Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas Hardcover – 2011

I figured it was only $6 for 80 pages (actually, turns out was only 64 pages in my ebook. When you paid $6, that's disappointment #1 - and this is hardly a "book," it's a single, booklet, white paper, whatever.) I'd not write this review if I only paid a dollar. It's a pretty net-negative review after buying and reading this last night and is simply my honest opinion/experience. I think the author is capable of adding a lot more value because of his reputation and other good contributions online.

Quickly tiresome is combative language describing all the bad guys out there. A little goes a long way, and I appreciate that yes, there are too many of them. But the negativity is so pervasive it feels immature - after several times of these descriptions and many more to come, it becomes the feeling you get when somebody insecure it putting down others so male themselves seem smarter. Ugh.

Many of the paragraphs simply didn't flow together; like a collection of thoughts strung together to sound really intelligent but actually isn't anything more than veneer.

Yet as I read the book I maintained hope of a silver lining because after all, it's the "science", design and engineering (power word, show me more) of contagious ideas. All the right words, bravo. I see the book focuses on 3 sections: Exposure, Attention, and Motivation and am excited about some solid, sink my teeth in strategies that I can follow. Nothing of the sort was in this book.

Why are there no solid, sink-your-teeth in strategies and what is there instead? The book was simply a collection of "scientific" "studies" that mostly the author conducted, loosely grouped into a few categories. I know science. The "science" in this book is simply unprofessional, flimsy and undocumented and frankly unworthy of my time (large data sets do not mean the research is superb), despite the author's emphasis of the scientific method. If I can't trust the methodology it all becomes a blur of page after page after page of charts with explanations and antedotes that I shrug at - maybe it's true, maybe it's useful, perhaps not. Starting with criticisms of charlatans, and then providing nothing academic of his own, I found it all ironic.

The final let-down was at the end: "Measure your ROI" - naturally I think "great, show me HOW to measure ROI." Nope. This section is only telling me to DO measure my ROI. Well, duh. Hi freshman year of business college. In about a page of blathering about how you really should do it, the only thing that comes close to telling me HOW to do this is "Getting simple referral reports from a free analytics provider is a great first step". That's it. Wow. And then the next section whisks away to "Once you're actually measuring how much money social media activity is making you..."

Helpful items were some of the "studies" that were relevant to me such as retweetable words, best times of day to email and so on, assuming they are correct.

I don't mean to be overly harsh. I am confident the author knows a great deal about the subject more than me, and that I would learn a lot on his blog (in fact, I think the author could have fleshed out a full, useful book from this but simply wanted to make a quick buck - it's a bit shameful according to my worldview and I think it cheapens a person's brand.) This book simply wasn't it, and I am sad that I wasted my money on it. It did not live up to its title one bit.

Dan Zarrella's an internet marketing Guru. He's researched internet marketing and social media, and has some ideas about what makes things go viral. Some of them are encapsulated in this book.

The book is very small and very short. Much of it was previously posted on Dan's web site. However a small book-shaped package is a convenient format. Dan says the bunnies on the front represent rapidly-reproducing ideas.

Dan uses memetics, cites Richard Dawkins and says:

"Our world is made of memes. If you've ever seen the matrix movies, You'll remember their world was composed entirely of computer code. Everything people interacted with was built from computerized instructions. Similarly, our world is made of contagious ideas. Everything made by huamns - from the chair you're sitting on, to the book you're reading - exists only because someone had the idea to invent it and that idea caught on, spreading from person to person."

It's a memorable image: our world is indeed made of memes.

The book is full of social media marketing tips of the type Dan posts on his blog. It's full of graphs and charts telling you what and when to tweet for the best results.

There was one bit of the book which I really didn't like - where Dan defined a measure of the rate of increase of memetic infections per generation, claimed that trying for an explosive epidemic was unrealistic and then recommended using big seeds.

Dan doesn't seem to think small seeds are effective. It is true that you should spend some of your marketing budget on seeding your idea. However making your idea spreadable is really very important. Dan says that when you do get a viral idea, it's just a fluke, and you shouldn't build your marketing strategy on luck. But relying on big seeds is not really correct advice in general. Pop songs may not reach every single member of the population before dying away, but they do reach many millions and that's good enough for their composers.

Some do have to rely on big seeds, since they have content that requires it - but most should try and use highly-contagious memes in their marketing, for best effect.

Dan advocates a science of marketing. However, few marketers do very much science, since they often don't want to publish their raw data, and they often don't trust what other marketers say. It's probably more realistic to advise marketers to cherry pick the best bits from the scientific method - such as iterating the process of performing experiments, measuring their outcomes and making changes. Maybe it's best to regard marketing as a technology - rather than a science.

The book is pretty neat. It is short, readable and fun. Most readers will probably be hungry for more details, but at least this is a start.

Sadly, my previous review did not adhere to the advice I received as a child from Disney's character, Thumper the Rabbit..."if you can't say anything good about anyone, don't say anything at all." So I won't say anything at all about Guy Kawasaki's book, Enchantment.

Along comes Dan Zarrella -- no overly-inflated guru, but an advisor I have admired for a while (His opening dedication shows someone skilled with weaving words). Zarrella's book identifies, what he aptly calls the Unicorns and Rainbows mentality that infect today's society.

I urge you to get his little book on contagious ideas...what they are and how (if you are clever)to make them contagious. As he says, it has absolutely nothing to do with the idea being good or bad (witness poorly examined assertions and denials about Global Warming).

As with any well-formed argument or observation, Zarrella's to-the-point writing is impossible to block or counter. It's like an oncoming bulldozer. No unicorns can stand in its way.

Because most of us dream of the Internet dripping money into our bank accounts; this may one of the clearest guides to getting there. It cuts through all the (useless) touchy-feely advice of "make the customer your friend." I have enough friends, I want more customers.

Zarrella is a guide to turning the oft-confusing power of social media to your advantage.

P.S. I agree with one of the reviewer's assessment of the Domino Project...good tools, cheap.