I’m reading ‘Nudge’ at the moment and it’s full of great thinking on how people make choices and how a variety of factors impact their decision making process. One particularly interesting point is the role of Social Influence – how following what others and the larger crowd think and do affects our own decisions.
I mentioned an experiment by social psychologist Solomon Asch a while ago demonstrating such an effect (here). In this case participants changed their answers to a simple question after finding out others had answered differently (“Which is the longest line”).
A more extreme (and grave) example can be found in Guyana. Facing tax evasion charges in San Francisco in 1978 the founder of the People’s Temple, Reverend Jim Jones, moved one thousand of his followers to a small village in Guyana which he named ‘Jonestown’ (unimaginative really). As the law caught up with him and facing more serious crimes of child abuse Jones prepared vats of poison and decreed that his followers should poison themselves and follow him in committing suicide. Despite some resistance his followers relented and poisoned themselves and their children amidst social pressures opposed on each other. All but two were found dead.
This is a clear example of the mass influencing individual decision, albeit in a rather harrowing way.
A current, and less horrific, example of such behaviour is Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent. In the space of 3 days clips of her crooning had racked up over 100 million views on YouTube (still rising) with various versions occupying 7 of the top 10 most viewed spots this month. And this wasn’t just a YouTube phenomenon – check out the surge in global search terms too.
In this case the 'Badger Lady' had the advantage of over 10million people (est.) seeing the clip first hand on TV instigating the conversation before any cyberspace fun began. The ball was rolling already.
This is the key. Get the ball rolling then let the masses take over. Why wouldn’t you want to watch something that everybody else is talking about? So how do you set the ball rolling without the luxury of a spontaneous story or a primed TV audience?
Fallon give a great example of how to do this with their rather random “Kittens Inspired by Kittens” YouTube clip (now with over 4million views). Whilst focusing on making content sharable, interesting and ‘imperfect’, their main trick for setting the ball rolling was to find and use key online influencers, often found in the most random corners of the web.
Amidst the current Social Media zeitgeist this type of ‘Influencer’ strategy is becoming increasingly relevant and useful. We’re catching on to the fact that simply plonking a video of a dog running into a wall and ‘hoping’ somebody latches onto it isn’t always enough (although there are, of course, exceptions!).
Don’t just think about how to tell your own story, think about who’s going to tell it for you, who they’re going to tell it to and where they’re going to tell it.
Then leave it to the masses.
But be careful if you’re planning on starting a religion.
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