Archive for February, 2008

Johnnie has a bit on the coverage of Duncan Watt’s ideas on Influencers vs. Influenceables… If you haven’t read it, you should… His view is that that ordinary people have just as much influence as influential people have in making something popular. Cory, Guy, Seth, Spike, and scores of others have all chimed in.

On The Media interviewed Clive Thompson who wrote the Fast Company article that compellingly explains Duncan Watts’ word-of-mouth randomness theory. In the radio interview (available online here), Clive summarizes Duncan’s complex theory this way,

“It’s not how influential each person is, it’s how influenceable everyone else is. If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start it.”

It really got me thinking.  I’m ready to hold Gladwell’s ideas and Watt’s in my head at the same time.  I don’t think they are exclusive.

What I don’t agree with is that society is “ready” to embrace trends – especially commercial trends.  That’s what marketers do.  They prepare society for trends and then activate those trends… Kind of like Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

There are instances where society becomes ready to embrace a trend – like Green — and smart marketers figure out how to leverage that.

Some applause for our Regeneration competition on Facebook.  I’m thrilled the team chose to do this on Facebook…

Mix a premium brand with one of the best applications on Facebook and you get Dell’s Regeneration campaign, which asked people to use FM author GraffitiWall’s application to draw what green means to them. It attracted more than 7,000 drawings using GraffitiWall and a million votes for the best ones. Read the tale of the campaign on Chas Edwards’ blog, ChasNote, and see the amazing work in the Top 150 submissions on GraffitiWall.

A couple of observations:

1. Costs a fraction of the cost of doing this on your own site – actually, pretty much nothing
2. Zero IT barriers, which for anyone working in a medium to large company is a major factor
3. Inviting a community to play is much easier than driving traffic to your own site and asking them to play there
4. The tools on Facebook are just amazing… I love watching the graphics take shape – be sure to hit Replay on some of the images.
5. We didn’t drive entries (data or form-fill) into Regeneration,org out of respect for the community and playing in the community.  Hard to get your head around this as a marketer when you are trying to grow two communities at once – the Dell and Regen community on Facebook – and the community at Regeneration.org.
6. Would definitely do this again.

Be sure to join The Regeneration.

Other coverage: LA TImes, Chasnotes,