JONAH BERGER: So I want
to start with a very simple question. These are three products and
brands that most of you in the audience are probably
quite familiar with. So on the left we have Walt
Disney World, the self-described place where
dreams come true; in the middle, we have Honey Nut
Cheerios, the delicious breakfast cereal, which may or
may not cure your cholesterol; and on the right we have
Scrubbing Bubbles, the bathroom cleaner. So if you had to guess, which of
these three products do you think gets the most
word of mouth? Is it Disney World, Cheerios,
or Scrubbing Bubbles? And I'm actually going to
ask everybody to vote. So you want to take
a first guess? AUDIENCE: I'd say Scrubbing
Bubbles. JONAH BERGER: Scrubbing
Bubbles. How many people want to vote
for Scrubbing Bubbles? OK. Good. Somebody else want to take
a different vote? Yeah. AUDIENCE: Disney World. JONAH BERGER: Disney World. How people want to
go with Disney? OK. Good. Anybody else? That's it. OK. AUDIENCE: I gotta
say Cheerios. JONAH BERGER: Okay, you'll
say Cheerios. You'll be the brave soul. OK, good. AUDIENCE: Come on Cheerios. JONAH BERGER: Cheerios. Good. I got a couple of people
for Cheerios. So I want to point out
two things in this. First, I don't think
we know the answer. So we went around, about, I'd
say about 45% of the folks were for Scrubbing Bubbles,
about 45% were for Disney World. So we're pretty evenly split
among those two. So we're not really sure
of the answer. But second, if we did have to
guess-- so how many people guessed Disney World? That is a really good guess. It's wrong, but good guess. Scrubbing Bubbles? Also an excellent guess,
also wrong. So the gentleman over here who
is nice enough to stick his neck out for me, I appreciate
it, is actually-- Cheerios gets more word of mouth
than Disney World and Scrubbing Bubbles. And this is just one example. But I think it points to a
broader question, which is why do some products and ideas get
talked about more than others? You probably heard that word of
mouth is really important, as we'll talk about in
next couple minutes. It's more important
than advertising. But to make it work, we have to
understand why people talk about some things rather
than others. If we want people to talk about
our product or idea, we have to understand the science
or the psychology behind social transmission. And so that's what I'm going
to talk about today. My name is Jonah Berger. I'm a professor at the Wharton
School, I have this book called "Contagious," which
is coming out tomorrow. I have heard that they've been
nice enough to get some of them for you guys at
a reduced cost. But they're actually
unfortunately not here today. So if you're interested, they'll
be here tomorrow apparently or you can
get it on Amazon or anywhere else you want. It'll be in stores tomorrow. I'm excited to actually
physically see it in the store. So tomorrow will be
exciting day. Also, everything I'm
going to talk about today is research based. It would be great to be
a social media guru. I think it's a really fun job. Apparently, all you have
to do is make guesses about what's true. You don't have to back it up
with data and you just get to write about it. And that sounds fantastic. But that's actually
not my job. Wharton would not pay
me if I did that. So all this is based on academic
research that we and others have done in the
past decade or so. It's all up on my website. If you're interested, please
go check it out. And that'll sort of fill in a
lot of the gaps from what I'm going to talk about today. So just to start us out with
that idea that word of mouth is important, McKinsey, none
other than McKinsey, because people believe what McKinsey
says, has said that word of mouth generates more than
twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as
diverse as skin care and mobile phones. And this probably doesn't come
as a big surprise to folks in the audience, but a lot of
research in the past decade or so has shown that word
of mouth has a big causal impact on sales. Everything you can imagine, from
online book reviews, so a five-star review, increases the
number of books sold by about 20, to offline word of
mouth for restaurants and a whole host of other products. Why do you think that word
of mouth is so much more effective than advertising,
if you had to guess? Yeah? AUDIENCE: It's usually
a trusted source. JONAH BERGER: OK. So we don't really believe
advertising. Advertisers say hey, 9 out
of 10 dentists love this toothpaste. You say hold on. Really? 9 out of 10 dentists. I don't know about that. You never see an ad that says 1
out of 10 dentists like this toothpaste, right? So you don't trust ads, but
you trust your friends. Your friends usually have your
best interests at heart. They're going to help you. That's good. That's one reason. The other reason is word of
mouth is much more targeted. And now with digital ad
targeting, a lot of the good work that Google's doing, it's
easier to target people. But it's still really hard to
be exactly sure what someone is interested in and
when they might be interested in that thing. So if you sell skis for example,
well maybe you say, OK, I'm going to buy some words related to skis on keywords. That'll get you sort of close. Because it may not be
still people who are looking to buy skis. Maybe you get buy skis and
that's even closer. Or you average in a ski
magazine, but a whole bunch of people who are reading that
magazine might not actually be in the market for skis
at the moment. So what word of mouth does is
it's really, really targeted. So if you don't have a baby,
no one's going to tell you about baby products. If you don't like spicy food, no
one's going to talk to you about a restaurant that has
really great spicy food. Word of mouth is like a
searchlight that works through your social network to find the
person that might be most interested in a particular
product or idea. So a really nice example of
this that happened to me a couple years ago, publishers
often send academics books in the mail. They're hoping that we'll read
those books and assign them to our classes. And so I got a book in the
mail from a publisher. But they didn't actually send
one, they actually sent two books, two copies of
the same book. Now let me tell you, the second
copy is not any better than the first. It was the exact same book. So why would they do that? Well, they sent that second book
and they said Professor Berger, we think you'll
like this book. And if you do, please share it
with a friend of yours might like it as well. And so that's this old sociological idea of homophily. We tend to be friends of people
that are similar to us. If you like football,
you tend to have friends who like football. If you like opera, you tend to
have friends that like opera. And so if you like something,
you probably know other people that would like that as well. And that's the targeting benefit
of word of mouth and social media more generally,
finding people that are going to interested in it, who can
help you find other people that are interested in it. That's why the referral benefits
are so useful. The customer lifetime value of
customers referred through social networks is much higher
than traditional customers because it helps people find the
people that will be most interested. OK, great. So we like word of mouth. Let's jump on the bandwagon. How do we get it? And indeed, there's been a lot
of interest lately in social media channels. If you had to guess though, how
much word of mouth do you think is over social media? So it's over things like
Facebook, like Twitter, online interviews. What percent of word of mouth is
online, compared to offline being face to face? AUDIENCE: 20. JONAH BERGER: 20. 20. AUDIENCE: 25. JONAH BERGER: 25. AUDIENCE: 5. JONAH BERGER: 5. We'll do--- AUDIENCE: 40. JONAH BERGER: 40. I feel like auctioneer up here. 10? Do I hear 20, 25, 30, 30? It's actually 7. So not 70, not 17, 7. So the 5 was pretty close. And if we think about why that
is though, we can think about why we think there's so much
online word of mouth. Hardly a the day goes by where
we see an article, like we don't see an article about it
in the paper, oh Facebook is doing this, Twitter is doing
this, Google+ is doing this. There's some new site we need
to pay attention to. And further there's a
record of all the things we share online. We can go back and look at
those things we shared. But if you think about what
you did in the five or 10 minutes before you were waiting
for me to talk or even when you were out in the
hallway, you were probably talking to someone else
and you were probably talking face to face. You don't sit in a meeting
and tweet back and forth to each other. You have a face-to-face
conversation. And so much more word of mouth
is actually offline. And I think the second problem
with focusing so much on these is we think about the technology
rather than the psychology. So everyone probably
remembers Myspace. A few years ago, you could have
decided you're going to be a Myspace expert. You're going to put all your
eggs in the basket of Myspace, understand how it works. That's great. And now how useful would
that expertise be? AUDIENCE: Not really. JONAH BERGER: Not
really, right? We've moved on to
something else. And so if Facebook is here in
10 years, maybe, maybe not. Twitter is here in 10 years,
maybe, maybe not. A couple of years ago,
it was Foursquare was the new hot thing. Now, everyone's talking
about Pinterest. Technologies will come and go. Why people share things will
pretty much stay the same, the same psychological drivers
of sharing. And so we need to understand
why people talk and share. And that brings me
to this picture. This is a cat playing
a turntable. It's not actually a turntable. It's a sort of cat
scratching post. But anyone have any idea why
I have this in my talk? Why a talk on virality has to
have a picture of cats in it. What? AUDIENCE: People share
them a lot. JONAH BERGER: Yeah. So there's a theory out there
that people share things because they have pictures
of cats in them. So you go on the web, one of
the most prevalent theories oh, why do things go viral? Because of cats. So this cat picture
is fantastic. It's got to go viral because
it has cats in it. Now, obviously that
logic is flawed. It's flawed for a
couple reasons. First, it's like noticing that
Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Bill Cosby are all famous. And so you decide to name your
child Bill because well, getting the name Bill must be
the route to fame and fortune. Certainly, there are some
kind cat videos that are great, right? That are very viral,
that people share. But that doesn't explain
why some are shared and others aren't. And it doesn't tell us anything
about non-cat videos, most other things that's
shared on the web. So I'm actually going to put
an X unfortunately through this cute picture of a cat
playing on a turntable. And instead, I'm going
to put this up. And this is supposed
to be science. I couldn't find a better
image for science. But this is what I would
call science. So we've studied things
like why "New York Times" articles go viral. We've gotten all the articles
released by "The New York Times" over a six-month period,
over 7,000 articles, to look at why certain articles
make the most emailed list and why others don't. We've analyze over 500 products
and brands to look at why certain products get more
word of mouth than others. We've looked at YouTube videos,
a whole host of different types of content. And based on these insights
we've seen again and again that certain principles
both drive people to talk and share. Unfortunately, it's not cats. But these principles can help
us explain why cats and a broad variety of things are
talked about and share. And so what I'm going to do
today is share a little bit of the insights from the book. And the book has a
framework in it. And what it is essentially
is a recipe, a recipe for engineering content to make
it more viral or talkable. And people at this point usually
say well, hold on. Can you guarantee that something
will go viral? We can't guarantee that
something will go viral. I can't guarantee that by
reading this book you will be the next "Gangnam Style"
with a billion views. That's what everyone
wants to know. But what I can guarantee is more
people will talk about and share your idea. A useful analogy here sort of
like a batting average. Can you guarantee you're going
to hit a home run every time? No. But to the degree you can
improve your batting average, you're increasing the chance
that you get a hit each time. That's what these principles
can do. They can increase the chance
that people talk about and share your ideas. From 9 people to 10 people,
from-- if you think about a virality coefficient, the viral
coefficient, getting that number up above 1. And so what I'm going to talk
about is how to craft contagious content. By content, I both mean the
messages we wrap around our products, but also how we build
the products themselves for viral growth. Thinking how to make the
products more talkable and shareable and how we design both
websites, as well as the product themselves, to be
something people will pass on. By contagious, I mean that old
idea of spreading from person to person, just like
a virus might. But the first idea here is
actually the most important one, the first word, and
that is the word craft. So you might think that you can
only do this for certain types of products. So someone this weekend shared
Google Glass with me, Google Glass, Glasses, Glass,
Glasses? Glass, really a cool product. That is a naturally remarkable
product that people are going to talk up because it has some
of these characters naturally. But you might say, hold on. I'm working on a product
that not that exciting. So I do exec ad sessions
sometimes where someone will, say I sell cement. How can I make people talk
about and share cement? And what I'm going to talk about
is how these same ideas can be used to sell cement,
toilet paper, network software, whatever you want. Pick your most boring product,
by following these principles you can craft that product or
that idea to make it more talkable or shareable. And finally, the last
thing I want to say here is quite important. We're going focus in our next
few minutes that we have left on the message, not
the messenger. So how many of you heard the
idea of influentials, or opinion leaders, or mavens,
connectors, salesmen, those sorts of ideas? So that's a really
compelling idea. So about a decade ago, Malcolm
Gladwell came out with a famous book called "The Tipping
Point," great book, extremely well written. But about half of what is
in that book is wrong. And many in the audience
probably have realized that already. My job as an academic is to
figure out what's right there and what's wrong. And we focus so much on special
people, the messenger of our ideas, we said if we can
just find those hipsters in the East Village
and get them our product, well we're done. Then it's going to catch on. But by focusing so much on the
messenger, we've ignored something else that's really,
really important and that is the message. Lots of people don't have
millions of friends or millions of followers, yet
they talk about and share things all the time. And so we need to understand the
psychology of talking and sharing to make people share our
stuff, whether they have 10 friends or 10,000, whether
they're really persuasive or not persuasive at all. It's sort of like thinking about
the difference between jokes and joke tellers. So we probably all have a friend
who's a really good joke teller. When they tell a joke at the
party, everybody laughs. But there are certain jokes that
are funny regardless of who tells them. And that's a difference
between the message and the messenger. How we can create content that
people are going to share regardless of who's
doing the sharing. So there are six key
STEPPS in the book. Each of these is a
research-based principal. I'll talk about that recipe, one
of the ingredients in the recipe for talking
and sharing. I don't have time today to
talk about all of them. But I'll pick maybe one or two,
depending on how much time we have, and see how
many we get through. I'll pick a fun one that relates
to you guys, I think. So I think I'll talk
about triggers. But I'll give you a sense
of what the others are. And if you're interested,
there's a whole fantastic book out there that you can
read to find out about the rest of them. So I won't talk about
social currency. I will talk about triggers and
maybe I'll talk about stories, depending if there's time. How many of you guys know
about Please Don't Tell, by the way? A couple people. If you don't know about Please
Don't Tell, ask someone who raised their hand. It's a great example
of this principle called social currency. I talk about it in the book. But basically, people talk about
and share things to make them look good. I'll tell you, you know what,
I'll tell you the Please Don't Tell story. Because it's a good one and
it's a New York one. So imagine you're down in the
Village one weekend, maybe it's this weekend. It's Saturday afternoon. You're looking for something to
eat, you're hungry, you're hanging out with your friends,
when you notice a hot dog restaurant. It seems pretty cool. You like hot dogs. You walk downstairs inside to
this place called Crif Dogs, a delicious hot dog restaurant,
gingham tablecloths, huge menu in the back to die for. It's got a breakfast hot dog
with eggs, bacon, and cheese; another hot dog with green
onions and pineapple on top, sort of interesting flavors; and
the traditional New York water dog, with ketchup
and mustard. So you're sitting there. You're enjoying your hot dog. You finish it. When you notice over in the
corner here is what looks like a phone booth, sort of what
Clark Kent would change into to turn into Superman. So you say, I haven't been in
a phone in a long time. They're sort of endangered
species nowadays. Let me go check it out. So you walk over, you slide open
the doors, and you walk inside this phone booth. It's a little cramped,
tight space. But you notice on the
wall is a phone. And it's not a recent, sort
of payphone looking thing. It's a rotary dial phone. Ones you have to stick
your finger in and dial around in a circle. Just for kicks, hold the
phone to your ear and dial the number 2. And someone will pick up the
other line and they will ask you whether you have
a reservation. Reservation, I'm in a phone
booth inside of a hot dog restaurant. What would I have a
reservation for? But if you're lucky and they
have space, the back of this will open and you'll be let
into a secret bar called Please Don't Tell. Now, for those who have of
Please Don't Tell, it's a fun experience. I've been there a couple
times myself. But they have violated a lot of traditional laws of marketing. There's no sign on the street. There's no sign in
the restaurant. They have made it really
hard to get into. Yet they've never advertised
and if you've ever tried to call there, you know it's
really hard to get a reservation. Phones open at 3:00
PM for that day. By 3:30, they're all gone. People hit redial again and
again to try to get through. Really hard to get through,
so many people calling. So what did they do to
make them successful? Well if you notice, they did
something really cute. They made themselves a secret. And if you think about secrets,
someone tells you a secret, what's the first thing
you do with that information? AUDIENCE: You tell everyone. JONAH BERGER: You tell
everyone else. They tell you not to tell and
what do you do, you turn around and you tell
someone else. Because the fact that it seems
like a secret makes that information seem better and it
makes you look really good by sharing it. You go to that cool bar, you
tell someone else about it, you look like you're
an insider. You look like you're
in the know. And that's this idea
of social currency. Just like the car we drive and
the clothes we wear, the things we say affect how
other people see us. And so we talk about and share
things that give us status by association. Things like cool bars, but
also cool information of restaurants that make us look
smart and in the know. I won't share this. I'll skip this. I was going to show you guys--
have seen Will It Blend? Yeah, people have
seen it blend. OK, I'll skip that one then,
because that's sort of fun. We'll talk about triggers though
and then I'll open it up to questions. Triggers is I think-- social currency is a little
pretty intuitive concept. Triggers are a little bit
more counterintuitive. Everyone knows Rebecca
Black, yes? So many people have argued
that this is the worst song ever. I will play you, in case you
haven't heard of it before, I'll play about 10
seconds of it. That I think it's about what
everybody can stand. [MUSIC - REBECCA BLACK,
"FRIDAY LYRICS"] JONAH BERGER: OK. Good. So we've all heard
this song before. People have argued that this is
the worst song ever, which in itself is a bit of
an accomplishment. If you could truly make the
worst song ever, that would be quite impressive. So one question was that if this
song is so bad, why did so many people watch it? This song was one of the most
viral videos of 2011, over 300 million views at this point. Why? And I was actually giving a
talk to a bunch of Google executives a couple years ago,
when one of your colleagues raised their hand and said hey,
Professor Berger, your framework is great. But if it can't explain Rebecca
Black, it's not really worth it. If you can't explain this, come
on, what are you doing? And then someone from YouTube
said hold on, I think your framework can explain
Rebecca Black. So they showed me
this nice data. And this searches for Rebecca
Black over time. What you notice is it
goes up, big spike. So then it tails off,
less interest. Then it goes up again,
down, up again. There's a spike. You probably can't see it. But it's a spike every
seven days. Every seven days is a
spike in attention. Now, this song is equally bad
every day of the week. I checked. I've listened to it on Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and
Friday, equally bad. Yet Friday is an environmental
reminder to think about that song and to share
it with others. And that's what I'll
call a trigger. It's a cue, a stimulus in the
environment that triggers us to think about something else. And maybe you hear that
something is top-of-mind, like Friday makes us think about
Rebecca Black's song, it's going to be tip-of-tongue. Not only are you going to be
more likely to watch that song or purchase a product if it is
a product, but you're gong to be more likely to share it
with others because it's top-of-mind. So usage is one thing that
makes a product or idea top-of-mind. By top-of-mind, I basically what
are you thinking about? So right now, you're probably
thinking about hopefully the talk, what you just had for
lunch, or what you're doing afterwards. You're probably not really
thinking about what you're going to for summer vacation or
what you're going to do for the holidays. Those things are lower
down on your list. But using a product is one
thing that can make it top-of-mind. This is Twitter traffic for
Cheerios by time of day. And not rocket science, what
you see is not much around midnight, 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM. 6:00 AM, it starts going up. Around 8:00 AM, lots of people
are talking about Cheerios. Then it goes down again
throughout the day. And what that's saying
is people eat Cheerios in the morning. It's making that product
top-of-mind. It's making it more likely to
talk about it and share it. Notice what happens
on the weekend? It shifts a little bit
to the right because we all wake up later. So we actually analyzed both
data from Cheerios, as well as Walt Disney World. That's the problem with
Disney World. How many people have been
to Disney this year? A couple. That's the exact problem. We don't go very often and
there's nothing in the environment to remind us that
the product exists. So when people come back,
they talk about a lot. But they don't keep talking
about it because there's no trigger to remind them of
them of the product. Cheerios is really boring,
extremely boring. But we eat breakfast,
last time I checked. At least once a day. Some of us, we really like
cereal, maybe even twice. And if you don't eat Cheerios,
you wheel your cart through the grocer isle and see that
box once or twice a week. And because you're seeing it,
it's more top-of-mind. And you might say well hold on,
is usage is the only thing that makes a product
top-of-mind? So do related cues. So if I said peanut
butter and-- jelly, right? Or if I said rum and-- AUDIENCE: Coke. JONAH BERGER: Coke. Notice that the word jelly and
the word Coke aren't up there. But the word peanut butter
is like a little advertisement for jelly. If someone says cat,
you think of dog. If someone says peanut butter,
you think of jelly. It triggers related ideas in our
minds because those things are connected. Michelob used this idea of a
couple years ago with their slogan, "Weekends are Made for
Michelob." Their idea was hey, we're going to link the product to a time, the weekend. So when the weekend rolls
around, people hopefully think about consuming the product. Every time the weekend rolls
around and I want a beer, I'm going to think about Michelob. Corona has tried to do the same
thing with the beach. When you're on a beach vacation,
it's really hard not to think about ordering
Corona. You have to sort of stop
yourself and say hold on, I should order something else. But they have done a really good
job of owning the beach. Beer and the beach, you
think about Corona. Weekends and the beach,
hopefully you think about Michelob. So in terms of applying this
concept, you need to consider the context. You think about the cues or
triggers that are around your consumers that they
might come around. So one of my favorite examples
of this comes with cats. So if you a the cat and your cat
is hungry, what's your cat going to say? Meow, which is why Meow Mix is
a great name for a cat food. Every time your cat goes meow,
you're more likely to think about that thing. But you need to think
about your specific customers, your consumers. So there's a restaurant in
Philadelphia called Barclay Prime that has a $100
cheesesteak. A $100 cheesesteak, right? It has Kobe beef, it has
lobster, it has truffles. It comes with a little
bottle of champagne. Basically, the most opulent
thing you can think of. Huge, hugely expensive, I
had never had it myself. Fast Company did a piece
on me and the book. The writer took me
out to dinner. She asked where I'd
like to go. I said, let's go to Berkeley
Prime and have the $100 cheesesteak on Fast Company. So she was nice enough
to take me there. But if you think about it, why
is $100 cheesesteak good for Philly in terms of triggers. Because Philly has a
lot of cheesesteak. So every time you think of a
cheesesteak, you might think about this remarkable
cheesesteak. Whereas a $100 cheesesteak is
now so good for a restaurant in New York. Because you don't think about
cheesesteaks very often here. And so depending on what
environment you live in, what you see, what you hear, what
you smell is different. Women may have certain cues
that men don't have. Older people have certain cues
the young people don't have. Think about the environment
that people live in, it is important to think about the
right triggers to link our product to. And then the second thing is
just growing your habitat. So just like animals have a
habitat, a set of things in the environment they need to
survive, so deer have, they need water and certain
things to eat. Ideas have a habitat, a set of
cues or triggers that make people think about them. And so Kit Kat did a
really good job of growing their habitat. So you might say Kit Kat,
I really like those. But they were having a problem
a few years ago when no one would think about
their product. Everyone loved it, but they'd
never think about eating it. And so they did a really simple campaign, Kit Kat and coffee. Think about having coffee,
have a Kit Kat. Every time you take a coffee
break, have a Kit Kat. They were linking those
two things together. Why is coffee a really good
trigger for Kit Kat? AUDIENCE: So people would
have it often. JONAH BERGER: People
have it often. You know really, really
prevalent, really frequent. You have coffee multiple times
a day, it's a good time to think about a Kit Kat. So the Michelob slogan was
actually originally, that one Weekends are Made for Michelob,
was originally Holidays are Made
for Michelob. Same issue, if you think
about it, right? Holidays don't come
up as frequently. It's like a Rebecca Black song
was "Leap Day," leap day, leap day, something, something,
leap day. Equally catchy or not catching,
my karaoke voice is not good as you can tell. But much less frequently
triggered by the environment. And because of that, it's not
going to come up as often. There was a song around
Thanksgiving that some girl had. I don't know if you saw it. She was singing into
a turkey leg. Similar sort of song,
the traffic before Thanksgiving was great. Since Thanksgiving, basically
nothing because there's no trigger in the environment to
make them think about it. Yeah? AUDIENCE: So does something like
coffee get that effect just by a virtue of being
called coffee break? JONAH BERGER: You're saying why
is that a good trigger to link it to? AUDIENCE: So Kit Kat had to
create the campaign to link-- JONAH BERGER: To link the two
together, Kit Kats and coffee. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
get that for free. JONAH BERGER: Yeah. So Rebecca Black got
it for free. Rebecca Back got it for free
because she called her song "Friday." That didn't
cost her any money. She just designed a song
around the cue in the environment. The same thing with
Barclay Prime. Barclay Prime took advantage
of the environment with the $100 cheesesteak. There was already the
$100 cheesesteak. Now, when people think about
other cheesesteaks, they think about that one. You're right here that Kit Kat
had to spend some money to link those things. And so you can either design
your product to take advantage of existing triggers or you
can through advertising or other methods, repeatedly link
two things together. I won't go through the rest of
the framework because I know we're short on time. I'll just mention that
the book talks about things like emotion. So when we care, we share. It's actually not true that all
emotions increase sharing. Some emotions increase it and
some actually decrease it. So if you're interested, the
book talks about that. I won't show you the good
Google example with-- you guys did a really nice piece
with one of your ads. Public-- it's basically the idea of when
we see something, we're more like to imitate it. We can't imitate something
we can't see. So I see a lot of people around here using Apple computers. Originally, the logo
was the other way. It actually faced upside down
when it showed to other people, because it was meant
to be the North Star. When you open up your computer
from your bag, you need to figure out which way the logo is
facing to figure out how to take it out facing you. So they used to have if the logo
is facing you, the user, it's easy to see. It's like a compass, really
easy to orient. But they actually flipped the
logo, making it harder for the user to figure out which side
is up, to make it easier for other people to see. Because we like to imitate
others, we often imitate others, but we can't imitate
them if we can't see them. So we talk a lot about making
things public and different ways to do that. Practical value is just news you
can use, basically useful information. And finally, stories build on
this idea of a Trojan horse. Basically almost all stories
are Trojan horses. They carry information, brands,
benefits inside So have you ever seen that
famous Will It Blend ad, that's a great Trojan horse. People don't share that because
they want to advertise Will it Blend, they share
it because the content is really great. But Will It Blend comes
along for the ride. It's hidden inside that
broader message. People are sharing the good
story, but Will It Blend comes along and gets benefit from
that particular story. So I will wrap up here and
I'll take questions. I won't show you Panda--
has anyone seen Panda cheese, by the way? You have-- OK. Talk to her if you haven't
seen Panda cheese or talk to me after. It's one-- you know what, I'll
show you Panda cheese. There's time for Panda
cheese, right? Yeah, OK. A really great example. Here's another good example of
a Trojan horse, a story or message that's not a
direct advertising. But it is an ad. But it does a really good
job of carrying the brand for the ride. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] -Would you like some
Panda cheese? No thanks, I'm not hungry. -Never Say No to Panda. I'm going to show you
a couple of these because they get better. -Good morning, good morning. I got you Panda cheese
for breakfast. -No thanks, I don't feel well. -Never Say No to Panda. -Here's the best one. Dad, why don't we get
some Panda cheese? Enough, that's too
much already. Never Say No to Panda. -And last, but not least. Dad, why don't we
get some Panda? Get one. Get one more. [END VIDEO PLAYBACK] JONAH BERGER: OK, so
I always close with this ad for two reasons. One, it's really remarkable. It's really funny. And humor is one thing
that drives sharing. But this ad would be equally
funny if it had a pet guy in a giraffe suite or an alligator
suit or sort of a brand like Joe's Used Cars. People in suits, kicking stuff,
jumping on groceries, and pulling the plug
on patients in the hospital are all funny. Why this is a great example is
because you can't tell the story without talking
about a panda. I challenge you to tell someone
else about this ad without talking about Panda,
which is the brand they want you to remember. They figured out how to
make it an integral detail to the story. This ad is a Trojan horse. It's not just funny. There's a cute exterior,
a candy shell. But along the way, the brand
comes for the ride. And so it's not just about doing
things that are crazy. It's about figuring out a way to
build messages that people want to share, but your
idea comes along. So just to summarize, then I'll
take questions, word of mouth increases sales. But to make it work for you,
you need to understand what makes things talkable or
sharable, why we talk about some things rather
than others. And so very briefly, we found
six key steps, six key principles that drive people
to talk and share. There's social currency, that
idea of status by association. We talk about things that make
us look like insiders. That make us look
good or smart, rather than bad or dumb. Triggers or cues in
the environment. Rebecca Black, not rocket
science, but viewed more on Friday because that's a trigger
to make it top-of-mind and make people more likely to
think about it and share it. Emotion, when we
care, we share. But some emotions we share
more than others. Public. Again, that idea of
being publicly visible increases imitation. Apple did a great job about
making their headphones white. Now, you can look at how many
people have white headphones and use that as a signal of
quality for whether or not I should buy that product. Practical value, news
you can use. And finally stories building a
Trojan horse or a vessel that carries your information. Thank you guys, very much. I want to make sure to stay
within my time, but I'm happy to take any and all
questions now. Yeah? AUDIENCE: First of all, I was
in your session a few years ago with [INAUDIBLE]. JONAH BERGER: Oh good,
no problem. AUDIENCE: So a problem that I'm
working on right now, so you say that the problem with
Walt Disney is you don't experience it enough. JONAH BERGER: Yes. AUDIENCE: The problem I'm
working on is actually the opposite problem. I've been trying to get people
to appreciate how awesome the internet is. Which it seems like it's simple,
but like we live in it so much that we only think about
the internet like when it's broken or when it's
not really working. So given the framework that
you're building, like how do you get us aware of-- like how
you do an ad campaign for oxygen or these sorts of
things that are so-- JONAH BERGER: A commodity. Or like you only think about the
water at your house when it goes off or the power
when it goes off. But I think you just pointed out
a really great point about your message. What if you could communicate
people what it would be like if the internet went off? So not actually have them
experience that and have them be upset when it's slow, but
have them mentally simulate what that would be like. So you could imagine showing a
campaign which shows what it would be like if the
internet was down. So using analogies is a really
helpful way to get people to understand something. So try to get them to experience
what that would be like, even without having them
experience themselves. Bing is obviously trying
to steal some space from you guys. But they tried to do that
recently with their experience the speed difference between
Bing and Google, allow people to not only say well, OK,
Bing could say hey, we have a great product. But you guys would say
oh, I don't know if it's really great. Whereas if they can show you,
you'd actually experience it. So how could you make people
experience what life would be like when the internet was down,
either rhetorically or actually experience
it in some way? And encourage them
to use that. I mean imagine if you had an ad
that just reminded people what it was like during
dial-up time. Remember how frustrating
that is? Or imagine if you've been to a
conference and you're waiting for the internet to load. And it takes forever. It's really slow. Or how it used to be when you
couldn't find anything. And showing people that again
might encourage them to remember how useful
the internet is. Yeah? AUDIENCE: I'm curious about your
study on "The New York Times" [INAUDIBLE] shared. So given that there's some use
triggers where they're not-- I don't think social like cachet
would necessarily apply to a lot of the article. What were some of the triggers
that apply to "The New York Times"? JONAH BERGER: So we found a
number of different things. And if you're interested, the
article is up on my website and we talk about
it in the book. We found a few things. So one, there is some social
currency in sharing. People are more likely to
share interesting or surprising things because
it makes them look good. There's also a lot of practical
value, so restaurant reviews, movie reviews. If you ever see the articles
that come out in education aren't many. But tips for choosing colleges,
people love that. One big thing in practical value
is six tips for this. I call it the "Cosmo" effect. If you ever looked at "Cosmo"
when you're in the line at the grocery store, and most men's
magazines do it as well, but six secrets for this, seven
ways to do this. Articles that really boil down
concepts into useful information get shared a lot. But then we also found emotion
was a big driver. And not just positive emotion,
also negative emotions if they're high arousal. So if you think about both
positive and negative emotions, they can be divided
not only into whether their valence is positive
or negative. So happiness or humor is
a positive emotion. Anger or sadness is a
negative emotion. But also whether they're
high or low arousal. So anger and sadness are
both negative emotions. Neither fear is really good,
but anger is activating emotion and sadness is a
deactivating emotion. So you think about
what you do. When you're angry, you want
to yell at someone. You want to throw something. You're mad, you're shaking
your fists. When you're sad,
what do you do? You of curl up under the
covers, you put on your favorite sweat shirt, eat
a big bowl of ice cream. You sort of shut off
from the world. And so what we found is it's not
only whether the articles are positive or negative, but
also at the high arousal, activating, or low arousal,
deactivating. We actually found anything
that deactivates actually decreases sharing. So even merely the act of
running in place, so we've done experiments where we have
people run in place in the laboratory, that increases the
likelihood of emailing articles to others, even if
those articles have nothing to do with the running in place. Because it activates the body. That physiological system gets
going and they infer that then the content must be
worth sharing. So that's just some of
the things we found from the Times analysis. Other-- yeah? AUDIENCE: So you mentioned
earlier that there's a misconception about how much
the word of mouth is taking place over social media right
now and I totally think that's true. And you mentioned sort of the
other side of that being a person's interpersonal
interactions. JONAH BERGER: Yes. AUDIENCE: Like I've been reading
more and more about people talking about like this
idea of dark social, which is a ridiculous term. But basically it's-- JONAH BERGER: It's a great
term though, right? Yeah. Everyone is like what
is dark social? AUDIENCE: On the social media
track-- email, and the chat, and all that-- so in your research, like how
much do you think that that factors in or doesn't in
how we share things? Like how important is that? Are we skewed because we can
track the social media stuff that Twitter basically is? JONAH BERGER: Yeah. So I think that's one we reason
that we focus so much on the online. We say OK, we can see it. And I'm actually working on an
op-ed for "The New York Times" for this weekend. But think about just how
statistics or measuring things affect our behavior. So take Facebook, for example. Facebook made the number
of friends we have a thing to count. Well, now we all want that
number to be higher. You think about the Prius,
the Prius came out. We used to care about
how fast a car went. Now, they display
the gas mileage. The gas mileage has
always been there. But now that we can see it,
we care a lot about it. Because we can say oh, I want to
get my gas mileage higher. I want to get my Twitter
followers higher because more must be better. And so merely measuring things
can actually change our behavior in relation
to those things. And I think social
is the same way. We can see it online. And I'm all about measurement. I'm a data guy. I like measuring things. I'm not saying we shouldn't
measure things. But we should be careful how
merely measuring things can change our behavior. And just because we're measuring
something, doesn't mean we're measuring
the right thing. So we've done some work
with offline word of mouth, as well. So there's a company called
Keller Fay that records lots of-- asks people to keep
diaries of offline conversations. Some smart academics have put
together a device called the EAR, electronically activated
recorder. Basically you can carry
it around with you. It records ambient noise
throughout the day. So it can get a chance of what
you're talking about throughout the day, even if
you're not writing it online. And so I think there are ways
to measure offline behavior. But there's always a focus
on what's online. I think the important thing
here is we've done some of the leg work. So some companies say well hold
on, we want to test every single campaign. How can we test offline
sharing? How can we measure it? And what we can say is well,
look, we've actually looked at offline sharing. We've done a lot of research
in this space. If you follow these principles,
your stuff will be shared more. You don't necessarily
have to do the groundwork all over again. But I agree, certain things
are definitely harder to measure in this space. Anybody else? Yeah? AUDIENCE: Cats? JONAH BERGER: Oh, why cats? So I'm an academic. Academics tend to be
a little bit of curmudgeons, so oh, cats. So I used to say, oh, it's
not actually true. And I thought about
it a little more. I was going to write an op-ed
about cats versus dogs. And I have an answer that's less
satisfying to me, but I think is more true. So one, I think there
are more cat people. Cat owners I think are more
into their cats than dog owners are. Everyone's into their pets. It's like your kids. Why do you show photos
of your kids? Look at my kid. They did this. They made this great picture. You show it to all
your friends. And they're like what is that? It's like macaroni on like
a piece of cardboard. But yeah, because my kid,
my kid made this. It's great. So the same thing with cats
and dogs in general. I think cat people are maybe a
little bit more engaged with their-- dog people are a more
like this is my dog. But cat people are like
this is my cat. I'm so excited. Having spent though
unfortunately, fortunately or unfortunately, an hour looking
at cat photos and videos last week and thinking about whether
I could write this editorial, I think that cats
are actually not more photogenic, but they have more
of a varieties of faces and things that make them amenable
to the phrases that people put on those pictures. So they really make themselves
amenable to whatever we want to call them, the I Can
Has Cheezburger? Or you know, I mean your fridge,
eating your foods. There's things we put on them. If you look at those for dogs,
they're just not like "as good." So I wouldn't think that
per cat piece, cats are more likely to be shared
that a given dog piece. But I think that more cat
pieces are created just because they're sort of more
leeway to do those things. Whether it's a cat hanging on
its hind legs looking like it's from "Thriller" or a cat
that is like Hoover Cat, there's all sorts of these
different things. I think dogs generally
look happy. And I have a dog myself. I'm a dog person. So I'm very dismayed
that people share lots of cat things. But dogs sort of have the happy
look and the sort of dumb, out of it look. My dog has both of them. Whereas cats do more angry. They do different
sorts of things. And I think that's really
amenable to those phrases, which itself is a little bit
of internet culture. I think that's a great example
of social currency. Why do people do that? What do they riff off
existing photos? There's a recent one you might
have seen with a pigeon with bread around, a bread crust
around it's neck. Have you seen that one, where it
says swag underneath, which I think is just great. But it's sort of showing
that you know what's going on in culture. You can riff off it and
create something new. And so I think that's a driver
of a lot of those. Why cats I think, I think cats
are quite photogenic. AUDIENCE: Well, you listed the
question about why there's more cat media up there
than say dog media-- JONAH BERGER: Yes. AUDIENCE: --but not why
it's shared more. JONAH BERGER: So I'm not
actually-- so sorry. To be clear, shared more in
aggregate is different than likelihood of sharing. So there's 1,000 pieces of cat
stuff and there's 100 pieces of dog stuff, cat stuff may have
more aggregate shares, even though the likelihood of
sharing given seeing one of those is lower. So you'd have to be 10 times as
likely share the dog stuff for aggregate shares-- if there's 1/10 the dog stuff,
you gotta be 10 times likely to share it. I'm not convinced that you are
more likely to share a piece of cat content. But I think people are more
likely to create cat content. And so the overall aggregate
sharing of cat content is higher, even though
the likelihood-- if you sent me a piece of cat
content and you sent me a piece of dog content,
the likelihood of sharing it might be equal. But I have not empirically
looked at that, even though it is a fun thing to empirically
look at. AUDIENCE: So this is now your
next piece of research. JONAH BERGER: Ah, yes. I should rigorously examine
cat versus dog, cat versus dog things. AUDIENCE: Well, if you
do, that certainly will be best seller. JONAH BERGER: Yes. It's emotion in one
of those things. We care about our cats. We like to show our cats
doing funny things. And we like to show we're in the
loop, which I think both relates to social currency
and emotion. Anything else? OK, thank you guys for coming. I will stay up here, if there
are any more questions. Otherwise, have a good day.
