Contagious Why Things Catch On

Proceedings 79th Annual Convention of
the American Psychological Association
, 1971, pp. 653–54.
Chicken McNuggets:
Thanks to Dave Balter for telling me about the McRib locator. For background
details 
on 
the 
story, 
see 
http://www.maxim.com/funny/the-cult-of-the-mcrib-0
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McRib
.
as soon as you pay people:
For early (and extremely clever) research on intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, see Lepper, Mark R., David Greene, and Richard E. Nisbett (1973), “Undermining
Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis,”
Journal of Social and Personality Psychology
28, no. 1, 129–37. For a more recent treatment, see
Heyman, James, and Dan Ariely (2004), “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,”
Psychological Science
15, no. 11, 787–93.
2.
Triggers
“Nobody talks about boring companies”:
 Sernovitz, Andy (2006), 
Word of Mouth Marketing: How
Smart Companies Get People Talking
(Chicago: Kaplan Publishing).
People talk about Cheerios:
 The finding that Honey Nut Cheerios get more word of mouth than Walt
Disney World comes from the BzzAgent analysis we discuss in this chapter: Berger, Jonah, and
Eric Schwartz (2011), “What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word-of-Mouth?” 
Journal of

---

Marketing
, October, 869–80. The finding also comes from Twitter data on the frequency with
which these two brands are discussed.
sixteen word-of-mouth episodes:
Carl, Walter (2006), “What’s All the Buzz About? Everyday
Communication and the Relational Basis of Word-of-Mouth and Buzz Marketing Practices,”
Management Communication Quarterly
19, 601–34.
American consumers mention specific brands:
Keller, Ed, and Barak Libai (2009), “A Holistic
Approach to the Measurement of WOM,” presentation at ESOMAR Worldwide Media
Measurement Conference, Stockholm (May 4–6).
Dave gave my colleague Eric Schwartz:
This included information about the product in each
campaign and the number of BzzReports each BzzAgent submitted. We were especially interested
in the fact that we could analyze the buzz generated by each product by agent. After all, certain
people might share more word of mouth than others: Chatty Cathys talk more than Quiet Quentins.
But by looking at how much individual agents talked across different campaigns, we could identify
patterns. We could see whether an agent talked more about a coffee brand than a new type of digital
camera. And we could start to understand why certain products got more word of mouth than
others. Not just whether people talked about certain product categories (such as food) more than
others (such as movies), but what really drives discussion in the first place—the psychology of
talk.
some thoughts are more top of mind:
Accessibility is a huge topic in psychology; for some classic
research on the topic, see Higgins, E. Tory, and G. King (1981), “Accessibility of Social
Constructs: Information-processing Consequences of Individual and Contextual Variability,” in
Personality, Cognition, and Social Interaction
, ed. N. Cantor and J. F. Kihlstrom (Hillsdale, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum), 60–81; and Wyer, Robert S., and T. K. Srull (1981), “Category Accessibility:
Some Theoretical and Empirical Issues Concerning the Processing of Social Stimulus Information,”
in 
Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium
, vol. 1, ed. E. T. Higgins, C. P. Herman, and M. P.
Zanna (Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum), 161–97.