Last night I attended a very interesting Mark Earls lecture called ”The Social Thing: How Social Influence Really Works & What It Means To You”. I live-tweeted some of the most interesting thoughts and quotes, and put them in the form of a few take-away lessons below.
“Independent thinking to humans is like swimming to cats. We can do it if we really have to but will do most anything to avoid it.”
Mark puts forward that more than any other animal, humans are exceptionally social beings. To the point where even though we think we make all of our own decisions, most are strongly guided by our tendency to copy others. This point strongly relates to Scott Adams’ “Moist Robot” theory, that assumes people are essentially living beings without free will. Mark provided a few fascinating examples to prove this point. My favorite one was when he had everyone in the room stand close to another person while facing them and holding their elbows. We then had to do something that would move the other person off the floor and back the most amount of times possible. People awkwardly looked at each other, considering lifting up a stranger, until one gentleman starting jumping up and down and in this way ‘forcing’ his partner to also bounce up and down rapidly. Within seconds we could see a human ripple effect and others adopted the same behavior and soon after we had a room full of bouncing people.
Mark shared with us his “5 Rules Of How Social Influence Really Works”:
1. Social influence is a pull, and not a push phenomenon. – You can’t force anyone to do anything, you can just facilitate a social phenomenon to happen and hope it works.
2. It’s not what you say that matters when trying to spread the word. – This point was less clear to me, but what I took away from it was that context and who you talk to was just as important as what you say.
3. Drive change and keep things the same. – Again a point that didn’t really translate for me, but it seemed to refer to people’s resistance to change, and how that needs to be taking into account. Mark mentioned that society is slowly changing away from following the old traditions of our parents, to doing what our contemporary peers do. One example was a chart of baby names, indicating that a few decades ago a majority of parents named their first-born son after the father, and how this trend in recent years has nearly vanished in favor of a slew of contemporary names.
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. This is also the thought behind the Family Records and Engine Room website have commenting options in each album’s player and on each album/artist page. Perhaps we should also install a rating/stars option.
5. Social influence is always on, and constantly happening.
So you better be on your toes and make sure your customer’s experience is always your focus. Help them help you by making it easy to influence their peers. Provide tools, chronicle fan’s behavior and communicate. Stop trying to think of marketing/advertising as trying to make people do things. It’s much less effective as actually getting in their and doing something with your customers. You will no longer be removed, but be a part of it.