>> I want you to imagine for a moment that you're in New York City. If you don't live there, imagine you're walking around one weekend doing all the touristy stuff. Visiting Time Square, checking out the Empires State Building, walking around the city. It starts to get late in the day, it's late on a Saturday and your stomach starts rumbling. It's time to get a bite to eat and you're walking down the street on the lower east side when you notice a big hotdog shaped sign with the words eat me written in front. Looks almost like mustard and say, I haven't had a hotdog in a while might as well check this place out. So you walk down a flight of stairs into a restaurant called Crif Dogs. Now if you like hotdogs, you'll be in heaven. Crif Dogs has every hotdog you can imagine. Over I think 20 to 30 hotdogs on the menu. They have a good morning hotdog with bacon, eggs and cheese. I don't know who would wanna eat a hotdog like that for breakfast, but interesting nonetheless. A hotdog with green onion and pineapple and a traditional New York style water dog. So you're sitting there, you're finishing your hotdog when you notice something unusual in the corner of the room. Looks almost like a phone booth, like one of those things that Clark Kent might jump into to change into Superman. So you have a couple minutes, wipe the corners of your mouth, get the ketchup off. You say, I'll check this phone booth out, so you walk inside. It's pretty cramped in there, it's a phone booth after all. But on the wall, you'll see something you probably haven't seen in 20, maybe even 25 years. Remember, rotary dial phones? Remember, those phones you had to stick your finger in to and spin around in a circle? Well, there's one on the wall right there. Just for fun, stick your finger to number three, go around in a circle and hold that receiver up to your ear. Well, the phone will actually ring. It'll go ring, ring and then someone will puck up the other line and they'll ask you whether you have a reservation. Now I remember the first time I heard this story, I said, a reservation? I'm in a phone booth inside of a hotdog restaurant. What could I possibly have a reservation for? But if you're lucky and they have space or a friend of yours happened to make a reservation, the back of that phone booth will open and you'll be let into a secret bar called Please Don't Tell. Now Please Don't Tell has violated a number of traditional laws of marketing. There's no sign on the street, no sign inside the restaurant. In fact, they've done everything they can to make themselves difficult to find. Yet they've never advertised, and every day they are full. 3 PM, the phone lines open up. By 3:30, all the seats are gone. People frantically hit redial on their phones again and again and again on their phones, trying to get through and it's not for lack of competition. There's dozens of bars within a couple block radius that serve a similar product. So why were they so successful when many other bars fail? In fact, most bars and restaurants fail. So what did they do to make themselves a hit? Well, if you think about it, they made themselves a secret. Let me tell you a little secret about secrets. Think about the last time that someone told you something and they told you not to tell anybody else. What's the first thing that you did with that information? If you are like most people, you probably told someone. Because having access to something that not everyone else has makes you feel smart, it makes you feel in the know. It gives you what I'll call social currency. Just like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, the things we say and the things we share affect how other people see us. So one thing that drives people to pass things on is that it makes them look good. The better something makes us look, the more likely we are to share it. To help explain this concept, I wanna introduce you to a friend of mine. Her name is Carla and she drives a minivan and I wanna see how much you can guess about her based solely on the car that she drives. So if you had to guess, for example, how old would you guess my friend is? Well, you might say 35, maybe 45. Does she have kids? Probably. Do they play sports? Probably. What sport do they play? Well, you might say soccer. How did I know that you would guess all those things? Do I know that you know Carla? No, because choices communicate information, the car we drive and also the clothes we wear. I thought a lot about what to wear for this video. I knew that you'd be looking at me and making inference about me based on how I'm dressed and I know that I have a little bit of a young face. So I wore a jacket to seem professional and encourage you to think that I'm 24 at least rather than 18 and have my own money and can buy my own clothes. Because if I was talking to you wearing a t-shirt as I'd probably much prefer to be doing, you probably wouldn't take me seriously. What we're wearing, our clothes are a signal of who we are just like what we drive. Well, it's the same thing with what we talk about and share. Do you ever look online and notice that people share all sorts of positive things on social media? Look at me on vacation. Look at me I got a promotion. Look at me my child did well on school. Why do people less likely to share negative things? Why does nobody share look at me, I'm in front of my computer doing Excel spreadsheets? They share things that make them look good rather than not good. They share things that make them look smart, special and in the know rather than not so smart or not so special or not so in the know. What we share is a signal of who we are. Some people love talking about sports, it's a signal of their identity. Some people are foodies, love talking about the newest restaurants. People that are into technology or business, talk about those areas to signal things to others. And so if we wanted to get people to talk about us, one key thing we need to do is find that social currency. How can we make customers, our clients or the people we wanna talk about us feel like insiders? Feel smart, special and in-the know like their not like everybody else? Please don't tell did a great job of that, a hidden bar. It makes you feel special and know that you are different from others. Coca Cola put people's names on the bottles, you can see pictures of different names when you walk in to the store. You see your name on a bottle, you're much more likely to pick it up, because it makes you feel different from others. That's one way to get social currency, but there's a few more and another fun one is to find the inner remarkability and I think this one is particularly important. Remarkability means worthy of remark, something that's surprising, novel or interesting. And you might say, well, certain things are naturally remarkable and others are doomed to fail. Think about a product or service you think would be difficult to get people to talk about. You might say, toilet paper or socks, accounting, maybe dishwashers or blenders. Nobody would talk about blenders. Let me show you a fun example how a company got over 200 million view for videos about blenders. >> Will it blend? That is the question. [MUSIC] I love my new iPhone. It does everything, but will it blend? That was the question, let's find out. I think I'm gonna push the smoothie button. [NOISE] ISmoke. Don't breathe this. [MUSIC] Now you fans on YouTube have asked me to blend an iPhone. So I did it, but I have another. [MUSIC] Think I'm gonna put this on eBay. >> Now, that's pretty remarkable. This video has over ten million views. They do them for lots of different products, the set has over 200 million. Blender sales go up over 700% when these videos come out and anyone would be happy with a 700% sales increase. That's certainly remarkable. They did this for a $50 marketing budget. That's even more remarkable, but that's not the most remarkable thing to me about this video. The most remarkable thing about this video to me is that they did this for one of the least exciting products ever, a blender. Most of us don't even have any idea what type of blender you might have in your home. Yet, this company got millions of people to talk about and share blenders. How? Because they found that inner remarkability. It's not that certain products are born remarkable and others are doomed to fail. Any product can be remarkable. If you find that inner remarkability. If you show people again rather than tell them. Don't just tell them we make a really powerful blender. How can you show them how powerful that blender is? Please Don't Tell didn't just get up and say, hey, look at our blender, it works great. They made a piece of content, a story that carried that message along for the ride. And by finding that inner remarkability, they got to people to talk and share.
