Contagious Why Things Catch On

part and parcel of the story. It’s an essential part of the narrative.
The same can be said for Blendtec’s 
Will It Blend?
campaign. It’s impossible to tell the story of
the clips where the blender tears through an iPhone without talking about a blender. And without
recognizing that the Blendtec blender in the videos must be extremely tough—so strong that it can
blend almost anything. Which is exactly what Blendtec wants to communicate.
—————
In trying to craft contagious content, valuable virality is critical. That means making the idea or
desired benefit a key part of the narrative. It’s like the plot of a good detective story. Some details are
critical to the narrative and some are extraneous. Where were the different suspects at the time of the
murder? Critical. What was the detective eating for dinner while he mulled over the details of the
case? Not so important.
The same distinction can be applied to the content we’ve been discussing. Take Ron Bensimhon’s
Olympic stunt. Jumping into a pool? Critical. 
GoldenPalace.com
? Pretty much irrelevant.
The importance of these different types of details becomes even clearer when people retell the
story. Think about the story of the Trojan Horse. It has survived for thousands of years. There is a
written account of the story, but most of the details people know come from hearing someone else talk
about it. But which details people remember and retell? It isn’t random. Critical details stick around,
while irrelevant ones drop out.
Psychologists Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman examined a similar issue more than fifty years
ago. They were keenly interested in what happened to rumors as they spread from person to person.
Did the stories stay the same as they were transmitted or did they change? And if they changed, were
there predictable patterns in how rumors evolved?
To address this question, they had people play what most of us would describe as a game of
Telephone.
First, someone was shown a picture of a detailed situation—in one case, a group of people on a
subway car. The car appears to be an Eighth Avenue Express and it is going past Dyckman Street.
There are various advertisements posted on the car, and five people are seated, including a rabbi and
a mother carrying her baby. But the focus of the picture is two men having an argument. They are
standing up, and one is pointing at the other and holding a knife.
Then the game of Telephone starts. The first person (transmitter) is asked to describe the picture to
someone else (receiver), who cannot see it. The transmitter conveys the various details as he sees fit.
The transmitter then leaves the room and a new person enters. That new person becomes the receiver,
and the original receiver becomes the transmitter, sharing what happened in the image with the new

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receiver, who also hasn’t seen the image. Then the original receiver leaves the room, a new person
enters, and the game is repeated to a fourth, fifth, and eventually sixth person. Allport and Postman
then looked at which story details persisted along the transmission chain.
They found that the amount of information shared dropped dramatically each time the rumor was
shared. Around 70 percent of the story details were lost in the first five to six transmissions.
But the stories didn’t just become shorter: they were also sharpened around the main point or key
details. Across dozens of transmission chains there were common patterns. Certain details were
consistently left out and certain details were consistently retained. In the story about the subway car
the first person telling the story mentioned all the details. They talked about how the subway car
seemed to be an Eighth Avenue Express, how it was going past Dyckman Street, and how there were
a number of people on it, two of them arguing.
But as the story was passed on down the telephone line, many of the unimportant details got
stripped out. People stopped talking about what type of subway it was or where it was traveling and
instead focused on the argument. The fact that one person was pointing at the other and brandishing a
knife. Just as in the detective story, people mentioned the critical details and left out the extraneous
ones.
—————
If you want to craft contagious content, try to build your own Trojan Horse. But make sure you think
about valuable virality. Make sure the information you want people to remember and transmit is
critical to the narrative. Sure, you can make your narrative funny, surprising, or entertaining. But if
people don’t connect the content back to you, it’s not going to help you very much. Even if it goes
viral.
So build a Social Currency–laden, Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable Trojan
Horse, but don’t forget to hide your message inside. Make sure your desired information is so
embedded into the plot that people can’t tell the story without it.

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Epilogue
Ask three people where they got their last manicure, and chances are good that at least one of them
had a Vietnamese nail technician. But the story of how it got that way might surprise you. It started
with twenty women and a set of long coral nails.
She’d been a high school teacher in her home country, but when Thuan Le arrived at Hope Village
in 1975, she had nothing but the clothes on her back. The tent city outside Sacramento was a holding
ground for Vietnamese refugees who escaped to America after the fall of Saigon. Teeming with new
immigrants, the camp simultaneously brimmed with hope and despair. People had come to America
with dreams of a better life for themselves and their families, but with little English knowledge, so
the possibilities were limited.
Actress Tippi Hedren, who had starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s