How social contagions reach critical mass part 2 Sticky messages

Before reading this text I recommend you to read part 1 of how social contagions reach critical mass. 

You may have heard this story before: A friend of a friend was abroad. He went to a hotel bar to have a drink. He met a nice girl, who wanted to talk to him. The next thing he remembers, is that he woke up in a bathtub full of ice. He started to look around and found a note next to him, which said: ”Do not move and call this number!” Next to the note he found a mobile phone and he called to the emergency room. Pretty calm voice answered and asked ”Is there a tube in your lower back attached to you? He touched it with his hand and noticed it and he said yes to the operator. The next thing he heard, was calm words: ”Do not move, just tell us in which hotel you are and we will help you, you are a victim of the kidney heist.”

Composing a sticky message is not easy. The first story is an urban legend, which is a sticky message too. Sticky messages have many similarities and this post is about composing one. Everybody has probably heard some version about this story from somebody they know. Sticky messages are understandable, remembered and they have long-lasting consequences, which can change behavior.

Sticky messages have some certain characteristics, they are

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. They are explained through stories

Simple messages are squeezed into the core idea. They are easily understandable. Finding the core means squeezing the message into its most critical essence. You have to find the most important idea from your message and forget everything else, which seem to be critical, but do not belong to the core idea. To form a sticky message, you have to know how much of the message you can lose without killing the core idea. Simple messages are compact and the core idea is easily understood. You should use sentences instead of paragraphs, short sentences instead of long ones, and you should use easy words instead of hard ones. The idea gets stickier, when you can reduce the amount of information.

Unexpected messages contain surprise(s) at some point. You need a surprise to get people´s attention. Surprise means breaking the pattern the audience is used to hear. The surprise makes you give more attention to the idea. The extra attention then moves unexpected ideas into your memory easier. You have to fix the broken guessing machine, which is in your brains. The goal is to make people care about something and then tell people what they want to know.

Concrete message is examinable through your senses. For example, you can show photos or some other live media to make people sense the idea. Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Concreteness creates a shared understanding. Abstraction moves you into other way. Concrete language is used to help beginners to understand some complex ideas. It is a lot easier to use complex and abstract language and professional jargon instead of keeping things concrete. The problem is, without concreteness of the message it may be too hard to be understood.

Credible messages need details. Yoy need to define details, which can symbolize and support the core idea. Sometimes you can use statistics to enhance the credibility of the idea, but they need to be related to the idea you want to share. You can also use authority or antiauthority to get more credibility to your idea. For example, some success stories are good, when you want to show our solutions to problems are working.

Emotional messages work better than trying to give a reason for something. Most people believe in telling many reasons to do something, but most often message fails. By trying to make people care, you inspire people to act. You should do this by associating people with feelings they already have. Trying to associate the message with identity may help you get your message through. By doing this, you associate the message into people´s self-interest. People most often ask ”What´s in it for me?”.

Story-telling is a best way to make people take action. Stories provide mental simulation and inspiration to people who are listening. Mental simulation works, because you cannot imagine events without evoking modules of the brain, in which the same physical activities are evoked. These mental simulations help you manage your emotions. Stories provide content that is missing from abstract ideas. They are almost always concrete, emotional and they have unexpected elements. When you can tell a good story with only the core of the idea, you get almost every component of the sticky message. This way you can get your message through in a best way and it sticks longer in the mind of your audience.

You should use a checklist of these 6 things before sending the message. You don´t have to have all the components, but some of them are needed. If you can get your core idea through with the other components, your message should be sticky. Just try it and see what happens.

-TT