Skill.md
Contagious — STEPPS Viral Content Framework
Core Framework
Jonah Berger spent years at Wharton studying why certain products, ideas, and content spread while others don't. His central finding: virality isn't born, it's made. The message matters more than the messenger. Any product — even a boring blender — can be engineered to spread.
Key fact that reshapes strategy: 93% of word of mouth happens offline, not on social media. Social media is a technology, not a strategy. The real driver is the psychology of why people share.
The Six STEPPS Principles
S — Social Currency People share things that make them look good — smarter, more interesting, or more in-the-know. Find the inner remarkability in your product, build game mechanics that confer status, or create insider knowledge that people want to pass on. The "Please Don't Tell" hidden bar in NYC never advertised but was perpetually booked because discovering it was the social currency.
T — Triggers Top of mind, tip of tongue. People talk about what they're thinking about. Link your product to high-frequency environmental cues that fire repeatedly in your audience's daily life. Cheerios gets more word of mouth than Disney because people encounter breakfast every day. Growing the "trigger habitat" beats trying to be more impressive.
E — Emotion Arousal level, not valence, drives sharing. High-arousal emotions (awe, excitement, anger, anxiety) increase sharing. Low-arousal emotions (sadness, contentment) decrease it. This means anger spreads as well as joy — and targeting the wrong emotion type (like sadness for a fundraising campaign) can actually suppress word of mouth.
P — Public "Built to show, built to grow." The more observable a behavior, the more it spreads. Design products with visible signals of use (Apple's white earbuds, yellow Livestrong bracelets). Create behavioral residue — things that keep advertising working after the initial action. Make private behaviors public.
P — Practical Value People share useful information because they want to help others. But "useful" isn't enough — it must be specifically useful in a way that's surprising or remarkable. Package expertise so it's easy to remember and pass on. Apply the Rule of 100: frame discounts as percentages for items under $100, and as absolute values for items over $100, to maximize the perceived impact.
S — Stories Stories are Trojan horses — information travels embedded in narratives people want to tell. The critical principle is Valuable Virality: the product or brand must be so integral to the story that you can't tell it without mentioning the brand. Many stories are entertaining but leave the brand out. The goal is to build stories where the product IS the plot.
Supported Query Types
- STEPPS audit: Score any piece of content, product, or campaign on all six dimensions with specific improvement recommendations
- Viral content engineering: Apply STEPPS to design more shareable campaigns for any context
- Viral analysis: Explain why a specific piece of content spread (or why it didn't)
- Trigger strategy: Identify environmental cues to link your product to for ongoing word-of-mouth
- Emotional angle design: Identify and engineer the right high-arousal emotion for your context
- Story construction: Build a Trojan horse narrative where your brand is integral
How to Use
Most common entry points: (1) "Why isn't my content spreading?" — runs a full STEPPS audit; (2) "Help me make [product/campaign] more viral" — generates specific STEPPS-based recommendations; (3) "Why did [viral thing] go viral?" — applies STEPPS as an analytical lens. Provide the specific product, content, or campaign for the most targeted output.
Limitations
STEPPS optimizes for shareability at the content level — it does not solve product-market fit problems. If your product doesn't create genuine value for a specific audience, STEPPS cannot manufacture virality from scratch. Additionally, the framework describes probabilistic mechanisms: applying all six principles increases the likelihood of spreading but cannot guarantee any specific outcome.