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How ideas go viral....
...Significantly, we're finding out that what makes ideas contagious has more to do with how we think about ideas than what we want to achieve with them. The "virality" of ideas is driven by people liking and passing on information specifically because we think others will enjoy or appreciate it.
Buzz is extraordinarily important because as social beings humans crave communication, and buzz spreads ideas like wildfire. In science, we like to use the word meme, a concept given to us by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Like genes, ideas must be replicated and passed on — or they die. When ideas become memes, they have the power to change people's minds, in fact to change our culture (and certainly a workplace). Consider how we think about the phrase "47 percent" now and a few months ago.
Memes are ideas, and ideas aren't ideas without people....
It occurred to me that mentalizing this way is similar to what a DJ does when listening to music: He doesn't just think about which music he wants to be listening to, he thinks about how different groups of people would respond to the songs he is considering. He has their interest in mind, not just his own. Buzz happens because we're "information DJs": we take in information and enjoy it but at the same time we also think about whom else might like it as well....
[In the Harvard Business Review, Matthew Lieberman shares some intriguing ideas about "information DJs" and how to create buzz. ~ Jeff]
