Posted by Luke in 
You don’t have to look far to find a meme these days. One at hand example is the growing popularity of things as seemingly random as the graph jam blog. The question that strikes me is the randomness of these ideas. They emerge and are passed around the internet and seem to make no sense. But as Malcolm Gladwell asked in the Tipping Point… what makes these ideas stick?
Stickiness can’t be planned… but if you don’t plan you fail?
The rate at which something becomes popular on the internet is alarming. I have seen one (yes it’s sad) of my posts be stumbled and hit 2000 unique visitors in less than an hour. That’s small fish compared to some people I know who do that by lunch everyday. The thing that always gets me about these peaks and valleys is the collective consciousness that drives it. To have this kind of short term stickiness you need something that makes enough people happy… at once… for a short period of time. The randomness of stickiness makes you wonder what it is that people love so much about things as bizarre as this poor bastard at the University of Florida.
Shared consciousness creates stickiness
What makes these things stick is the shared consciousness around the singular element of meaning… or the thing that makes us laugh at the poor tase me bro man. What sticks relates to people and how they think about that one thing. That doesn’t mean everybody loves it… it means that equally as many people hate it. Then when we come to see it… it divides us into a love/hate paradox. Very few people I have ever met I have learned to think in a way that helps to see multiple intersecting dimensions (Alan is good at this). Most people learn to enjoy a false positive narrative when it comes to life because it’s easier than admitting that stuff happens so randomly. Yet, in the disorganisation of things, especially consciousness there is an equilibrium. It’s there … otherwise we wouldn’t ever be able to detect the patterns that appear to us in the everyday flow of life. We also actively create these patterns… which makes it all the more confusing.
Randomness Stickiness
Ralph Stacey used a concept called: complex adaptive systems to explain how in social networks people learn and grow through disequilibrium. As new problems arise there is an emergent response to the crisis which we in turn find ourselves trying to manage. We try different concepts until one sticks for no other reason that the fact that we tried it. In affiliate marketing circles and in general most of the successful people will tell you that they make so much money because they keep on trying and until they find the random stickiness they are after. Once the ‘hit the vien’ it’s low cost-high profit. In between it’s trial, error and misery.
The most recent example in my life of random stickiness came when I wrote a paper for the Australasian Journal of Information Systems. At first the editors said no but might accept it if we revised it. We changed the title and indeed the focus of the paper and they accepted it immediately without contacting us. Something we wrote stuck with the editors of the journal or they needed papers!
Right place at the right time is random stickiness
So is being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The guy who started Facebook and the other one who did myspace were probably reading social trends. I strongly doubt however they mapped out the random stickiness that happened to their sites. That said, intuition might have had something to do with it. What about the LOLCATS people? These are those things that for some reason large groups love and hate at the same time. About all I can work out is four things that I have noticed that these ’sticky’ things have in common.
Four essential properties of stickiness
1. Engagement: People engaging with the core concept – interacting consciousness that engages to create a platform that people use or something that is liked as a basic concept.
2. Talkability: Something people are willing to remark on and spread the word for to whoever and whomever they please. Reasons for this vary but I have noticed that people like sharing something that adds a certain amount of humour to the lives of others. Most people share things because it gives them a sense of worth and creates value for the audience.
3. Passability: Something which is passable or easy to share creates the possibility of stickiness but does not absolutely guarantee it. If it’s easy to tell people about something then it’s easy to spread.
4. Lastability: The final point about stickiness that I have noticed is the life cycle of a concept. To me most (not all) high volume concepts, on the web at least, last a lot less longer that others. I have seen posts on other people’s blog have an immediate hit then nothing whereas others will last a lot longer because of the inherent value of the post. The same goes for anything. There is a natural limit to how long something can last. There is short term lastability (i.e. get a first life) and long term lasting(ness) which continually uses the same engagement factor to create more value from the same essential concept (i.e. problogger or digg). A short term lasting concept creates value for a shorter cycle (but might have higher initial volume) as opposed to a long term lasting concept which creates value over an extended period. Either way the level of engagement with a concept and it’s lasting quality are important levels of stickiness.
A contrast to what I am saying here is found in the one hit wonder. They come and then they go. Why? Random stickiness. I have had no end of trying concepts that failed (especially in business) and I have to say I had never really considered the level of stickiness involved. It’s incredibly important to do market research and find these streams… but you must remember it’s random. If it could be continually predicted to 100% reliability (or 95% for the statisticians out there 
) then we would all be rich. We aren’t all rich. Some of us are pretty far from rich… actually. That aside, how something sticks and why it does is random.
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Good post.
Thanks Dan.
Thank you for the mention, Luke.
This post certainly resonates with me…though I’d steer clear of the “random” label. Chaotic, perhaps, complex, certainly.
Where would you put authenticity/coherence/integrity (a single concept)? From people, books and films, through restaurants, brands and websites to theories and perceptions, it seems to me that a distinctive essence of “self” is at the heart of the joyously popular (as opposed to the joylessly popular).