Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness

Dan Zarrella's book, "Zarella's Hierarchy of Congtagiousness" is a elegant set of ideas, presented in a short book that I found to contain a useful framework and specific advice about how to make the most of social media.

For a CIO or CTO, it is vital to be able to communicate in a sticky fashion. Books like Made to Stick provide a good explanation of what makes an idea compelling. Zarrella takes the conversation one step further and explains that plumbing through which an idea is propagated throughout the world.

Zarrella presents a framework in three stages: Exposure, Attention, and Motivation. He then uses data to show what works and doesn't in each stage. For example, if you want more links, post content really early in the morning, that's when editors are searching for new stuff to link to. If you want more retweets, then tweet later in the day, after 1:00 PM, and later in the week, Wednesday or later.

Two quibbles with the book. My nitpick is that the person who formatted the book for publication forgot to put in the heading for the "Motivation" section, which should have showed up on page 40.

My bigger problem with the book is that it is missing a discussion of the quality of content. The book is written from a perspective that implies that all tweets and blog posts are equal, in a sense. To be fair, Zarrella talks about what kinds of words promote retweeting, but we are missing any data on the variation between tweets posts from a single source.

There must be some other variable, let's call it quality, that determines if a tweet or post really hits home. I would love to see Zarrella read Made to Stick and the do some research about identifying what leads to quality in social media content.