee that it will raise the likelihood that consumers talk about and share your ideas. If a person on average tells one person, we can increase it to two. If half the people are talking about your product, we can increase it to 60%. We have evidence-based principles that show why people talk about it and share. There is some luck to get a billion views. You can’t mathematically put something together to guarantee that you’ll get that many views. There is a snowball effect on the web. But you can guarantee that more people will talk about your brand or more people will share your idea, if you understand why people talk and share.

Knowledge@Wharton: How have changes in the advertising and technology landscapes altered the nature of how things become contagious and, conversely, the reasons or the speed at which they maybe become uncontagious, or just peter out?

Berger: Advertising is great for broad awareness. It’s great because it makes many people aware that your product exists. But it’s not very persuasive. If we think about it, we’re much more likely to believe what our friends say than to believe what ads say. I’m not against advertising. If you have enough money to buy a Super Bowl commercial, and that’s worth doing on your end, it’s definitely worth doing. It gets broad, broad awareness. But it’s not going to be very persuasive. What’s going to be persuasive is hearing from a friend or a colleague or someone you know that a product is good. Ninety percent of people believe what their friends say. Only about 30% of people believe what ads say. What I would say to businesses and organizations is, advertising’s not a bad thing. Indeed, it is one way to encourage word of mouth. But they should think about why people are going to talk about and share your ads once they’ve happened. How can you build content, both online and offline, that people will talk about and share?

This conversation is focused a lot on the web, and the web is important. But actually, much more word of mouth is offline than online. There has been so much focus recently on social media technologies — Twitter and Facebook and the newest shiny tool that’s out there. But if you think about it, five or six years ago you could have been an expert on MySpace. You could have gone to a talk that says, “MySpace is where you should spend all your resources.” You could have gone after that tool. Now that useful knowledge would be pretty worthless, right? No one’s really on MySpace anymore. Will Facebook be around in 10 years? Will Twitter still be around? I don’t know. Will people still be talking and sharing? Certainly. It’s more about understanding why people talk and share, whether it’s online or offline, rather than focusing on the technologies they are sharing through.

Knowledge@Wharton: Can you give an “offline” example of something that went viral?

Berger: One example I really like is the example of Movember. Nonprofits have a problem: most donations to nonprofits are pretty private. You know what you donate to, and you might even know what your spouse or your best friend donates to. But you don’t really have any idea what your friends or people at the office donate to. That action is pretty private. But because it’s private, it’s hard for that to catch on more broadly. If you can’t see what others are doing, it’s hard to imitate it. One idea I talk about in the book is making the private public — making what people are doing more observable or visible. A favorite example of that is this campaign called “Movember.”

A number of years ago in Australia, a couple of guys got together. They were drinking beers. They were talking and thinking about what would be fun to do just as a joke, for kicks. They decided to have a mustache-growing contest. They grew their best mustache. It happened to be the month of November, so they called it Movember. The next year, they had so much fun they wanted to do it again. They decided to raise money for men’s cancer. There are lots of campaigns for women’s cancers: the 5K races, Susan G. Komen Foundation and so on. Not so much for men’s cancers. But they had the really sharp idea of rather than just asking people for money, they would use mustaches as a public signal of that private behavior. For the month of November, you would grow a mustache, and you would ask people to donate money to support the cause for men’s cancers. But what’s really nice about that behavior, it’s a very public behavior…. If someone’s part of the campaign, you can see that he has a mustache on his face. If somebody in your office, who is a pretty buttoned-down guy starts sporting a mustache suddenly in the month of November — a big Rollie Fingers sort of mustache — you’re going to ask them, “Why are you doing this? What’s going on?” That will encourage them to talk about and share this Movember campaign, which will encourage you to do the same thing, either that year or next year. This is entirely offline, but public is a really simple way of getting ideas to catch on.

Think about Apple’s headphones. It used to be that we all carried portable CD players. It was like carrying a pizza. You had to run like this, to make sure it didn’t skip. Then, they came out with these things called mp3 players. Really great technology, but they were super expensive. Is it worth adopting this new product? How do I know if it’s worth adopting this new product? If you looked around on the subway or the bus, you couldn’t tell [which products people were using] because everyone’s headphones were black. It was impossible to see what device someone was using, as opposed to another device.

But what Apple did really smartly is they used white headphones. Once you start seeing a number of people wearing white headphones, you say, “Wow. A lot of people are using this. It must be really good,” which encourages you to adopt that product as well. It’s just like if you’ve gone to a foreign city and you don’t know where to eat. How you decide? You look for a restaurant that’s full of people. It’s a totally offline example. But you assume if it’s full of people, it must be really good. Thinking about how to make the private public, particularly in an offline environment, is a great way to help your product catch on.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On