Do you ever wonder why certain videos go viral? Or why some articles get shared widely while others don’t? Dr. Jonah Berger has spent his professional life digging into why certain things take off and why people make different decisions.Dr. Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior.
Sometimes we see what catches on and we think it's random, it's luck, it's chance—but it's not. There's really a science behind it. As I talk about it in Contagious, there are six key factors—what I call the S.T.E.P.P.S.—that drive things to catch on. If we understand those steps, we can understand why people talk about it and share things.
The same formula can certainly be applied to the B2B space. Often, we think word of mouth is mainly a consumer thing. Consumers talk about products and services and ideas but not business people, right? Well, 91% of new business leads in B2B markets come from existing business. Word-of-mouth is just as, if not more, important in B2B cases. We need to think about the social network. Who's connected to whom and why they might talk and share. The underlying principles that drive people to share are very much the same. If we want to increase engagement in online community, we need to think about what makes that community engaging. Why might someone visit? What might they share? How can we increase the likelihood they pass things on not only to people in the community to keep that community vibrant, but also outside to the community to bring new folks in.
