there's a restaurant in Philadelphia called barlay Prime and they are known for their $100 cheese steak sandwich and in a market where the average cheese steak can be bought for $5 Barkley primed thrived and the reason why is our first principle which is social currency social currency says that people are more likely to share something than makes them look good in the case of barlay prime people were not buying into the sandwich they were not buying into the cheese steak not the ingredients not the bread what they were buying into was the story was the
social currency that they would get from them experiencing that sandwich that experience was worthy of them sharing it on social media where they would show off to their friends and family that they are able to afford such an experience it is a story worthy of recounting it is the type of story where you walk in on Monday into your office space and you show people you're like you won't believe what I experienced this weekend look at these pictures this is the $100 cheese stick from barlay Prime people were buying into the story and their ability
to use that as a social currency within their social network and the reason why this is important for us here in web 3 is because social currency is built deep within web 3 and in the context of the nft space as we saw people are more likely to share something out to their audience when that certain something increases their social currency within the marketplace this is when they will be more likely to go out and share your message share your product to Their audience and something important if you were to notice in the nft space
one thing that is deeply embedded within our culture is people posting about the nfts that they hold every morning it is culturally built within web 3 to go out there and say good morning to nft culture and what typically people do is they embed an nft the nft that they own within that picture people change their profile picture on the internet to that specific nft but what you don't realize is it is only 1% of the thousands of nft collections that exist out there that end up making it into Flex worthy category the category that
people are going to be willing to put put out there and show when someone flexes their nft on their social media they're flexing only the nfts that they want to associate their brand image with that they want to showcase to the world like hey I own this beauty right here and you don't so rule number one of why things go viral social currency people are more likely to share things that makes them look good on their timeline and this is a principle that I learned from the book contagious incredible read I read it back in
2017 and since then it's been one of the books that has stuck with me throughout my marketing career and if this is the first time we meet my name is Leon Abu and I help web3 Founders launch and scale their brands in web 3 in the most ethical sustainable and profitable way over the last two years I've helped over a 100 teams and only in the last 90 days have helped generate over $20 million in mint funds I make these videos for free so you can learn and hopefully one day when you're ready to take
your project to the next level partner with us at un funable principle number two is a trigger in7 KitKat were losing market share sales were plummeting by 5% every single year and at the company they needed to do something badly to get back on track and increase their sales and the marketing department of KitKat came up with a genius idea what they did is moving forward for the next year every ad that came out for KitKat they Associated the chocolate bar with coffee every single ad you saw every billboard every social media post there was
always a coffee sitting next to the KitKat and what that did in people's mind is it created a trigger where KitKat was able to associate the behavior that they want to create which is people consuming the KitKat with something that was already deeply embedded within people's habits the C coffee so what happened next time on your three or four occasions that you were having coffee during the day it created a trigger for you to think about KitKat they will pretty much be able to create an association between their product and a second product product two
right here they were able to create a very strong Association where the moment people would see product two that was already embedded in people's behavior they thought of your product and what ended up happening exactly one year after sales of Kip Kats were up by 33% and this is a great example for my viewers here people here at home that are watching this if you're watching this videos you are most likely a web3 founder or you are launching an nftd collection and I'm going to give you an example that is very relevant for your position
as an nft founder about 2 months ago there was a viral word that circulated around social media and that was the word Kabal all of a sudden someone made a post on social media doxing the cabal and talking about how there's a group of people behind the scenes that are the ones that are pulling the strings of the industry and that person called them the Kabal and all of a sudden the word Kabal became the most viral word it became part of memes it became part of conversation people were making content about the cabal what
my business partner Kermit did genius at the very same time time as he saw this rolling out he rolled out his own private Community around his brand he's a big content creator and guess what he called it he called it the cabal with a K when the word Kabal was written with a c he wrote it with Kabal with a K to stand for Kermit and he was pretty much able to call this community the cabal and now the people that are part of his community are call cabal Members so what happened now what he
was able to do incredibly well is he was able to ride off this viral word which was the cabal he was able to associate himself with it so now what you see out there on social media anytime now people are talking about the cabal people are writing about the cabal there's a trigger there's the association people remember oh yeah there's this content creator that has a community called the cabal he was able to hijack that term and make it into his own proprietary community and this is an example how Kermit my business partner was able
to use the word cabal to associate his personal brand and his community within web3 culture another example that I can think about top of mind is one thing board apal Club did amazing in the first bow run is they became the thing people thought about when they thought of nfts when you ask anyone in the world do you know nfts the first thing they're going to tell you is oh yeah those monkey profile pictures bour fat club was virtually able to associate their brand with the term nft and that's how they were able virtually to
become the biggest web through brand in the world during that period of time so reason number two why things go viral you create a trigger between a product that is already existing out there a ritual a well understood concept or phenomenon you create a trigger with your brand so the more that second product grows the more your brand grows with it so this was reason number one why things go viral social currency number two trigger number three reason why things go viral they did an experiment where they simulated waiting room for a doctor's appointment and
they brought in a Tex test subject who was supposed to have a doctor's appointment the test subject walks into the appointment room and that appointment room was filled with people and what that test subject didn't know is that all the people in that room were paid actors pretty much and what they were trained to do is every once in a while they're going to be hearing a buzzing sound when people hear that sound what they were tasked to do is just to stand up look around and just sit back down and what happened is that
the subject came into the appointment room and sat down to wait for her appointment sits down a couple minutes and then you hear the first alarm sound and everyone in the room just stands up unknowingly for no reason and you see that that subject all of a sudden looking around looking confused everyone sits back down second time everyone gets up and everyone just you know does their thing and they sit back down you can see confusion grows in that person's mind and guess what happens on the third buzzing sound that that subject also stands up
for no apparent reason and no apparent explanation the reason why ladies and gentlemen social proof social proof says that when faced with a lack of information people seek to the behavior of others around them to guide their decision making and in the context of web3 conversation this is a really interesting one really interesting because it is one of the more common reasons why things catch on and go viral we've recently seen an incredibly successful marketing campaign with the portal coin farming where all of a sudden through a genius marketing stunt they were able to get
the biggest content creators in the nft space talking about this new token called portal and the whole initiatives behind this was the more you posted about portal the more Impressions your specific post got the more points you would get and these points would then be redeemed for actual tokens and what very quickly happened in the nft space everyone on X followed through and for an entire 3 weeks the timeline was filled with people farming the portal token and one thing I'm going to guarantee to you one thing I'm going to say with confidence 99% of
people who were farming the portal coin who were posting about it who were using their attention and the Odes that they have to farm that token 99% of them had absolutely no idea what they were farming they didn't know who the team was they didn't know what portal coin was all they knew is that it was something important because other people were talking about it and they didn't want to miss out so they thought let me start writing that Trend and whenever I figure out about it I will figure it out but might as well
I start doing that because if everyone is talking about it then there must be something important about it and this was a perfect example how portal coin was able to do it another example that I recently made a case study for was Persona an nft project that we worked on recently raised 5.5 million on their nft Mint one thing they did m masterfully was they created a questing system where people were presented with a page where they had different quests that they could partake in and every Quest got you for example 10 points Five Points
six points 12 20 points if you were to complete these quests and what these quests were if you go like this post that Persona just did if you go follow the founder accounts if you go retweet this if you go comment on this so what this created ladies and gentlemen seeing this happening live was incredible is it ended up creating a positive feedback that fed itself where the more people saw this the more they interacted with the quest which made more people on the timeline see Persona which made even more people get into the quest
system it created that Viral Loop effect and one of the phenomenons one of the reasons why Persona went viral social proof so far we have social currency trigger social proof number four reason why things go viral and catch on is Authority after World War II in the 1960s they did experiments to try to understand human behavior and what leads people to do certain things and in the context of that it was to understand what is it that led the mass genocide or the mass killing during World War II and one experiment that they ran that
is incredibly popular that still up until today is quoted in Psychology studies is the milr experiment and what they did with the mgram experiment is very simple they brought a test subject in a big room and that room was separated in two by a wall you couldn't see through the wall one thing they had is they had it the test subject was sitting over here and in front of that test subject they had a computer they had a a keyboard where you could press buttons to send an electrocution shock to another test subject that was
behind the wall and in that room with the test subject there was the professor the researcher the authority figure that was there to oversee that the experiment was going well one thing this subject right here was tasked to do is to ask questions to this person right here behind the wall and when that person would give a wrong answer they were tasked to press a button on the keyboard to send an electrocution shock to that person and on the keyboard every time they would answer wrong they had to send a higher signal up until the
final button that had a skull sticker next to it what that person didn't know is this man right here behind the wall was an actor so what started happening during the experimentation the first test subjects ask a question to the second one answer is wrong sends an electric shock ouch reacts the second one as the wrong answers starts compiling so does the level of shock that he's sending and so does the dramatic reaction of that test subject behind the wall up to the point where this person started screaming and saying that his life is in
danger but throughout the whole experimentation the professor right here kept scale in the nft space are the ones ran by an authority figure it is by Founders that are respected and looked up to in the nft space and this is why ladies and gentlemen looking back at the bull market previous bull market celebrities would just come out and launch projects and these would sell out an instant go viral why because there was an authority figure behind the project even though that person had nothing to do with web 3 had no idea what they were doing
here people still bought into the project because of that author figure and this is something that is only getting embedded more and more in the web3 space this is not going anywhere we live work and build in an industry that still does not have product Market fit so people no longer bet on the ideas that Founders bring to the table they bet on the actual Founders that are bringing these ideas to the table so what this tells us if we are to recap all four points social currency trigger social proof and Authority if you are
trying to build a product and you want to catch the attention of people you want to create virality around your project and you want to become spoken about in the nft space you need one of those four things if not all of them you need to have a product that people will want to show off to others you need to associate your product with something that is already embedded within people's habit or within people's subconscious you need to have social proof you need a large following of engaged active people and you need number four to
become someone worthy of people's attention and someone that people are going to look up to turn off their brains because they trust you and they respect you and they want to be part of everything that you are creating ladies and gentlemen my name is Leon bu and it was an absolute pleasure sharing this moment with you I can't wait to see you on the very next video cheers
