theMediaFlow Managing Director Nichola Stott gives an overview on the book Contagious in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s Content Marketing Tip of the Week.

This weeks’ tip is a bit of homework; which is further reading for those of you looking to get more of a thorough academic understanding of “virality” and what common properties there are with the kind of content that spreads.

Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age is written by Jonah Berger, Professor of Marketing at Wharton Penn. and is the result of decades of analysis into thousands of case studies, distilling success-factors into six common principles. As an example one of [the factors] is “emotive” in that messaging that has the right emotive power has the potential to be shared very widely within the group for which it resonates. If you think about the amazing Kony2012 video it broke every rule for video content on social media. Well over three minutes and a hard hitting message, but the emotive power was phenomenal and it racked up 100 million views in 6 days.

Caveat: I’m not sure one can explain the success of Gangnam style however…