Wandering Wandering Star

…if you want to exploit network effects, forget about Influentials.

A Workable Model

While the Influentials concept is a dud, influence is very real and we’re learning more every day about how ideas spread. While much of it involves complicated, often counter-intuitive network math, there are some basic principles that are easy to apply.

Passion:
Every movement is built on the passion of true believers and igniting that passion is the key to viral marketing. However, inspiring devotion is not new nor is it mysterious. Brands like Apple, Harley Davidson and Trader Joes, for instance, have been able to build an army of passionate followers without an “influencers” strategy.

Density:
It’s been a longstanding principle in biology that organisms grow out of a substrate. In a similar way, social messages flow through dense networks much more efficiently than sparse ones.

There are social analytical techniques that can evaluate connectedness, but in the interst of brevity, let’s just say that there is a good reason that movies are launched in NY and LA, before the rest of the country.

Empowerment:
Probably the most important principle of viral marketing is to give people a forum to share. It’s no accident that hi-tech brands like Apple and e-Bay rely heavily on low-tech events where the faithful can meet face-to-face. Harley Davidson, quite famously, has built an amazingly strong community from local clubs.

Social marketing, therefore, is not new, but we do have exciting new tools. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ offer us new possibilities to promote, encourage and track word of mouth marketing. However, that is no reason to abandon good sense.

Brands are not built by influential consumers, but by influential ideas.

Social learning is really visual theft, and in a species that has it, it would become positively advantageous for you to hide your best ideas from others, lest they steal them. This not only would bring cumulative cultural adaptation to a halt, but our societies might have collapsed as we strained under the weight of suspicion and rancor.

So, beginning about 200,000 years ago, our fledgling species, newly equipped with the capacity for social learning had to confront two options for managing the conflicts of interest social learning would bring. One is that these new human societies could have fragmented into small family groups so that the benefits of any knowledge would flow only to one’s relatives. Had we adopted this solution we might still be living like the Neanderthals, and the world might not be so different from the way it was 40,000 years ago, when our species first entered Europe. This is because these smaller family groups would have produced fewer ideas to copy and they would have been more vulnerable to chance and bad luck.

The other option was for our species to acquire a system of cooperation that could make our knowledge available to other members of our tribe or society even though they might be people we are not closely related to — in short, to work out the rules that made it possible for us to share goods and ideas cooperatively. Taking this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated wisdom and talent would become available than any one individual or even family could ever hope to produce. That is the option we followed, and our cultural survival vehicles that we traveled around the the world in were the result.”

The reality is that most executives don’t use social networks. And, to be honest, most don’t read their own emails. Many won’t ever see this post.

Trying to convince decision makers that this is a war fought on the battleground of social networks is in of itself fighting a losing battle. That’s because the future of business isn’t tied to the permeation of Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, tablets or real-time geo-location check-ins.

The future of business comes down to relevance and the ability to understand how technology affects decision making and behavior to the point where the recognition of new opportunities and the ability to strategically adapt to them becomes a competitive advantage.

…

This a about the survival of both the fittest and the fitting. And it take more than a presence in new channels to improve customer experiences and relationships. It takes courage. It takes persistence to break through resistance.

Everything starts with articulating a vision for how your business will invest in customer relationships and experiences. From there, technology, processes, and systems will serve as enablers for that vision. In the end however, it is leadership and an empowered culture that will bring about transformation.

Many follow, but very few lead.
Many compete to survive, but few compete for relevance.
Do we listen to our customers? Do we truly understand them?
Do we create experiences or do we simply react?
The future of business comes down to one word…change.
This is a new era that redefines everything.
An era of empowered consumers and employees.
Will we fall to natural selection or will we rise to lead the revolution.
This is our time to make business relevant.
Because people, after all, are everything.
#AdaptorDie

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don’t have a good enough sense of humor to tell.

This disconnect may be responsible for many of society’s problems.