Taking a refreshing break from witnessing a mass amount of bracket busting and from celebrating Farokhmanesh day I decided to write this mandatory blog post.
Within Ideas That Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, a lot of important things are discussed and ironically a lot of these ideas stuck in my mind. Haha funny right? The concept that stuck with me came as a result of the “Six Principles of Sticky Ideas,” the principles were simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.
The easiest way to get the majority of people to grasp and understand a concept or an idea is to simplify it down to its most basic and raw form, unfortunately a vast amount of the world doesn’t have the same intellectual capacity as the minority amount of college educated people out there. The example I’m going to use for this blog entry is twitter as an entity. In its raw form twitter is a very very simple thing, you are given 140 characters to express your thoughts per message.
The second step is unexpectedness, people need to pay attention and remain interested in the idea. The example the Heath’s used was popcorn and how one bag of it is essentially as unhealthy as eating a full days worth of fatty foods. With twitter the unexpectedness comes with how deep it can take us into each others thoughts and minds. The way the human mind works we keep looking for more and more knowledge. The unexpectedness actually catches our mind off guard and creates and opens a gap in our knowledge and then proceeds to fill that gap with this information.
The third principle is concreteness, these ideas are supposed to be explained “in terms of human actions,” twitter does this very well. Taking a visit to the “about” section of twitter I went on to find that twitter defines itself as, “a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.” There is no ambiguity within this it clearly states what human actions can occur and what information people can take from the site. This isn’t as concrete an image as someone mentioning a candy apple that has a razor blade hidden in it but it still gets the point across.
The fourth step comes with establishing credibility and getting people to buy into and believe in the idea or product that is being pushed to them. The Heath’s speak of credibility in the literal sense of cold hard facts, an example of this comes with their reference to a presidential debate that occurred between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan destroyed Carter by simply asking voters to ask if there were any positive changes since Carter took office. With twitter a different form of credibility was used, this credibility was established by its users and subscribers. The general population gained an interest and validation from the fact that countless amounts of celebrities were using the social networking site and through their verified accounts they could see a credible in-depth look at the lives of some of their favorite celebrities. These celebs made people buy into the concept of twitter, in addition to celebrities various news outlets started to create their own twitter accounts and were providing the public with factual information at a higher rate of speed then they ever could before.
The fifth step comes with people becoming emotionally invested in twitters case addicted to this idea or concept. The Heath’s example of this is the emotional feeling that individuals get from knowing that a bag of popcorn is the equivalent to however many meals I previously mentioned, that is something the mind is going to remember and can tangibly comprehend as bad while knowing that a specific amount of grams or calories is in that same bag of popcorn. With twitter the emotional investment comes from the fact that humans are given a tool to freely express their opinions about anything and everything with no immediate repercussions, in addition to forming weak tie relationships with people over the network. Twitter users become attached to some of the people that they are following because it provides them with a way of connecting and interacting with their lives. This is extremely apparent with the super fans of generation Y who form obsessions with non talented musical artists such as Justin Beiber, his fanatic fans kept him as a trending topic for months.
The sixth and final step comes with getting people to act upon these ideas, and this all comes through storytelling. The book references firefighters swapping stories after every fire as a means of gaining experience, twitter has the same potential. Being a site where individuals are given the ability to tweet about whatever they want, this leads to people tweeting about their personal experiences. Within these tweets people who could potentially go through similar experiences will now have the opportunity to almost pre-live these situations which could potentially benefit them and prevent them from making the same mistake that the other user made. On the other hand it could also potentially influence users to step out of the box and try new things.
In conclusion the Heath’s have come up with a very respectable concept that ironically forms the acronym of “success”, which is a pretty sticky and simple idea. To be successful a simple unexpected concrete credible emotional story filled product has to be created, in Twitters case this was created, as of September 2010 the site that was initially launched in July of 2006 now boasted over 175 million users who were tweeting over 95 million tweets per day. The idea and concept of the site is something that has clearly stuck and at this point looks like something that will be stuck with our society for an extended period of time. Especially with the existence of generation Y super fans that yearn to know about Justin Bieber and co’s every thought and movement.
