The 5 Characteristics of Ideas that Spread

A great article at the 99U. The five characteristics are:

1. Relative advantage
2. Compatibility
3. Complexity
4. Trialability
5. Observability

Read the whole thing.

And for those who want to go deeper on how ideas spread, I would recommend:

1. Unleashing the Ideavirus, by Seth Godin (a classic and still the best).
2. PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life, which you need to read carefully in order to truly get, but adds important details not in Godin’s book. It’s by Greg Stielstra, who oversaw marketing for numerous best sellers at Zondervan, including The Purpose Driven Life, and clearly knows what he is talking about.