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Most people think of social media as exhibitionism through communication – a way to announce your product, your event, and your thoughts. But it’s actually much more than that. You don’t want to just say something to people – you want to infect them with it by sharing something so contagious that they feel compelled to absorb it and share it out to their network.

I’m personally still learning about this process, and one thing I’m learning is that the most powerful thing to do is trust young people. Their instincts for how and what to do with social media are 100% better than mine. Why? I grew up in an era of privacy, but this younger generation grew up in area of being digital and transparent. Through practice, they understood that in order to get what they want they have to create a naturally scaling infectious idea that makes the writer’s content addictive to everyone else.

I’ve seen it in my own experiences here at i.c.stars, the way young people think differently about how to use these tools. During a recent Tech Bash event, I wanted to send out an array of tweets that said “X person was a sponsor of Tech Bash, Y person was a sponsor of Tech Bash” to share who our sponsors were. But our i.c.stars fellows said no one is going to retweet a generic announcement – you have to frame your language in a way that’s contagious. They are thinking virally right from the beginning. In a deep way that I still can’t perfectly describe, but it’s deeper than just thinking about giving gifts or saying words. It’s thinking with scale in mind.

My favorite story of the year was New York Times interview with Mark Zuckerberg. The interview asked him what his reaction was to Sorkin’s movie, and he responded by saying that 5 million people might see the movie. But he doesn’t think in terms of 5 million – he think in terms of his 500 million customers. He’s thinking 10x bigger than Hollywood and that just to get your arms around it. Hollywood in our generation was the biggest. This generation thinks 10x orders of magnitude bigger than we can fathom.

Just as Zuckerberg made himself addictive to 500 million people, you can make yourself addictive to 500 or 5000 influencers in your space. Not by communicating to them - that’s the mistake people make, they think of it as a linear process - but by infecting them through this process of viral thinking. Keep in mind that young people, who already have the instinct to make it addictive, are the leaders who will engage the 500 people that are interested in what you have to say in a very meaningful way.