The Invisible Herd?

My copy of Mark Earl's Herd arrived today. 

It was awesome getting a chance to chat with him last month.  I think Mark is dead on when he tells us to stop looking for "influencers" and to focus on the human traits that drive us to spread memes.

The key is to identify WHY people should be or already are talking about and spreading your product, brand, etc. And yet it is so easy to get caught up in WHO is talking or WHO we want to be talking.

Mark implies that we are just herd mammals deep down and I think he's right.  The coolest part of the herd mentality is that it does not follow any one individual, contrary to myth.  Rather, each member follows the visible assumptions of those immediately around them.  And from this simple copying emerges complex systems or ecologies of behavior.

Which is why I find it so amazing that campaigns go out of their way to not be visible.  I can't tell you how many campaigns I've participated in on Facebook that don't ensure that my participation is made visible to my friends - update my feed, allow me to tweet it, etc.  The first step to being copy-able is that one be visible.

But what if there is no herd?  Or what if everyone just does what the celebrities tell them?

Recently there was a great Facebook experiment that was clearly false, but the researchers ensured that [large numbers] of people had already joined the group.  People continued to join in crazy numbers.  And when asked why they joined, they said that they figured it had to be true because so many people were already in there. [link: CBC Spark Episode ]

The herd exists.

If you are going to ask "Who," then the who question to answer is "who do people copy and why?"  And while we would all love to believe we copy the celebrities and the A list bloggers, the reality is we follow the majority and we follow our friends.

Today I saw seven boys walk by in a group.  All of them had jeans and a blank white t-shirt on.  Not only that, all but one had the same brand of sneakers.  Why?  Well, they could be an all-boy band on their way to practice or they simply wanted to belong to the collective group.  And while one or two may vie as leaders, reality is that it is impossible to predict what trend the group will pay attention to.  Only that the group will continue to copy the behaviors of the members around them.  (Note to my US readers, don't try this at home.  Following a gang in the US and taking notes may lead to getting shot.)

So what can we do?

1) Make our campaigns visible, visible, visible
2) Soft launch everything and continue to test and tweak until it catches
3) Pay attention to who is copying what and why

Image Credit:  Marxpix