The monkey in the machine

Here's another chance to see the marvellous Mark Earls (@herdmeister) present at the RSA on how things spread - how that social sharing thing happens (much less rational than we like to believe of ourselves).
I'm a big fan of Mark's book Herd. And no doubt I will be of the signed copy of his new book I'll Have What She's Having - when it arrives... (hint).

Related articles

• Why no one wants to be in your club (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• I'll Have What She's Having by Marc Earls #TMRE #MRX (lovestats.wordpress.com)
• Somebody tell me what I want (herd.typepad.com)
• Et cetera: Steven Poole's non-fiction choice - reviews (guardian.co.uk)
• The Hazards of Herds and Tribes (marketingtechblog.com)

Why no one wants to be in your club

I used to belong to a fund-raising organisation which always seemed to struggle for members.
Every now and again there would be much gnashing of teeth as members wailed and failed to comprehend why so few others would join us.

We'd always end up blaming society ("no one wants to join organisations these days", "people are more selfish than they used to be", "there's no sense of community" etc etc.)

No. Sorry. These are excuses.

There's nothing broken about our desire to join with one another. The web shows given the right conditions groups will form. And scale. Even today.

Those conditions:
1. Give people something interesting to do together.
That's straight out of the Herdmeister playbook. If your group isn't gathering numbers it's either not offering interesting enough stuff, or good enough ways for those who would wish to, to join in.
2. Discover and invite people to whom the group will matter.
If you aren't doing this - if you've just built it and expect them to come - you're going to end up disappointed.

Of course when one of the right folk finds your group, they will invite others of like mind. But you must also think about ways in which newbies can arrive together. Walking into a pub with a group of mates is a much nicer experience than walking in alone.

The tyranny of the authority of signs vs the mimicry of monkeys

When on holiday in Barcelona recently I watched an amusing example of human behaviour which illustrates our irrational reliance on authority – following its dictacts even when the evidence of our own eyes compels us to do otherwise.

In this case travellers at Barcelona Sants station were confronted with both an up and a down escalator to choose from to go down to the platform. 

An easy choice you’d think. An easy rational choice, yes.

But introduce a confusingly placed sign and it seems we will often switch off our rational thought, ignore the evidence of our own eyes, and follow the authority of the sign.

In some cases this was true even when people were coming up the ‘up’ escalator right in front of the person planning to use the same escalator to go down – leading to results that kept me amused for many moments.

I was lucky enough to have a flipcam in my pocket so recorded what unfolded. 

Perhaps what follows below also illustrates that we are more likely to be convinced by authority (represented by the sign) when we are in an agitated state (ie the folk in a hurry seem most likely to follow the orders of the signs over and above the herd instinct of following those folk who are going the right way.

This perhaps has implications for channelling behaviour in riot situations of the kind discussed on this blog in recent weeks.

I was particularly amused by the behaviour emerging towards the end of this 3min video in which it appears our herd instinct has us copying some very irrational behaviour – ie you have to try to go down the wrong escalator first before returning to try the right one. It’s what all the rest of us monkeys are doing...

Related articles

• Cameron, circumstances and priests (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• How riots spread - expressed through the medium of dance (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Cameron, circumstances and priests

Image via WikipediaOne of the points of my previous post on how riots spread is Monkey See, Monkey Do.

Or to put it less simply, we are less rational than we would like to think - we act like those around us and as allowed, persuaded, nudged or otherwise cajoled to do by the circumstances in which we find ourselves (the behaviour of other folk being a very key part of those circumstances).

Now, even our nice Mr Cameron (remember the one, when he first became Tory leader, when he seemed more interested in what is right rather than what is Right), knew that.

As HM Opposition are all of a dither to point out, Cameron himself proclaimed "there are connections between circumstances and behaviour" five years ago...

Damn right. Primed with the right conditions, given the right circumstances - you too are at great risk of behaving in a very irrational way. Once again, I point you at Mark Earl's excellent Herd for more on this.

This is really important because once we understand this is what drives behaviour, then we can start on the business of ascribing blame for that behaviour and (rather more importantly) doing something about it.

It's why I am getting increasingly annoyed at the misdirection the Government PR machine is employed in. First every talking head spouted 'criminality' to focus our attention on the outcome. Now that is being replaced by 'moral collapse'. Both make us focus on the outcome. Which is convenient because it's hard to pin the blame on the Government for outcomes. Circumstances and conditions? Now there some Governmental blame can be laid.

So, I had best demonstrate what can turn even good people bad - to act irrationally - if the conditions are set for them. I best show how it's more the context and circumstances to blame and less the moral fibre of the people concerned...

Take for example the study at Princeton Theological Seminary quoted in Malcolm Gladwell's often-bought-but-rarely-looted Tipping Point.

In the story he tells, each student priest is asked "to prepare a short talk on a given Biblical theme, then walk over to a nearby building to present it."
Along the way to the presentation each student comes across a man slumped head down, eyes closed, and clearly in some distress.
Obviously being good God-fearing folk (with no doubt all the parental support our dear leader would desire) they stop and help, don't they?

Wouldn't you?

Well. The researchers included three variables: background of the subject - whether they had entered seminary as a way of helping people or not, (2) which parable they were to prepare - several were given the Good Samaritan... and (3) a time context, saying either that they were running several minutes late and should hurry up, or that they were early and had some time to spare.

Guess what?

The only thing that impacted how likely our trainee priests were to stop and help our hapless fallen guy was how late they thought they were running.

In other words whether you were planning to help folk as a vocation, and whether or not you had just been hard at it thinking about the Good Samaritan, mattered little. Their attitudes and feelings were instantly  over-ridden by subtle clues in the environment - in this case being told whether they were running late or not.

 I can't claim to be any better than any of those flawed priests-to-be. I can't claim to be able to resist temptation to act irrationally if the conditions are right - if the circumstances so nudged me. You see, I'm human too. So is David Cameron if the stories of the Bullingdon Club are to be believed.

The good news is I do think there is something your rational selves can do to avoid those contexts.

My guess is many of us would loot in the right (wrong) circumstances. But I'm also pretty sure most of us would employ our rational moments to guide us away from those circumstances.

And that's where the Government - and others bent on behaviour modifying must focus, too.
We can rationally decide to join together with good things in mind - and we can support each other - be good monkeys to be seen and copied, too.

That's how the brooms came out - en masse - for the twitter clean up. We can use social media to find folk thinking positively, too and coordinate and cooperate with them.

Call it rational if you like...

Related articles

• How riots spread - expressed through the medium of dance (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• LONDON RIOTS 2011: Ashraf Haziq says 'Samaritans' threatened to stab him - Daily Mail (news.google.com)
• Letters: Sociologists' offer to unravel the riots (guardian.co.uk)

How riots spread - expressed through the medium of dance

Brixton Footlocker - the morning after (via linniekin, Flickr)

There are two things of significance for me about the London Riots of the last couple of nights (and as I write I hear they have extended to a third night).

The first is how they have been reported; by citizen witnesses; by journalist witnesses and finally as edited by news orgs.

Citizens have delivered a tapestry of fear, anger, concern... reality; Journalists a cooller detachment which lacks the white heat emotion of engagement; News orgs a filtered, cooled, emaciated version of 'the validated truth'.

Always ask whose truth you gaze upon. I may not be able to check or validate every citizen expression of the reality as they see it - but there must be at least as much truth in what they are sharing as in the cold, dispassionate glance of the edited news org version.

Heady, fast moving times. They require of us that we take responsibility - with crap filters on - for what we choose to pass on.

But enough of the messages, what of the behaviour?

Why have these riots happened now? How could the new tools of coordination and cooperation lead to a truly landscape-shifting revelation for those taking part?

I should say right off I'm not a fan of theft, violence, arson or even of keeping folk from a good night's sleep.

However, the group dynamics and peer-to-peer permissions and mimicry that the human behaviour of rioting demonstrate, do hold a grim fascination for me.

So, why now? Those dismissing the London Riots as one long acquisition spree by thieves fail to answer that simple question.

If greed were the key, why this summer, not last? The answer may lay in a longer term period of joblessness and hopelessness - yes the result of policy decisions.

But it also took:

• A crowd
• A state of agitated excitement,
• The ability to organise.
• Permission to act out of line (in a co-ordinated way)

These factors came together on Saturday night in Tottenham.

But they could have come together in another crowd with another cause to be excited.

What of our flock turner? Someone has to start a riot. Someone has to grant the permission to act out of line. And in so doing they grant permission to those around them to act, entirely irrationally, in a way they wouldn't ordinarily behave. It may be one person at first - and then another - then a clump join - and then the crowd joins...

This video goes some way to illustrating that - through the medium of dance...

Once permission to behave differently (and badly) was granted (we're back to the riots now) off it spread.
We do what the monkey next to us does - we are Homo Mimicus rather than Homo Sapien as Mark Earls (@herdmeister on twitter) author of Herd, puts it.

We copy - Oh so readily. Particularly if someone has prepared the ground as effectively as the economy and The Government have contrived to do. The conditions are right.

If a Government unit on behavioural economics had planned this nudge themselves, they couldn't have hoped for greater success:

Agitate folk through economic and policy means - give agitated folk a reason to gather - and then all you need is the 'dancing man' to give them a nudge.

Monkey business spread rapidly across London.
Tonight? More parts of London? More Uk cities? (Unfortunately while drafting this post I heard of outbreaks of violence in Leeds and Birmingham to add to London's third night of troubles.

Next: More European cities? MoreUS Cities?

Riotous behaviour is Herd behaviour like any other human behaviour: As hard to identify how to stop as it is to start.

Mark's book has a chapter on riots - and some tips for cops. They focus on breaking the channels of communication (in this case blackberry messenger and twitter), moving swiftly to break up crowds the moment they asssemble, and arresting anyone for even the slightest infringements (removing any hint of permission to act out of line).

And when equilibrium is restored - of course - go looking for the root causes and act on them.

In short, take away the ability to organise, the gathering of agitated folk, the permission to act out of line and once all those are dealt with, the reasons for the agitation.

In 1981 when conditions were similar it took broadcast media to spread the news.And there was no tool of on-the-go coordination - not even mobile phones.

Now everyone taking part carries with them a way of coordinating on the fly. No wonder the authorities are concerned. Trouble can now be organised, directed and refocused in a decentralised way making it exceptionally hard to deploy against for the police.

They've learned from the Arab Spring. Monkey see, monkey do. That's as much of an answer to 'why now' as anything I've seen.

The decentralised 'bad guys' are able to dissipate and reassemble too fast and in too great numbers for the police to act. There are tales this evening of shop keepers boarding themselves inside their shops, having reported mobs outside to the police, only to be told the police don't have the bodies to act.

My guess is that if we don't get a night or two of heavy rain to break the cycle the army will be on the streets by the end of week. And at that point we in the UK may feel a bit glib pointing at 'heavy-handed' responses in Arab lands.

Those at the helm in this and other countries should be less concerned about acts of theft and vandalism and rather more about what the participants are learning.

IF those intent on riotous assembly are indeed coordinating through the social tools now at our disposal, what happens after they are done with expressing anger and frustration through fire and theft?

What if they realise the true power they wield?

What if they do to The Government what they did to The News of The World?

I'd stick a cork in the chianti and get the next flight home if I were on Her Majesty's front bench.

Related articles

• UK:Who started London riots? (laaska.wordpress.com)
• Getting into the mindset of a mob mentality (independent.co.uk)
• Urban riots: Thirty years after Brixton | Editorial (guardian.co.uk)

Making Waves

I went to see Take That tonight. Take the mickey all you like but those boys can sure put on a show.
As often happens a group of people tried to start a Mexican Wave. A packed Wembley Stadium is a mighty large group of people to try to coordinate.
And sure enough this group - of enthusiastic ladies - repeatedly failed. At least they did until they reversed the direction they were trying to get the wave to go.
When they went clockwise, off it went - round and round 6,8 times.
Regular Mexican Wave watchers (among them Mark Earls, who notes the phenomena in his book Herd) will tell you this should not surprise. An anti-clockwise wave is something of a rarity. Clockwise is the way we flock (and rock, on this occasion).
When Robbie Williams came on and demanded an anti-clockwise wave from his fans, his position as influential broadcaster from the stage secured an against-the-grain success. But only for one lap.
Interesting that when we are told what to do by a sufficiently impressive and influential 'centre' we do as we're told. For one lap.
When we self-organise, from the edge, from the fans, we join in and make it happen far longer.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

The message is, it's not about the message

Great to see Mark's Herd referenced in this deck (now available as a paperback, btw). You get to it just before the end. Paul's decks are consistently good and bang on the money as far as I'm concerned.

I've long agreed (believed) we must be part of co-creating interesting things for people to do together.

Marketing: Advertising: Products: Services.

It's not really about the messaging any more (if it ever was?) - that's the message. It's about the doing.
Not to them, with them. With us.

I often say: We're trying to change the world, not report on it. That's not a media thing. It's a people thing.

What's Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Via Neil Perkin

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• What's Next (neilperkin.typepad.com)
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People doing what other people do

Awesome example of the ability of a group to form in the right conditions. Molecules in an agitated state. The Herd in action.

Ask yourself why one guy wasn't left dancing alone?



Via Seth Godin. But also read Herd.

How we are made great

Just added a new post at /Message. Pop over and add to the conversation re How We Are Made Great?

Take a fresh look at your 'resources' (read human beings)

Dave Armano has another corking post at Logic + Emotion
He describes the growing impact of quality real-live human interactions as effective marketing in mediums such as twitter.
One line really rang my bells:

"We’ve become so starved for authentic live human contact that when it’s offered up to us we are all too happy to rejoice and tell the world."

I commented on Dave's blog, but I wanted to expland a little here.

Real live human one-to-one (or many-to-many in a community setting) interaction has a really positive impact on us. And then we take that and have really positive impacts on each other (we do the marketing). Just look at my experience with Qik for example.

This need for the human voice and human interaction is often kind of understood by senior company types. But the response I most often hear is:

"But how can we afford to have all the people this would take?"

That kind of misses the point. It assumes you have to have specialised team who 'do' customer service.

But human interaction is much more than customer service. Human interaction should be what we all do. Hell, it IS what we all do.

So instead of thinking about the cost of additional people in additional new silos, think about unleashing the staff - the humans - you already have.

Marketing, advertising, customer service, promotions, new product development, M&A etc etc it can all come spilling out of its silos and beyond the company firewall where people can interact with people. And as Dave points out digital stuff helps make this more effective than ever.

Too often we make helping customers some 'ones' responsibility, or some department's, - By sealing that responsibility into a specialised department we sign it off as 'job done'. The impact is to either explictly or implicitly make everyone else ignore and 'get on with their day jobs'.

It's a side effect of the specialisation mass production forced on us - together with an unhealthy dose of scientific management techniques.

But as we rediscover that humans aren't made more efficient by being made more machine-like, the silo walls will dissolve and we'll be allowed to get on with being human. More forward thinking management techniques and companies are already applying them.

And, as Dave points out, being human makes an awful lot of sense when you want to sell to other humans.

Make things spread fast: With a smile (or a scream)

A smile is among the most rapidly transmitted things I know. Laugh and the world laughs with you... smile and people smile back (they can't help themselves, as Herdmeister would aver).
We're monkey-see-monkey-do critters. Homo Mimicus. Things spread because we copy the monkey next to us. So spread with a smile?
One example HERD brings us of human-to-human transmission is the roadside floral tributes to road crash victims we now see so many of. I spotted a varient in New York last month: The bicycle the victim died on chained to a post on Broadway (I took a picture, right).
Now I read that the idea is being copied by fellow apes across the UK. They have been dubbed, Ghost Bikes.
This kind of spreading is very easy to spot (it's hard to miss a bike chained to a lamppost, hence the reporting in the mainstream press).
The idea is being easily and relatively rapidly copied. It is easy to understand the idea, and easy to create our own versions of it. (nb: The moment the Government makes a standard white replica bike to distribute to local authorities to attach to lampposts at accident black spots, the idea will be finished).
But perhaps there is already a brake on the pace at which ghost bikes can spread.

There's nothing funny about them. Nothing at all.

The things that get rapidly shared are not only those which can be easily copied and adapted (co-created) to suit the community we each interact with, they are also funny.

Smiling spreads fast. Laughter too. It's why the watching-tv-at-home belly laugh is a rare thing but the laughs-out-loud are two-a-penny when you're in a comedy club audience.

So, I'll stick with the idea that we pass on things that we think those we are passing on to will think is cool. Stuff spreads this way.

Bit if I think it's cool and funny stuff spreads way faster.

Perhaps it is simply because there are now three possible groups you will share with:
1. those you define as likely to think what you pass on is cool,
2. those you define as likely to think what you pass on is funny and finally,
3. those you define as likely to find it both cool and funny.

I'm guessing group three are the most likely to pass it on?

There's a darker flip: Fear and panic spreads rapidly through groups, too...

Ghost Bikes?

To advertisers: stop targeting, start broadcasting

We're getting better and better at targeting advertising - at sending users messages we think they'll actually find quite useful.

But the increasingly free expression of metadata changes the game regarding the way we 'target'.

Indeed, it may reveal that who-does-what-to-whom in this relationship can and should be turned on its head.

In the process we may have to let go of one of the grand promises of the digital world - that we can target individuals with such precision that they'll always want what we target them with.

In this world of freely-exposed metadata by all parties advertising is not about targeting, it is about making a message available as widely as possible.

Sounds counter-intuitive in the digital age, right?

But it starts from the notion that recommendation happens in the mind of the receiver, not in the mind of the person making the recommendation.
Simpler still: Marketing is not something advertisers can do to people (ie target and deliver at them), it is something people (with the assistance of other people) do to themselves.

A TV advert is a broadcast of metadata. If some of that metadata hooks up with your own then you find it useful. The advert transforms into recommendation in your mind. When it achieves that status you may transmit how useful you find it to other people.

Trouble is, you can't share how useful you've found it while sat alone in front of the TV.

Which is why the best place to broadcast advertising (as metadata) is in a digital social network. Again, sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? Banner ads etc have failed miserably in social networks (certainly in terms of click-thrus and/or engagement).

So, let's be clear. I'm not advocating broadcasting any old-style, fixed, centre-out message will get you endorsed by an adoring public.

No. You have to understand that when you are invited into the 'huge crowd' of a social network you are invited into one of thousands of small groups, each one made up of people looking at each other - not at the stage.

Getting the signal right for each of those small groups is close to impossible (hello 0.01% CTR!) - if you try to do it yourself.

So let the receivers' adapt it. Let them shape it so that its likelihood of being passed on within that receiver's peer-group goes through the roof. Who better to put the message in the most effective terms?

Nutshell: I pass things on that I think are cool, to people who I believe will also think it is cool.

If I get this wrong I lose some of the trust and authority I have built up with my group. So I do this with care and judgement. Much more care and judgement than the one-size-fits-all brand-control-driven centre (the broadcaster of a traditional ad message) can hope to muster.

Critically, emotions are at risk. I don't want to look bad to my peers. I'm a social creature. A human being. An ad message is not. This informs my decisions about what to pass on. Data has a hard time understanding this.

By targeting, the advertiser starts selecting where they are going to choose to share their metadata. They are saying they know who the message is for and who will respond best to it.

Fine. But they are reaching the tip of an iceberg. If you allow the receiver to decide for themselves whether your advert is a recommendation, they will take that message with them deep within their peer groups - where iteration after iteration of your message can spawn - where the next generation of receivers are available to decide if the message is an advert or a recommendation for their peers and so on...

In this context broadcast ain't all bad. We all broadcast our metadata all the time in social networks and mediums - advertisers and receivers all.

The advertiser can't assume they can calculate what it is that the receiver will decide to morph into recommendation today, right now, in the social context they are in. Their peers may be better placed - their current adhoc community of purpose.

The sharing of metadata encourages us to form into groups - communities of purpose no matter how adhoc in nature.

And groups with whom I share purpose are in a great position to spread advertising messages that morph into recommendation when I receive them. They share stuff with me they think I'll think is cool.

Targeting tries to calculate this. It rationalises our preponderance to respond in certain ways.
People, however, can feel this. Which is useful; because we're rarely entirely rational when it comes to purchase (or any other) decisions.

As Mark Earls suggests in Herd - we're post-rational creatures. We do stuff and then try to rationalise why we did it, later. If this were not the case you wouldn't smoke and I wouldn't be overweight.

So, given all this. Why spend the time and trouble targeting? Put your metadata out there - as widely as possible - and hope to be pulled to the people who find it useful, who can shape it to be useful to other people they know.

Messages don't do marketing. People do.

Please, help me on the journey with this one...

Marketing frozen in time

Fun, smart mobby, full of impact (via Media Influencer) but...
At 1:39-1:42... why did they look? That's marketing, right there.

Your brand is along for the ride

The relationship is not between the brand and the consumer. The relationship is between people.
What people do to each other is more important than what you try to do to them.
Stop trying to understand the individual (own their data) and watch the dynamics between people.
Brands as social lubricant, as Mark Earls puts it.
The Herdmeister speaks.
Thanks to Peter for the link from comments here.

Recogs

I had lunch with the Herdmeister last week - Mark Earls, the clever bloke who wrote Herd.
Mark points out that we are not rational creatures, we are post rationalisers, ie we do stuff and then reason for ourselves why we did it, after the event.

My own experience backs that up. We duck because everyone else does. We go the wrong way at a busy tube station because we're following the crowd rather than rationalising which direction we should head in, the examples are numerous (of me doing something without thinking about it, that is...)
This has lessons for marketing and communications of all hues.

Mark also has something of a challenge for the evolutionary model of groups in group forming network theory that I describe in Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21st Century, in that massive opportunities to create difference, in theory, appear to lead to homegeneous results in practice.
He points to the way every high street in the world, every shopping mall, is becoming more and more uniform as we pour more and more diverse products and services into them.

We do what we find useful.

Nutshell: we find useful what other people find useful.

Whether or not those examples transfer in all cases and particularly in all digital cases, remains to be proven.

But whatever the case the basics of how new stuff gets spread through populations remains challenging - that it is less about what we do to people (ie what we 'market' at them) and more about making the best of understanding the transmission mechanism.

I'm obviously a big believer in engaging with communities, enlisting their support by providing tools for a pre-existing community rather than thinking I can use tools to build one from scratch.

But this all brings us to the question of who are the influencers, what kind of people are the people who change behaviours in the herd? Are the hubs - those around whom many connections congregrate - the key. Or is it more likely to be those who forge the connections between distant hubs. Who are most critical to virality? (my best guess, for what it's worth, is the latter).

So I've started having a stab at who it is that is likely to have the greatest influence on the spread of an idea, of the take up of a service or a product.

And this is very much an idea in progress...

I'm going to call them 'Recogs.'

These are people who are:
Recognised by their peers as worthy of copying.
Recognisable: easily found because they are well connected (in two-way flows).
Recognisers. They can identify quickly what is useful to them from the myriad new things emerging
Recogniscient: Me stretching an idea... okay, what I'm getting at here is that they are good at passing on what they've identified; they are good at re-expressing what they know in a language others understand and will respond to (ie helping the next person know what they know in a process of repetition and amplification recog = reknow... told you I was stretching a point). They are very effective communicators (in ways which are valuable within their particular communities of purpose).

I see one immediate question. If identifying what is useful is important and what is useful differs for each diverse group, why is it that we see this tendancy towards homogenity? Is that pattern repeating in the digital world. It feels to me like it is not - hence the huge profusion and confusion of options and opportunities in digital space.

But I only seek to start the ball rolling so please do give it a prod in the next direction!