Make ideas go viral
Do you have an idea you wish would spread? We all do. And luckily for us Chip & Dan Heath have created a model will teach you how to do just that.
Below is a summary of the most important insights from the book. Use this lens as a checklist when you try to make your next idea go viral, and I guarantee it will make your ideas more likely to spread.
Below is a summary of the most important insights from the book. Use this lens as a checklist when you try to make your next idea go viral, and I guarantee it will make your ideas more likely to spread.
A model for spreading ideas:
- Simplicity: How do you learn to strip an idea to its core without turning it into a silly sound bite?
- Unexpectedness: How do you capture people's attention ... and hold it?
- Concreteness: How do you help people understand your idea and remember it much later?
- Credibility: How do you get people to believe your idea?
- Emotional: How do you get people to care about your idea?
- Stories: How do you get people to act on your idea?
Read the book!
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Amazon Price: $17.16 (as of 12/24/2009) 
Chapter 1: Simple
- Make your ideas simple. What we mean by "simple" is finding the core of the idea.
Example: The Combat Maneuver Training Center recommends that officers arrive at Commander's Intent by asking themselves two questions:
1) If we do nothing else during tomorrow's mission, we must _______.
2) The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is _______.
- Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander's Intent-- it's about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine.
- Finding the core isn't synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities.
- Simple = core + compact.
"Short sentences drawn from long ideas."
Chapter 2: Unexpected
- The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patters. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.
- 1) Surprise gets out attention.
2) Interest keeps our attention. - What is counterintuitive about the message-- i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally?
- Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
- Many of the most successful stories begin with a mystery. The authors describe a state of affairs that seems to make no sense and then invite the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.
- Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick is convincing people that they need our message, and we can do that by highlighting some specific knowledge that they're missing. We can pose a question or a puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don't. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict the outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps-- What will happen? and Was I right?).
- A little dollop of the news-teaser approach can make our communications a lot more interesting.
ex. There's a new drug sweeping the teenage community-- and it may be in your own medicine cabinet!
ex. Which famous local restaurant was just cited-- for slime in the ice machine? - Some topics naturally highlight gaps in our knowledge. Human interest stories are fascinating because we know what's it's like to be human-- but we don't know what it's like to have certain dramatic experiences. How does it feel to win an Olympic gold medal? How does it feel to win the Lotto? How did it feel to be conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker?
Chapter 3: Concrete
- It's easier to understand tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement-- just as it's easier to understand a fox dissing some grapes than an abstract commentary about the human psyche.
- What makes something "concrete"? If you can examine something with your senses, it's concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. "High-performance" is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things.
- Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you've got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't certain what they know, cocreteness is the only safe language.
Chapter 4: Credible
- What makes people believe ideas? We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we've had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities.
- We must work to overcome cynicism. A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hear your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her awn hair bouncier. Well, duh. The company wants to sell you shampoo. Your friend doesn't, so she gets more trust points. The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.
- Adding a vivid detail allows us to easy picture the event, adding credibility.
ex. On the diversity of a famous dance group:
"The longest-term member of our company is a seventy-three-year-old man named Thomas Dwyer. He came to the company after a full career working for the U.S. government when he retired in 1988, and had no previous dance experience. He has no been with the company for seventeen years. - Humanizing a statistic adds credibility. Present statistics in a way that drawn on our experience and intuition.
ex. Cork taint in wine is caused by the chemical trichloroanisole, which is detectable by humans in as little as five parts per trillion. That's the equivalent of adding a teaspoon of sugar to Lake Erie and having the entire lake taste noticeably sweet. - One way to gain credibility is by landing a contract with a well-known company and then leveraging that to get further contracts.
- Testable credentials lend credibility.
ex. Wendy's ran an ad campaign called Where's the Beef, which asked customers to compare the amount of beef in a McDonald's hamburger to the amount of beef in a Wendy's hamburger. If the customer didn't believe Wendy's claim, all they had to do was go out and look for themselves.
ex. During his campaign, Ronald Regan asked, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"
Chapter 5: Emotional
- Thinking about statistics shifts us toward a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they're less likely to think emotionally. If you are making an emotional appeal, adding statistics will lessen the impact of the argument.
ex. Once, teens smoked to rebel against The Man. Thanks to the ingenious framing of the Truth campaign-- which paints a picture of a duplicitous Big Tobacco-- teens now rebel against The Man by not smoking. Adding statistics would make that message less effective. - First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.
- Even if it takes your audience just a few seconds to connect the dots between the feature you describe and the implied benefit, by the time they catch up, you will have moved on you your next point, and they probably won't have time to absorb the benefit .. or the next point.
ex. Don't say, "People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires." Say, "You will enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires." - A motivator that is good in one situation can actually make people less motivated if it doesn't match the story they tell themselves.
ex. Using greed to motivate someone who sees themselves as motivated by altruism. - Group interest is often a more powerful motivator than self-interest. E.g. "What's in it for my group" is often more powerful than "What's in it for me."
- People often make decisions based on what they think "someone like me" would do in a given situation.
ex. Texas was having a problem with litter on the sides of their highways. The typical litterer was a white male pick-up truck driver who listened to country music. The state designed an ad campaign designed to teach them that "people like me don't litter." In this way the state decreased litter by 72%.
Photo credit: Victor Bezrukov
Chapter 6: Stories
- Stories are effective teaching tools. They help us to recognize misleading situations. Stories illustrate casual relationships that people hadn't recognized before and highlight unexpected, resourceful ways in which people have solved problems.
- Research has suggested that mental rehearsal can prevent people from relapsing into bad habits such as smoking, excessive drinking, or overeating. A man trying to kick a drinking problem will be better off if he mentally rehearses how he will handle Super Bowl Sunday: How would he respond when someone gets up for beers?
- Mental practice alone produces about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice. The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it's the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we're suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.
- Hearing a story is better than reading a training manual for the same reason that flight simulators are better for pilots than stacks of instructional flash cards. The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.
- There are three basic types of stories:
The challenge story: The story of David and Goliath is a classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. There are several variations that we will all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower of adversity story.
The connection story: About people who develop a connection that bridges a gap-- racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. Think Romeo and Juliet or Titanic.
The creativity story: Involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. These stories make us want to do something different, to be creative, to experiment with new approaches.
What idea do you want to spread?
Get developing nations to iodize their salt
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04kristo more...0 points
Use cap-and-trade to limit carbon emissions while creating economic growth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading0 points
Stop proping up unworkable businesses
There isn't a credit crunch. Credit is still avail more...0 points
Jared the Subway guy
The perfect story
"What we have argued in this book-- and we hop we've made you a believer by now-- is that you could have predicted in advance that the Jared story would become viral.Note how well the Jared story does on the SUCCESs checklist:
It's simple: Eat subs and lose weight. (It may be oversimplified, frankly, since the meatball sub with extra mayo won't help you lose weight.)
It's unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food! This story violates our schema of fast food, a schema that's more consistent with the picture of a fat Jared than a skinny Jared.
It's concrete: Think of the oversized pants, the massive loss of girth, the diet composed of particular sandwiches. It's much more like an Aesop fable than an abstraction.
It's credible: It has the same kind of antiauthority truthfulness that we saw with the Pam Lafflin antismoking campaign. The guy who wore 60-inch pants is giving us diet advice!
It's emotional: We care more about an individual, Jared, than about a mass. And it taps into profound areas of Maslow's hierarchy-- it's about a guy who reached his potential with the help of a sub shop.
It's a story: Our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. It inspires the rest of us to do the same."
Read the book!
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Amazon Price: $17.16 (as of 12/24/2009)
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Amazon Price: $9.11 (as of 12/24/2009)
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All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World
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