Introduction

For the Book Report assignment, I read "Contagious" by Jonah Berger. I choose this book because the company I work for, Pegasus Dance Studios, is a community dance school whose primary method of advertisement is word of mouth throughout the neighbourhood. I wanted to see how we could better harness this word of mouth both in the traditional sense but also through our social media efforts.

I have picked Blogger and Pinterest as my two social media tools.

Berger has set up his book into 6 "STEPPS". He has devoted one chapter for each of his 6 principles. I have set up my digital book report in the same format. Each principle has a blog post and a Pinterest board that focus on the concept he discusses in that chapter as well as my own thoughts and take away actions for Pegasus Studios from the lesson.

The blog and Pinterest boards are all private.

1. Social Currency

"People like to make a good impression, so we need to make our products a way to achieve that." (Berger, 59)

The idea of social currency has three parts to it, making it the most complex principle in the book. It is also, I think the hardest to wrap my head around applying. I can see clearly the examples he presents and how they use the ideas of inner remarkability, game mechanics and scarcity, but I had more of a challenge coming up with ways to adapt these principles to my company's situation.

How I might use these concepts at Pegasus Dance Studios:

Inner Remarkability -

Example of a Facebook Post to encourage parents to share

This idea talked about the fact that people liked to share things they found interesting, exciting or remarkable in some way. This word of mouth is created by people's need to share something that makes them look interesting or exciting or smart. At Pegasus Dance Studios we have the advantage of our primary client being parents and what do parents love to do more than share their children's accomplishments? My take away action would be to included more ways we can celebrate children individually. Can we make a big deal of their recital costumes, give them attendance awards, perfect bun awards, publicly recognize children who participate in ballet exams or performances so parents have the ability to share that both on social media and verbally with their friends.


Game Mechanics -

The idea of making a game out of your business was more challenging to me. I see clearly how airmiles or points cards work, but how do you apply that to a dance school? This is easier done from the perspective of the kids. We can do sticker charts, for example, in classes for various things such as attendance, coming in proper uniform, etc, but the we have found that kids are not as reliable a source of word of mouth as the parents. An idea we have tossed around at Pegasus is rewarding the parents. For example, if a dancer has perfect attendance, why not give the parent a gift. After all, up to a certain age, it is the parents who are getting the kids to class on time. So we might try giving all the parents with perfect attendance for a term a coffee gift card, or a gas gift card.

Scarcity -

This one is actually very easy. Having full classes with students on the waiting list is ideal. Obviously, the fear is always that if we can never add the waitlist person to the class they will simply find another dance school. So, we need to walk a tightrope here. Having full classes certainly makes us look like we are doing a good job (and plays into the imitation factors from a later concept), but we also need to be able to deliver at some point. Unlike other businesses, our students register for the entire school year, so unless a student drops a class, we will not be able to take a waitlisted student in. One solution would be to start with fewer classes on the schedule and add a class if we get enough students on the waitlist.

Social Currency Pinterest Board

2. Triggers

"Triggers and cues lead people to talk, choose, and use. Social currency gets people talking, but Triggers keep them talking. Top of mind means tip of tongue."        (Berger, 92)

The second concept that Berger discusses is the use of triggers. The best example I found was the idea that peanut butter usually triggers the thought of jam. Associating our business, dance, with day to day things will help keep us in "top of mind, tip of tongue."

Below is a Facebook ad we ran this summer for our intensive dance summer program. We were playing on the idea that although many of our senior dancers travel during the summer, many others stay in Toronto. We took some photos of a dancer in the Toronto subway system, which is fairly recognizable to Torontonians. I believe it also works as a trigger though. I know I have often thought back to these pictures when I pass Pape station. Many of our students take the TTC to school and to Pegasus every day, and we have a large population of parents that are TTC riders as well.

Trigger Pinterest Board

3. Emotion

"Emotions drive people to action. They make us laugh, shout, and cry, they make us talk, share and buy." (Berger, 123)

The emotional connection to sharing is a fairly clear concept for me. I recognize it in my own patterns of behaviour in social media. I always share things that make me laugh or that get me angry, which are the "high-arousal" emotions Berger discusses in this chapter. I hardly ever share things that make me sad, a "low- arousal" emotion, because I almost never actually read those posts on platforms like Facebook, or other places.

Applying this concept to Pegasus Dance Studios has many opportunities. We do re-post a lot of articles about uplifting stories and funny dance videos (like this one), but we also have the opportunity to create our own content that conveys the emotions of our business model and reflects the happy, body positive, supportive and fun environment that we try to create in our studios.

Below is an example of one of our most successful Facebook posts. This image was posted on Facbeook with a link to a blog article about our Kindness Project. We had noticed some bullying behaviour starting in the changerooms and wanted to tackle it before it grew too big, so we started  studio wide discussion about kindness and encouraged students to be kind to others by giving out "kindness awards", a business card that instructed the recipient to find another person doing something kind and pass the award on. I believe this Facebook post did so well because it played on a high-arousal emotion and people cared enough to share it. The initiative has also been very successful in the studio as well.

Emotions Pinterest Board

4. Public

"It's been said that when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another. We look to others for information about what is right or good to do in a given situation and this social proof shapes everything from the products we buy to the candidates we vote for." (Berger, 153)

The first part to Berger's concept of being "Public" discusses the social proof of a product or service. Berger describes this as the "monkey see, monkey do" behaviour of most people. The more we see a brand, product or service being used by people, the more likely we are to consider trying it. The trick is how to get a relatively private service out in the public.

"We need to be like Lululemon and Livestrong and create behavioral residue, discernible evidence that sticks around even after people have used our product or engaged with our ideas. We need to make the private public. If something is built to show, it's built to grow." (Berger, 153)

The second part to the concept is "behavioural residue". The public elements that are created, cannot just be one time things. Berger's Lululemon example looks at their bags. Most stores will give you a branded bag after a purchase which helps their public visibility as you continue shopping or carry it home, but once you get home, it turns into a garbage bag, or gets thrown out. Lululemon gives you reusable bags that can become grocery bags, shoe bags, lunch bags and get carried around again and again, thus taking the public visibility and adding behavioural residue to it.

At Pegasus we've done a few successful things in these areas. We give out dance bags with our logo on it to all new students, and from time to time to the entire school. These bags are now all over the neighbourhood, being worn to dance class and other places by students.

Another area that has longer lasting, if a little less public, behavioural residue are recital videos. Many student's DVD shelves are lined with DVD's of their dance recitals. Memories that are on display to guests in their houses and that last a lifetime. As a school that is thirty years old, it is amazing how many alumni are now bringing their children to dance class, because their memories are so strong from their own childhood.

Here is an example of Pegasus dancers participating in a community event wearing a Pegasus T-shirt and a tutu to make our brand public.

Public Pinterest Board 

5. Practical Value

"We go out of our way to give advice or send others information that will make them better off." (Berger, 177)

I believe that humans are programmed to give advice. I rarely meet a person that is able to hold back on giving a piece of advice without being asked for it, and it almost always comes from a place of goodness, even when the advice is not wanted. So, Berger's concept of "Practical Value" makes a lot of sense to me. I see things shared in social media all the time that are practical and that element in face to face interactions is almost unavoidable.

We've been experimenting with various ways to share practical value at Pegasus. For a while we noticed that posts about positive body image and preventing or dealing with eating disorders in children were getting a lot of attention. But, then we noticed that all these articles or posts were saying the same thing over and over, so we couldn't just post those, we needed some more topics. In recent months we have done a collection of "practical value" style social media posts or re-shares. Topics specifically related to dance are popular but so is parenting advice. When the studio was smaller and everyone knew the owner, Jane (a mother of three and grandmother of three), parents would come in and chat with her not about dance, but about their kids. Her parenting advice and guidance was invaluable. This still happens with the families she knows more intimately, but we are trying to take that element of the business online as Jane is less and less available to be present in the building. This post for example, had one of our highest engagements in the past few weeks, and the blog post that went with the image below also had a high engagement rate.

Practical Value Pinterest Board

6. Stories

"...people don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride." (Berger, 181)

 Berger's "Story" concept is a collection of all of the five previous concepts. Putting social currency, triggers, emotions, public and practical value together in the form of a narrative to convey the message of the brand. Easier said than done!

As someone who loves stories and storytelling, I am the most drawn to this concept, however, I find the balance of incorporating all the previous concepts without making your story sound too "salesy" difficult. One benefit we do have at Pegasus Dance Studios is the power of dance itself. We can tell wonderful stories through the art form that we teach. One of our most watched videos is of a dance that tells a strong narrative story of living near water. It is a powerful dance piece because of it's narrative aspects.

Stories Pinterest Board

Conclusions

This book was very useful in both the social media context and the face to face context. I learned some very valuable information about what makes people share things. As I mentioned previously, relying primarily on word of mouth for advertising, this book was a perfect read for the business I work for, because as we discussed in this class, social media is not independent of the overall business strategy, it is just a tool. Word of mouth can be very hard to control or measure, but now I feel that I have some more concrete tools to apply when working on all aspects of the business.