The Power of the People
This week I read a post on Wesley’s blog entitled,“Lessons Learned: Mark Earls Lecture on Social Influence”, that I found pretty interesting. In the post he summarizes a lecture by Mark Earls, a former advertising and communications professional who describes himself on his About Page as someone who was:
… taught (at home, at school, at uni, at everywhere) to “think it through” i.e. not to accept what I was told but to challenge everything until a more compelling, better-evidenced and more workable descriptions of how things work emerges.
But down to the nitty-gritty. The part of Wesley’s summary that I’ve been thinking about all week is the following:
4. Big movements of influence isn’t driven by influentials, but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. – My first reaction was: “Well, what about Oprah, Seth Godin and some other massive traffic drivers?” Mark convinced me that, aside from exceptions like the above, for the most part trends are driven by large groups of regular people, just copying each other as described earlier. An example of an advertising trick to exploit this kind of group behavior is to call your product “America’s beer”, or “America’s Automobile”. If it works, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another way to facilitate this process is to let people see each other, so they can copy each other. A great example of this is the way in which Amazon shares customer review and indicates what percentage of people visiting a book page purchased that book, and which other books were purchased by those customers.
I definitely peruse around Amazon.com before making a book purchase–which I most recently did when buying a book about web analytics. But, I’ve been trying to think of other ways that I have seen this phenomena in action as well as ways that I could be applying this gem of insight to my own social endeavors.
TweetMeme does this with re-tweeting. The TweetMeme icon next to a blog post allows you to not only immediately tweet about an article but also tells how many times that article has been re-tweet (see below), TweetMeme shows 277 tweets of a Mashable post:
This definitely had an impact on how readers determine whether something is worthy of their attention. You may read Seth Godin’s blog because you think Seth Godin is amazing (which I do), but you may read this article because 227 anonymous people thought this was worth communicating about to others. So clearly, the power of the people has a definite hold in the consumer industry (whether it is consuming things for free or for money)–and particularly for the online community.
When I first moved to New York City, I quickly became acquainted with Menupages’, NY Mag’s, and Time Out New York’s restaurant guides. These guides combined included the trifecta of menus, reviews, and comments which gave me ample information to make “educated decisions” about where to grab dinner with friends or take my parents to brunch when they were in town. This sort of detailed information and public participation works very well in New York (so much so that it is second nature to many New Yorkers), but at this point in time probably wouldn’t fare as well in other communities.
For example, if Bloomington, Indiana had this sort of detailed information at the time that I was living there, I was completely unaware of it. While it is a college town–and all of its 40,000 seasonal residents are required to use internet for their coursework–it’s still a very small community. There were few choices for places to eat and those that I patroned were usually word-of-mouth recommendations.
What does this mean for the power of the people? The internet provides interesting opportunities for transparency as well as public participation that are not available to the offline community. Word-of-mouth is still the name of the game in both cases. The difference is quantity and availability. In the offline world, you may run into one person (who you probably know and have a relationshp with) who gives you a recommendation about a book, restaurant, or plumber; but, in the online world you potentially have access to lots of recommendations with different perspectives (depending on how the recommendation set-up is, i.e. a star-system or a comment system) from random, anonymous people which will help you make a more educated decision about how you consume. These recommendations can either be inherent to the product (TweetMeme icons on articles, star-ratings at Amazon) or independent of the product (Menupages, Citysearch).
How does this phenomena play out in the social sector? The social sector has a number of celebrity champions or “influentials,”–Angelina Jolie and Bono are obvious ones. But does the social sector rely on the power of the people as part of its strategy of influence? The best example I can think of are The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training and other similar groups which motivate huge national and international teams of people to run, bike, and/or swim for a cause in a very public way. You probably know someone who has participated in one of these groups, and if not, they do a pretty good job of publicizing what they are doing via the power of the people. During the actual event–say a marathon–you will see gigantic purple masses running by you. But Team in Training also “works” via the power of the people during the several month long training season as well. Team in Training provides its team members with training groups and purple training jerseys that advertise what they are doing while they run or bike by you as they train for the event. This subtle advertising is in a passive, offline way letting you know that this person recommends this organization. (It’s passive because you are not intentionally seeking information about the organization or any organization for that matter, but are still getting a recommendation regardless.)
Is there room for growth in the social sector using the power of the people? I think so, but I think part of that involves thinking of elements of the social sector as “consumables” (whether its information, events, donations, etc.), increasing the value of “educated consumers,” and increasing transparency and public oppinon, which may include the possibility of unfavorable reviews.