Masses of Influence

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.

Simon is considering his Social Media status

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Social Media of late and unsurprisingly everybody’s first point of reference if Facebook. It seems to take a bit of effort to get clients to think bigger than Facebook sometimes and it can be even trickier getting them to realise what they can actually do with the network itself.

We were discussing this for a client this week saying how great it would be if rather than simply creating a fan group we could get everybody to change their status to show that they were taking part in our promotion. Something like Alison Christie is loving the TNCC Mini-Movie Maker right now.

Whilst I really liked the sound of this I’ll own up to not really ‘getting’ the whole status update thingy. Anda Goddard is looking forward to buying a fish. Keith Halifax is sore from football. Simon Gregory is probably skiving work right now. Thanks for letting me that your life is more eventful than mine.

Then I came across a decent post by Grant McKracken on “Exhaust Data” (the posh term for status updates). He suggested that these updates act as phatic messages (where the function is to perform a social task rather than overtly carry a message) carrying a message in their own right:

"A 'newsflash' about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out... But this is not just news that I am extant, but that I am, as much as this is ever true, emotionally and intellectually active."

A status update acts as a consistent reminder that I’m here, you’re here, we’re both OK, our network’s OK, and we can communicate whenever we want. Nice way to look at it. Rather strangely this reminded me of a random stat about marketing spend and return on capital during a recession.

PIMS International conducted a piece of research on ad spend during a recession looking at the resultant returns and market share when an economy starts to recover. Based on a wide range of companies they came to the following conclusions:





The argument that you’re better off spending during a recession is old ground, but the effects of maintaining spend were surprising. 3% Return On Capital Employed and 1% increase in Market Share during a dodgy period is pretty good! Is this the equivalent of maintaining your status update?

Is maintaining marketing presence a brand’s equivalent to us updating our status? We know that consumer confidence is vital during a recession so can, and is it important for, brands to send out similar phatic messages? We’re still here, we’re both OK, we’re still talking, we’re here when you need us, everything’s all good?

Simon Gregory is unsure what this means for the Social Media presentations he’s working on.