Let's play a quick game for a moment. You've never played this game before, but you'll get the hang of it really quickly. It's called, which is tastier. I'm going to put up two things on the screen and I'm going to ask you which of those things is tastier. I want you to be honest, not which of the two you think is tastier, not which of the two you wish is tastier, but which of the two is actually tastier. Our first contestant is a wonderful, delicious head of broccoli. Now you probably know that broccoli has lots of vitamins and nutrients. It has lots of fiber, and in fact, it actually has a lot of vitamin C. Our first contestant again is wonderful, delicious broccoli. Our second contestant is, well, a cheeseburger. Now, this example of a cheeseburger isn't my version of a cheeseburger. If I was going to eat a cheeseburger, it'd have bacon on top, it probably have grilled onions, it have blue cheese. Feel free to put whatever toppings you want on the cheeseburger. To keep things even, feel free to put whatever toppings you like on the broccoli as well. Now I'll ask you again, which is tastier? Be honest, cheeseburger, or the broccoli. Now, I've played this game with thousands of people, and the answer most people give is always the same. Most people say the cheeseburger, 95 percent of people say the cheeseburger. When I look at the other five percent, most of them are either vegetarians or maybe they're liars, one or the other. I'll let you guess based on how well, you know them. Point here is really simple. We all know that we should eat more broccoli. We all know that broccoli is better for us. The government has spent millions of dollars and decades trying to convince people to eat more fruits and vegetables. Yet when it's late at night, when we're on the road, when we're tired, the cheeseburger beckons, pizza beckons, fast food in general beckons. It's not random or luck how that works. The cheeseburger just fits better with the way we're designed. McDonalds, for example, has spent millions of dollars engineering French fries, so they have the right amount of crisp and salt and sugar. When you bite into them, your tongue lights up. Certain food is just tastier than others. Now, I'd love to spend the next bit we have together talking about food. I love eating food, but I'm not really an expert on it. But I'd like to use that idea of certain things being tastier and poured them to a slightly different domain. What makes certain messages or ideas more tasty than others? Why does some gets spread, gets shared, while others don't? In this next section we'll answer three key questions. First, how we can make our messages tastier. Second, how we can craft contagious content or build word of mouth and buzz? Third, how we can use word of mouth to get our own products, ideas, and services to catch on. But one more question from me before we start, here are three products or brands that you're probably quite familiar with. First, we have Walt Disney World, the self-described place where dreams come true, wonderful place to take the kids. Second is Honey Nut Cheerios, in case you're not familiar with it, it's a breakfast cereal in United States, quite popular breakfast cereal. Third is Scrubbing Bubbles. Scrubbing Bubbles is basically a bathroom cleaner that you might spray on the walls while you're cleaning the shower or something along those lines. If you had to guess which of these three products do you think gets the most word of mouth? Is it Disney, is it Cheerios or is it Scrubbing Bubbles? Now, if you're like most people, this was probably a little bit more difficult than the cheeseburger and the broccoli. That one you had an answer right away, of course, the cheeseburger. But here you're probably a little bit more uncertain. I don't know which of these three gets more word of mouth. Indeed, you might say of this answer doesn't have a lot to do with me because unless you work for Disney World or you work for Cheerios, or you work for Scrubbing Bubbles, you don't really care which one gets more word of mouth. But the why is really important. Because if we don't understand why one of these gets more word of mouth, it's going to be really hard to get people to talk about and share our ideas to get our products to catch on, whether externally outside an organization or internally within an organization. That brings me to my second point. If you had to guess which of the three do you think it is? Well, most people when I ask this question, would say Disney World. Usually about 85 percent of people guess Disney World. It's a great guess, but unfortunately it's wrong. Usually, another set of people made about 10, 12, maybe even 15 percent guess Scrubbing Bubbles. That also makes a lot of sense, and unfortunately that's also wrong. The answer is Cheerios, the one that almost nobody guesses. The point here is really simple. We all might think we understand word of mouth. We see viral content on the web and we assume I get it, I know what makes things viral. But if we don't understand the science behind social transmission, we're not going to be able to get messages to catch on. We have to understand how to craft contagious content.
