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"Social media scientist" Dan Zarrella has done some interesting work to help dispel the notion that social proof is the be-all and end-all
persuader.
Whether it is or isn't, social proof is entirely overrated, if you set aside worries about Web 2.0.
Here are five arguments against the wisdom of social proof, drawn from history:
- In 2008, the citizens of Riviera Beach, Florida, approved a referendum that outlawed the wearing of saggy pants in public. The vote in favor was overwhelming. That same year, a local judge ruled the law unconstitutional.
- In 1941, the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane for Best Picture of the Year. Today, Citizen Kane is generally considered the greatest film ever made by an American.
- In 1825, the accepted remedy for nearly every ailment in America was mercury, which is poisonous. For years, tourists from abroad returned home to report that all Americans were lazy and walked funny.
- In 1636, speculation in tulip bulbs by the Dutch drove the price of rare bulbs to a figure equalling six times the average worker's yearly wage. Today, a tulip bulb retails for about 70 cents.
- In 33, a crowd in Jerusalem chose to commute the death sentence of the thief Barabbas over that of Jesus Christ. You know the rest of the story.
Accepting society's blessing may be no blessing at all. Crowds can be nitwitted.
It's often better to blaze your own path, even though it's hard work. As Nietzsche said, "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe."
Business executives who champion predatory
practices are, in general, deplorable. The ones who operate on the belief that "misfortune is the mother of opportunity" are odious.
In my book, executives who extract money from hapless customers by exploiting their misfortune deserve nothing but scorn.
And I don't have contempt just for greedy funeral parlor owners or retailers who run check-cashing stores in disadvantaged neighborhoods. I have it for the leaders of many purported "world-class" companies, Fortune 1000 firms that rountinely reap windfall profits by imposing customer "penalties."
As a consumer, you know who they are. If not, you know the corporations they run. Most of the major airlines, banks, health insurance companies, credit card companies and phone companies.
Of course, any business leader who's halfway smart would weigh the short-term gains won by penalizing loyal customers against the pain inflicted on them and the long-term hatred that inevitably results.
But these executives aren't smart. They're merely treacherous.
Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell (the most vicious of all) was the final repository for the treacherous: men and women who, in Dante's eyes, had betrayed their communities. Condemned to the Ninth Circle, the treacherous don't "burn in Hell," contrary to the popular expression, but are encased in ice for all eternity.
Pack your Gucci parkas, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm reading a fascinating new book by historian Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America.
With a nod to David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan, there's a lesson or two for marketers in it.
All artists are sponges; great artists are sponges with vision.
Wilentz's book chronicles how Dylan devoured (and continues to devour) the sounds and words of forerunners and fellow travelers and sculpted from them his own view of contemporary America.
"He belongs to an American entertainment tradition that runs back at least as far as Daniel Decuatur Emmet (the Ohio-born, anti-slavery minstrel who wrote 'Dixie') and that Dylan helped reinvent in the subterranean Gaslight Cafe in the 1960s," Wilentz writes. "But he belongs to another tradition as well, that of Whitman, Melville, and Poe, which sees the everyday in American symbols and the symbolic in the everyday, and then tells stories about it."
The question for marketers: how does a solitary artist the likes of Dylan produce so many masterpieces?
The answer: he doesn't produce mashups. He produces marriages. He spots harmony and concordance where others compartmentalize. Chuck Berry and Bertolt Brecht. Jack Kerouac and Martin Luther King. Authur Rimbaud and Jimmie Rodgers.
Dylan divines counterparts and BobDylanizes them.
Marketers who want to give birth to innovations can take a page (or a back page) from him.
A lot of social media marketing efforts fall flat.
That's because a lot of business people who post forget Emily Post.
Lacking in basic social graces, they push out one boorish self-promo after the other. They succeed only in making it clear to the world that they put profits before people.
What do successful social media marketers do differently?
In their article in the latest issue of Communication World, "The Return of the Hyper-Social Organization," Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran (coauthors of a new book on the subject) answer the question.
Successful social media marketers turn business processes into social processes.
While that sounds pretty cool, Gossieaux and Moran warn that success in social media marketing won't come from "taking a business process and layering it on top of social media."
"Social media PR does not mean distributing your press release via social media channels, and social media marketing is not about pimping your wares through social media," they write. "Turning a business process into a social process has to be steeped in humanity and recriprocity: You give, you take, you share, you help, you enable, you empower. We recommend that you start by giving. If you don't, people will not only shut you off, they will punish you for not respecting the basic social rules that have existed in human societies for thousands of years. People are no more likely to enjoy a Twitter feed that constantly spews company information than they are to enjoy a person at a party who only talks about himself."
Today I acted on a recent decision to put my money where my mouth is.
I decided to quit griping about illiteracy and do something about it.
Beginning this month, The Mighty Copywriter will donate four percent of all profits to Washington's literacy council, DC LEARNs.
DC LEARNs provides materials and training to literacy programs throughout the city and works with them to recruit volunteers and reach out to new learners.
Illiteracy is terrible social problem. It affects people’s health, employability and chances to participate as full citizens.
And it's a growing problem. According to the US Department of Education, a whopping 44,000 people join the nation's ranks of adult illiterates every week. Hundreds of these folks end up living in Washington. Right now, one in five DC residents has low literacy skills.
By contributing to DC LEARNS, I hope to give literacy in our nation's capital a little boost.
Helping to solve a social problem feels good.
And I hope that feeling will be shared by the clients who work with me.
