Need to spread an idea? Make it Contagious

Just finished Jonah Berger’s Contagious: Why Things Catch On, which was first brought to my attention by Houston Foresight alum Simeon Spearman in an excellent blog post “How can futurists more effectively engage the public” for the Assn of Professional Futurists’.

The key message of “Contagious” is that social influence and word of mouth are the key factors in spreading ideas, and that can be in-person or online. BTW, he asks us to guess the percent of word of mouth that happens online? [answer below]. We futurists often toil in obscurity, daring to hope that one day, one of our many wonderful ideas will go mainstream. They usually don’t, but don’t give up. There are things we can do to increase the odds that our ideas go viral.

Berger proposes six principles behind making ideas contagious,  using the acronym STEPPS (not to be confused with STEEP)

• Social Currency:what we talk about influences how others see us…knowing about cool things…making people feel like insiders
• Triggers: stimuli that prompt people to talk about related things – peanut butter makes us think about jelly; the more often people think about an idea, the more it will be talked about
• Emotion:evoking some sort of emotion; kindle the fire.
• Public:can people see when others are engaging in our desired behavior; making things more observable makes them easier to imitate
• Practical Value:need to understand what makes something seem like a particularly good idea; package our knowledge and expertise so that people can easily pass it on.
• Stories:what broad narrative can we wrap our idea in? people don’t just share information; they tell stories

The book has lots of great stories and supporting data to illustrate the principles. For instance, he talks about a hundred dollar cheese steak –yep!

The book made me think about my efforts to promote the Houston Foresight program. In terms of how to invest my time in promoting the program, is it better spent promoting what we do through social media channels or improving the current student experience and relying on their word of mouth? Ideally, both, of course. But if one had to make a choice? Flat out, Berger says: “nothing is more viral or infectious than one of your friends going to a place and giving it his full recommendation.” Hmmm.

I suspect a key reason why futurists in general are still largely under the radar is not that we don’t have a compelling story, but that we haven’t spread it well. Our collective interest in doing this is clearly growing from my observation – years ago it was seen as somewhat crass to be seen as a self-promoter, or even worse, a pop futurist. There is still some of this sentiment around, for sure, but I’ve noticed much greater attention to how communicate about the future and the importance of stories. I also think that as a field we’re coming around to the notion that telling the story of the field would be a benefit to us all. My interest in working on the APF Professionalization Task Force, for instance, is partly motivated by the desire to tell our story — recognizing that we first need to get our story together.

There’s lots of good stuff in this book to help us spread the word about foresight….and the answer is 7% Andy Hines