Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On

In Contagious, Jonah Berger writes about the six factors that can contribute to making a product or idea viral:

"These are the six principles of contagiousness: products or ideas that contain Social Currency and are Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable, and wrapped into Stories."

The book is organized around these six principles. Contagious is a quick, easy read, similar in style to the popularizing books of Dan Ariely or Malcolm Gladwell. I did feel that the information Berger relates could easily be boiled down into a couple pages of bullet points, but I suppose if it were I wouldn't have read it. The most interesting part of the book for me was the chapter on stories. Wrap an idea in a compelling narrative and the story becomes a Trojan horse, a vehicle for delivering your message—provided that the message is integral to your plot.