Made to Stick: Why Some Content go Viral While Others Flop

A friend of a friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an urgent meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink. He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered. 

Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice. He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note: don’t move. Call 911. A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. 

The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?” Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube. The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive.” (Source: Made to Stick)

If you call someone an hour after you read that story, can you tell that person, without rereading the story, anything about the story? Sure you can, for some reason, that story got stuck in your mind, and you remember the concrete detail about it. The tub is full of ice, the beautiful women, the tube, etc. Something about that story made it very easy for you to remember. The question is what.  

Contrast this story with this passage, drawn from a paper distributed by a nonprofit organization. “Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice,” it begins, going on to argue that “[a] factor constraining the flow of resources to CCIs is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements in grant making to ensure accountability.”

Does that sound familiar, you probably heard that type of communication a thousand times at the office. God knows I have, the long-winded, boring speech that gets my eyes teary and sleepy every time. Some leaders suffer from the evils of a natural psychological phenomenon called the Curse of Knowledge. What is the Curse of Knowledge, well I will explain it this way? 

The Curse of Knowledge

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. 

Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120. But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. 

Why? 

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself—tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune—all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code. In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? 

The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is priceless: How could you be so stupid? Being a tapper is hard. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. 

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind. The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. 

The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear. (Source Made to Stick)

Great leaders are great communicators, they keep their communication simple, and their audience captivated during a speech or presentation. They deliver what it's known as a sticky message. Communication that sticks in your mind and stays there like a staple on paper. 

I learn about creating a sticky message via an online course on coursera named Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content, really great course when you have some time you must check it out. This particular course peaked my interest because it delved into why some content goes viral, and some don't. The professor at Wharton references this book:   

In this book, the authors outline 6 principles of a sticky message. It's a great read, and as someone who strives to develop my craft as a writer consistently, this book has helped tremendously. I believe all leaders should incorporate these 6 principles in their communication because it will help you become more focus on your message.  

Before we get into the 6 principles in detail, consider for a moment you're a business traveler, and you need to buy a new laptop. If you go to Dell's website, for example, you might see a long list of information looking something like this:

-Type I or Type II PC card. 

-optional media base with a variety of different options. 

-D/Port or a D/Dock or a D/View Laptop Stand. 

-Different modular options, various types of dvds and memory keys. 

-Eight times DVD or do you want a 24 times CD-RW/DVD floppy disk drive? 

If you are like me, I have no clue what that list above suppose to represent, when it comes to the tech stuff, I don't have a clue. You might as well put me in a kitchen to make a cake with a recipe, and you will get the same result. It's a tremendous amount of information, and even if you're in IT or you know technology, it's still pretty difficult to parse.

As oppose to this ad from Apple 

Simple enough. One of the attributes of Steve Jobs was keeping it simple for everyone to understand. At the core, this ad doesn't tell you anything about the number of modular options, about the docking ports, about the PC card. You only know one thing. You know that the laptop is really, really thin. Which bring us to the first principle. 

SIMPLICITY 

You need do find the essential core of your ideas and make it simple for everyone to understand.

Have you ever met someone or you were talking to someone who make everything complicated when it can be very simple. I must admit sometimes I suffered from the curse of knowledge and I made something straightforward very complicated. You know when you want to sound like if you know more than the next person. I can remember watching the faces and the body language of some people I was talking to, and it was like what the hell is this man talking about? In the end, I confuse the whole thing.

According to Made to Stick, a successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it. People get confused when they've presented too many things at once, and they usually get turned-off.

UNEXPECTEDNESS 

Shatter your customers' expectations with something counter-intuitive, and they'll remember you.

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. But before we get into unexpectedness, lets look at this ad to drive home the point about simplicity.

Did you expect that at the end? I don't think we expected that. To make ideas stick, we have to understand how to make our messages unexpected. It speaks to breaking the pattern, giving your audience something different. The world was captivated when the Apple 1 was introduced. It was different, something unexpected and to this day Apple has kept that core principle in all their innovation, give the public something they never saw before. 

For our ideas to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. We can engage people’s curiosity over an extended period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps. Check out the ZaZoo Condoms Ad, hilarious.

CONCRETENESS

How to make your ideas clear? Use concrete terms that appeal to the senses so people will remember it better.

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. Think about the details of the story you read above. You always remember the kidneys. You still remember the bathtub full of ice. And you always remember the lipstick written on the mirror. In fact, if you had to think about it, what color was that lipstick? You can probably see it. It's red. How did that ice feel? It was possibly freezing.

What does that bathtub look like? You probably have a mental image in your mind. The story uses concrete details to help us to remember the key points. But often when we communicate, we don't always use such concrete details. Business language, for example, tends not to be very concrete. 

This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In Proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience. 

CREDIBILITY 

Show that your stuff works, and people will trust you more. The fastest way to establish credibility is to use an authority figure, as illustrated in Robert Cialdini’s principle of Authority.

How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. If you take LinkedIn influencers or people who write great content, for example, their post attracts thousands of views and comments simply because people consider them authority in their field. 

We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases, this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.” 

EMOTIONS 

Appeal to the heart, not the mind.

How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. I can remember the first time I heard Howard Schultz speak. After the speech I felt something in my heart, I cannot explain the feeling, something like when you fall in love for the first time, you get this great feeling you don’t want to go away. The man has a gift of motivating people and the ability to appeal to your heart. His story of growing up in the projects, his father working hard to provide for the family, following your dream and not allowing anyone to derail you from your dream touch my heart. 

When you can duplicate that in your company, with your employees, with your customers you will create something so unique only a few have achieved, look at Starbucks, Nike, and Apple, for example, they have formed cult following of their brand. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to stop by tapping into their resentment of the hypocrisy of Big Tobacco.

STORIES 

"Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever." 

Native American proverb

How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. 

Great leaders are great storytellers; they know how to set the mood, their tone, and body language to get their audience entirely in tune with their presentation. According to the book Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those conditions. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that position in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively

How do you get your content to go viral, how do you get people to remember your message every time you speak, how do you get your team motivated and inspired every day. This 6 principles is the key. By the way, that story above with the kidneys, well that story is not true it has been spread so much time, it sounds real and has influenced the action of people interaction in bars all over the world. That's the power of a sticky message. 

Don’t take my word for it, try it out. When you make your message sticker, your content will go viral. You will make your ideas stick, increase your influence and harness the power of social networks to spread your information and influence. The question you should be asking right now is:

Which of my content do I want to go viral. 

Don't forget to hit like and share this article! Have a great day everyone.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gifford is the founder of Leadership First, a leadership community dedicated to inspiring every leader into creating a great organization, one their employees will enjoy. Help us achieve our purpose, SUBSCRIBE to our community and get exclusive leadership articles from the best leadership minds in the world. Let's change the leadership status quo and inspire every leader into great leadership. Leadership First