Everything Spreads Like a Virus

What looks like a Native American dream catcher is really a network of social interactions within a community. The red dots along the inner and outer circles represent people, while the different colored lines represent direct contact between them. All connections originate from four individuals near the center of the graph

-Biomedical Beat, 2005

There’s a new article in Wired about how scientists recently discovered that happiness and sadness spread just like a disease. I’m not surprised. This seems to be the case with almost everything in life.

From my experience, every meme , every characteristic, every habit, every mood, and every ideal is passed from one person to another. I think different people have different susceptibilities to picking up things from one another. A terrific underrated movie about this phenomenon is the great Woody Allen movie Zelig.

If these concepts are in fact important in the transfer of ideas, moods, memes, etc, then it seems to me the study of the spread of diseases and the mathematical models used to monitor and predict the spread will become a much more sought after field. Salesman, marketers, and anyone interested in the assimilation of products or ideas would be interested, right?

This field is known as epidemiology.

A Social media scientist named Dan Zarrella has an interesting article on the way ideas spread, The 8 Elements of Contagious Ideas. Although Dan’s bio photo makes him look 22, his ideas are very very solid. This gentleman is extremely smart and he’s discovering a lot of interesting stuff.  A charming example of this man’s savvy intelligence can be found in this quote.

Social exchange theory is the idea that most human interactions are an exchange of value, proverbs are a great example of this in action. The more useful you find the information I share with you, the more you’ll value our relationship and the more useful information you’ll share back with me. Teach your readers how to make fire or money, make it easy for them teach their friends and they’ll gladly spread your content for you.

He wrote a well received book entitled, The Social Media Marketing Book. Give it a look.