Dan Zarrella - Zarrellas Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas

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If youve read about social media or been to any marketing conferences, youve probably heard tons of advice like love your customers, engage in the conversation, be yourself, and make friends. I call this unicorns-and-rainbows advice. Sure, it sounds good and it probably makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. But its not actually based on anything more substantial than truthiness and guesswork.

Unicorns-and-rainbows advice is the modern-day equivalent of folksy superstitions and old wives tales. Take a couple of time-honored adages repeated ad nauseum , add in the unquestioning awe of an unaware audience, and pretty soon youve got an entire industry based on easy-to-agree-with but unsubstantiated ideas.

But theres a problem. Myths arent real and superstitions often do more harm than good.

After centuries of superstition in medicine, along came real sciencehard facts and real data about what works and what doesnt. Medicine moved out of the Dark Ages, and scientists started making progress in the search for the causes of and cures for diseases. Now its time for social media to move past mythology and into measurable outcomes. One of the most important things about the Web is that nearly every interaction can be measured and observed in aggregates of tens and hundreds of millions. We can gather more qualitative and quantitative data about human behavior than ever before. Yet the future of marketingthe very industry that is trying to push communications, business, and public relations forwardis built on advice that is based only on assumptions, clichs, and truisms.

To the snake-oil salespeople, success in using social media isnt something repeatable. Its not the outcome of a process; its superstition, guessing, and praying.

Those of us who are part of the social media industry now will be the forebearers of the next generation of marketing methods. Were going to be the ones who decide how it plays out. Of course, there arent any formal degrees in this yet, and most of us dont wear lab coats. But we need to decide if we are going to leave the future of social media to magical tonics, or if we are going to use science and data to discover what really works to motivate people.

To scientists, success in using social media is something you can iterate on, plan for, and learn from. Things that work can be analyzed to produce repeatable, dependable results.

The next time you see or read about or hear someone giving superstitious, feel-good advice about social media, question the person. Ask what data, what science, the advice is based on. Ask the person to prove what hes saying.

And most important, ask yourself: are you a snake-oil salesman or are you a scientist?

Ideas Dont Spread Just Because Theyre Good

In my previous life at a marketing agency, I sat around lots of conference room tables with bright marketers and businesspeople and was part of a very frustrating line of conversation. It all starts when someone says lets make something go viral.

The conversation isnt frustrating because I dont like things that go viral. I love contagious ideas and social media campaigns that work. The conversation is frustrating because of what comes next. When you ask what makes an idea go viral, the first response is that its good.

The concept that ideas spread simply because theyre good is completely false. There are tons of good ideas that go nowhere, and even more bad ideas that spread like wildfire. There are clearly some other characteristics, some other factors, that determine how much an idea or piece of content will spread.

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to mean a unit of cultural inheritance. His point was that ideas evolve like genes do, and their success is based on their ability to spread, not on the benefit they provide to their hosts.

Marketers interested in making ideas that spread themselves need to understand those contagiousness factors, and this understanding needs to be based on real science, not on guesswork.

Our World Is Made of Memes

If youve ever seen the Matrix movies, youll remember that their world was composed entirely of computer code. Everything people interacted with was built from computerized instructions. Similarly, our world is made of contagious ideas. Everything made by humansfrom the chair youre sitting in, to the book youre readingexists only because someone had the idea to invent it and that idea caught on, spreading from person to person.

The history of human culture is the history of memes. Politics, religion, wars, literature, and art are all built from building blocks of ideas that succeed in replicating themselves because of their ability to reproduce. Not because theyre good.

Social Media Provide Petri Dishes for Ideas

Biological evolution occurs when there is a population of varied organisms and there is competition for scarce resources. Consider fruit flies; each individual fruit fly is a little different from the rest and theyre all competing for a limited amount of food.

Remember the game called telephone? One person invents a phrase, whispers it into someones ear, that person whispers it into the next persons ear, and so on, down a line of kids. The one at the end says what she heard, the originator says what he said, and invariably the phrases are different. Folklorists call the continuous remixing of ideas communal re-creation. Every person who transmits an idea has an opportunity and often a motive to change the idea to fit his own mental framework. Consider a meme like lolcats. The entire point of the genre is to create new variants, and somelike the cheezburger variantshave become more successful than others.