To talk about the next concept, I want you to introduce you, a friend of mine named Ken Craig. Now, Ken Craig has made a viral video. It's got over 10 million views. That by itself is not very surprising. But what's more surprising is that Ken is 86 years old and that viral video is about one of the least exciting things ever. Corn. Now, who would share a video about corn? Why did over 10 million people share a piece of content about corn? Well, if you've ever eaten corn, you know that there are two key problems. First, it gets stuck in your teeth. I can't solve that problem. But second, once you take off the husk, there's those annoying little things called silks that run down the side. We can never seem to get them all off. Well, Ken has a simple trick for getting rid of those silks. You take an ear of corn, you pop it in the microwave for four minutes, take it out, cut off the bottom quarter-inch, hold the husk out drop the ear, clean ears every time. Not the most exciting piece of content, not the most emotional in the world, but pure useful information. That brings us to the second P, which is practical value. People don't just share things that make them look good. They share things that help others and make others better off. When we look at your inbox, for example, you'll see lots of things that people have shared with you that are often useful. Black Friday Deals, top 10 Superfoods you should be eating things like more almonds are more salmon. Or even articles about the six things you can do to be happy or the seven questions you should never ask in an interview. In all these cases, people are sharing this information because they want to help others out. They want to pass along useful information and make others better off. We use to help our neighbors by doing things like barn building. Our neighbors would come by and help us. A couple of years later when they needed a new barn, we'd come by and help them. But today we're more separate from our neighbors than ever before. We don't interact as often face to face too often we're looking at our phones or on digital rather than really interacting with those around us. Sharing content is a way to deepen connections between people we don't see as often. We may not see our friends face to face, but by sharing things with them, we can deepen the social bond. One way that companies take advantage of this is something called content marketing. Rather than talking about themselves, they share useful content to their lists that people want to share with others. Vanguard, for example, the financial services firm creates a series of emails called MoneyWhys. Every month they send along useful tips for how to manage your money, child's education fund, or other things you need to know about. How to plan for retirement, how to do better on your taxes. Not all of those things are things at Vanguard helps with directly, but people share the information just because it's useful. 3M does most of their business B2B, but they've created a great newsroom where they create articles and content about the power and the motivating impact of science. The articles aren't about 3M per se, but they are about what science does for the world. People share them because they're inspired and along the way, 3M gets to come along for the ride. One important thing to think about though, is how can we get people to share our useful content? There's so much useful stuff out there. Why don't we share some useful things rather than others? There's ways to frame content to make it seem more useful. Let me give you a brief example. Imagine you're a retailer and you're selling a product that's $20 and you want to discount it to motivate people to action, so you say, well, I'll make that product five dollars off. What would five dollars off be in percentage terms? You can do the quick math. It'd be 25 percent off. Economically, are those the same? Certainly, five dollars off is the same as 25 percent off. In both cases, people pay $15 for the product and the retailer lose five dollars along the way. But are they the same to the end consumer? Are they both equally motivated to get people to take action? Not quite. People are much more likely to take that deal and be motivated to talk about it if it's 25 percent off rather than five dollars. Economically the same, but how the numbers are framed, influences their impact. While our percentage is always better, there are some cases where numbers are better. Take, for example, a product that's $2,000 off. You can imagine it being $500 off, or again, 25 percent off. In that case, $500 off is more motivating. It's something I call the rule of 100. It's not just what that number is, it's how large or small that number seems based on the context, 25 percent seems larger than five dollars. For numbers less than a 100, percentages often seem larger than the number itself and so they're more motivating to take people, to take action. But for numbers over a 100, like $2,000, most off there, the numbers off will be greater than the percentage off, and so the absolute number off will be more motivating to people and more likely to drive people to action. Numbers aren't just numbers, useful information isn't just useful. How we frame that information, how we make it seem even more useful, will drive people to take action.
