This is part 2 in an arc hinted at in SNCR NewComm Forum Day 2 - TS Eliot, Ezekiel, Beehives and Mighty Mouse and officially started in TS Eliot, Ezekiel, Beehives and Mighty Mouse - Why "Whispering to Be Heard"?.
The title of the presentation was "Whispering to Be Heard: The Art and Science of Buzz Marketing". I'm sharing it here due to the comments, thoughts and feedback people provided. We're going to discuss
TS Eliot, - Ezekiel discovering that the limit of his knowledge isn't the limit of what is knowable,
- How to have fun with beehives and the people inside them
- and Mighty Mouse
In 1997 I wrote a paper, "Semantic Information Mechanics".
How many of you ever heard of it? I'm guessing the reason few of you heard of it, let alone read it, was because it was filled with stuff like this.
(You could imagine the tweets that went around about that slide)
Lose that Wisdom-Knowledge-Information thing, did ya?
I wrote something a little more accessible, Yes, You Can Predict Viral Marketing, in 2006. It listed the basic elements you need to know before you start a viral or WOM campaign in order to insure success:
- How many individuals does the campaign need to start with (seed)?
- How fast will the campaign spread (propagation factor)?
- How will the campaign spread (vectors)?
- How large a group is required to sustain the propagation (viral burden)?
- What is the campaign's goal (maintenance factor)?
- How large a group is required to sustain the campaign once the goal is achieved (threshold point)?
- At what point is the campaign too successful (saturation point)?
- Do you want a mobile or static audience to get a message out quickly? (You'll need to read the article to understand why this is a trick question)
- Start with a general message
- Change the message every X hours or Y miles
What it discovered this time was that people, especially people over the age of 28, are self-regulating the amount of information they interact with in a day. Two direct comments we recorded during this research included "I don’t have time to follow 20 blogs" and "I don't have time to be on half a dozen social networks".
What we learned was that blogs and related information sources people thought relevant, important to their lives declines with age. This is true with blogs, newsletters, places to shop.
What did increase?
We discovered that people 28yo+ will often put an information governor on their intake, often trusting as little as 2 information sources. They may give time to others but they're only able to redact to 2-5.
Thus TS Eliot, in stating that we've lost wisdom via knowledge via information, was ahead of his time. I'm pretty sure semantic information mechanics -- which this is -- wasn't known of, at least not a formal discipline, in his time.
Next up, Ezekiel hits his wall.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
Upcoming Trainings:- Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08
- International Communication Association's Communicating for Social Impact, the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association at Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22-26, 2008
- SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08
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