1. Social currency — sharing it makes the sharer look good
People pass on things that reflect well on them. Not on you — on them. Anything that makes somebody seem knowledgeable, early or generous to their own audience has a reason to travel.
For a small business: be the source of something worth knowing. An uncommon fact, a clear explanation of something people find murky, or a piece of insider knowledge freely given. Somebody forwarding it is telling their colleagues that they read good things.
Why most attempts fail: company news is social currency for the company, not for the reader. Nobody looks smarter for sharing your rebrand.
2. Triggers — attach the idea to something already in the environment
People talk about what is in front of them. An idea linked to a frequent cue gets remembered repeatedly and for free; an idea linked to nothing has to survive on its own.
For a small business: tie your message to a moment that recurs in your customer’s week. A guide about slow websites is triggered every time somebody waits for a page to load — which is often, and which is exactly when they are most receptive.
The design question: what does your customer routinely encounter that should remind them of you? Build towards that rather than towards being generally memorable.
3. Emotion — high-arousal feelings travel, low-arousal ones do not
The useful distinction is not positive versus negative. It is activating versus deactivating. Awe, anger, amusement and anxiety make people act. Contentment and sadness, however genuine, tend not to.
For a small business: the reliably activating emotion in business writing is recognition of a frustration — the thing your reader has felt and never seen named. That is why a problem section outperforms a capability list.
The caution: anger is the easiest of these to reach for and the most expensive. Advertising built on indignation spreads and then defines you.
4. Public — make the private visible
People imitate what they can see. Behaviour that leaves no visible trace cannot be copied, however good it is.
For a small business: this is the argument for working in public. Publish the guide, show the reasoning, let people see the standard rather than describing it. A site somebody can open and test is public in a way a case study is not.
The blunt version: if a prospect cannot observe your quality without first hiring you, your quality is invisible, and invisible quality does not spread.
5. Practical value — useful things get forwarded
This is the least glamorous ingredient and by some distance the most dependable for a small business. People share things that help somebody they know.
For a small business: the checklist a reader can use against any supplier, including you. The explanation that saves somebody a mistake. The guide that answers the question properly rather than gesturing at an answer and asking for an email address.
Why it works when nothing else does: it needs no reach. One person forwarding something to one colleague who needed it is the whole mechanism, and it compounds quietly.
6. Stories — carry the idea inside something people retell
People do not pass on messages. They pass on stories, and the message travels inside.
The essential discipline is that your point has to be *load-bearing* in the story. If the tale can be retold without mentioning you or what you do, it will be — and you have entertained somebody at your own expense.
For a small business: the strongest available stories are usually about a problem being diagnosed. A site that looked fine and was quietly serving spam to Google. A booking system that cost somebody a day a week for two years. The point rides inside because the point *is* the diagnosis.
What this means if you have no audience
Every one of the six is available at any scale. None of them requires reach, and that is the part most easily missed: reach is what you get from doing these things, not what you need in order to start.
The practical order for a business starting from nothing is: practical value first, because it needs no audience at all; then public, because it makes the work visible; then triggers, because it makes the visibility recur. The rest follow.
In shortStart with practical value — something so useful a reader would forward it to one colleague. It is the only one of the six that works with an audience of zero.
A campaign built on something worth passing on costs less to run, because part of the distribution stops being paid for. More about marketing campaigns and advertising →