Contagious: Social Currency

Key Points:

Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; (3) make people feel like insiders.

• Inner Remarkability

• Remarkable things are defined as unusual, extraordinary, or worthy of notice or attention.
• Worthy of remark. Worthy of mention. Learning that a ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber is just so noteworthy that you have to mention it. 

• Leverage Game Mechanics

• This in a greater sense means make your product or service a game that others can work towards for personal and social status.
• People don't just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others. After all what good is status if no one else knows you have it?
• Great game mechanics can even create achievement out of nothing. Airlines turned loyalty into a status symbol.

• Make People Feel Like Insiders 

• The power of friends telling friends. 
• Exclusivity is also about availability.  Exclusivity isn't just about money or celebrity, it's also about knowledge. Knowing certain information or being connected to people who do. 
• If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique high status. And because of that, they'll not only like a product or service more, but tell others about it.
• Using scarcity and exclusivity early on and then relaxing the restrictions later is a particularly good way to build demand.
• The mere fact that something isn't readily available can make people value it more and tell others to capitalize on the social currency of knowing about it or having it.

 People like to make a good impression, so we need to make our product a way of achieving that.