Last week, I attended the Shop.org Strategy and Innovation Forum and listened to Andy Sernovitz's keynote address on word of mouth marketing. His book "Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking" is full of practical advice. The rise of online social shopping has marketers everywhere studying up on how to create "buzz"; in other words, how to get people talking about and flocking to their products. In bee speak, that means getting customers to do the "waggle dance", a bee's method of using body movements and sound to alert others that they've found something good.
If you are a student of word of mouth marketing, you'd be wise to also become a student of nature and science. In the last couple of months, I've read a number of articles on "swarm theory"; in other words, how ants, bees, birds and other "leaderless" species in large groups manage to find the right place to live, stake out the best place to eat, solve complex problems and guide one another to into forming a thriving society. The behaviors are, no surprise, remarkably similar to humans traversing the internet in a quest to find the right product. And, some would argue that the popularity of certain sites and certain products has more to do with randomness than smart marketing (sorry to deliver the bad news). Despite the time and money spent trying to find those elusive highly influential people, much of this writing suggests that more successful results will come from making your product available via mass marketing, then letting regular old non-influential people get the message out in the "random" way that ants and bees do it.
If this topic is of interest, here's the reading list.
1) First, read what National Geographic has to say about Swarm Behavior, and how observing bees and ants is proving to have real business value by helping companies find the most efficient means to solve complex scheduling and routing problems and save energy. Nature's way of decision making is making it's way into the boardroom.
2) Next, read the Knowledge@Wharton article We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed (registration is required, but the content is free) to get an excerpt of Barry Libert and Jon Spector's book We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash The Power of Crowds in Your Business. There are some terrific examples of how smart companies are bringing "swarm theory" or community decision making into their product development process, creating loyal fans before the product even exists.
3) If you're still not a believer, read an MSNBC article Scientists Abuzz Over More Efficient Web Servers: Honeybee Waggle Dance Inspires System For Internet Hosting Company and you'll see how imitating bees can improve business performance.
4) And finally, this month's Fast Company magazine ties it all together with a story for marketers involving real, HUMAN research. This one is a must-read. Is The Tipping Point Toast? challenges the long standing belief (brought to center by Malcolm Gladwell's popular book, The Tipping Point) that trends are driven by a small number of highly influential people. According to The Tipping Point, marketers must seek out and target these influencers to be successful. Not so fast. Duncan Watts, a network theory scientist, argues that despite marketer's desire to believe that they can find and target these elusive influencers, the way trends happen is, in fact, much more random, and dependent upon a variety of circumstances that all have to come together. Take the analogy of forest fires - there are thousands of them every year, but only a few are big, serious fires. The ones that do become big are less about the spark that started them, and more about the conditions that existed around the spark: the landscape, the lack of rain, the remote location, etc.
In other words, the leaderless crowd makes the trend happen by responding to its needs and the environment...and that bee doing the waggle dance because he found nectar is just as likely to be your average Joe bee than some BMOC bee.
Time for lunch. I think I'll try that new restaurant down the street that everyone's flocking to.
Great post, Sally, with some excellent meaty links. From The Tipping Point to Blink to The Wisdom of Crowds, there's a growing library of sociological/economical literature that it behooves us all to read. (By the way, there's no overt reference in your post to James Surowiecki's seminal The Wisdom of Crowds -- a must-read along these lines. See http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201814604&sr=1-1)
Posted by: Peter Kretzman | January 31, 2008 at 04:26 PM
Thanks Peter, and great tip on the book. I have it on my bookshelf but I confess I haven't had time to read it yet. It is a fascinating topic and I can't get enough of it these days!
Posted by: Sally McKenzie | January 31, 2008 at 07:37 PM