The Rules of Contagion

The outlook is even worse for a typical marketing campaign.
Although Jonah Peretti once bet that it was possible to get something
to deliberately take off, he’s since acknowledged that it’s much harder
to guarantee contagion when working to a client brief.[51] Consider
the difference between his original Nike e-mail, which spread widely,
and those later e-mail campaigns, which were far less transmissible.
Peretti and Watts have pointed out that infectious diseases have
millennia of evolution on their side; marketers don’t have nearly as
much time. ‘The chances are, therefore, that even talented creatives
will typically design products that exhibit R less than 1, no matter how
hard they try,’ they suggested.[52]
Fortunately, there is another way to increase the size of an
outbreak: get the message out to more people at the start. In the
above examples, we’ve been analysing stuttering outbreaks by
assuming that one person is infectious at the start. If the reproduction
number is small, this will lead to a small outbreak that fades away
quickly. One way to fix this is to simply introduce more infections.
Peretti and Watts call it ‘big seed marketing’. If we get a slightly
contagious message to lots of people, it can pick up additional
attention during subsequent small outbreaks. For example, if we send
a non-contagious message to one thousand people, we’ll reach one
thousand people. If instead we launch a message with an R of 0.8,
we’d expect to reach five thousand people in total. Much of
BuzzFeed’s early content became popular in this way. People saw
articles on the website, then shared them with a handful of friends on
sites like Facebook. Having pioneered the idea of ‘reblogging’ in the
early 2000s, Peretti’s team took full advantage of it in the decade that
followed. By 2013, Buzzfeed had been named the most ‘social’
publisher on Facebook, with more comments, likes, and shares than
any other organisation.[53] (Huffington Post, Peretti’s former
company, was second.)
If web content generally has a low R and needs multiple
introductions to spread, it suggests that we shouldn’t be thinking
about online contagion as if it’s the 1918 flu virus or . Infections
like pandemic flu spread easily from person to person, which means
outbreaks initially grow larger and larger over several generations of