Viral Marketing and Two-way communication

In a recent article in HBR (Viral marketing for the real world) Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti dives deep into on how to get Viral Marketing to work even if you don't get the viral part self sustaining. Which means that the reproduction rate is lower than 1 and that it will die eventually. However they launch the interesting idea to use viral marketing techniques to reach a wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. So combining the techniques of traditional mass marketing with viral marketing generates a much better result from the invested marketing dollars they conclude.

This sounds perfect and a pragmatic way into using a technology that is hard to master (getting the viral message loose IS hard). However I miss two things here. First of all you miss the opportunity to get to know the respondents of your mass marketing effort. They only send the message on, and you know as little as you did before. And the ones they send it to also are totally anonymous. Why not combine the mass marketing and viral marketing with permission based marketing. Take the opportunity to collect permissions when you have them interested. That way you can continue send marketing messages their way without having to be dependent on expensive mass marketing campaigns. You can then continue using viral techniques to repeat each marketing message sent to your collected group of permissions.

The next accelerator is to use digital services to actually foster viral tendencies in the target group. For each person the message is sent to they receive payment in form of digital services like Video-On-Demand, top-up of the pre-paid mobile account, etc.

This leads towards becoming ONE with your customers as expressed by Stefan Engeseth in his book ONE.

Information Ecology

I once read a book which mentioned the word "Information Ecology". It didn't talk much about the topic and ever since I've been thinking about what it means. Taste the words ... Information ... Ecology.

Information can be so much and so little. Useful and useless. Mean something and be totally false. Data is something we collect with our five senses and interpret with our filters or glasses. The remaining data could be called information. Already here it is filtered and with the right filters it is actually worth more than in the raw form. But if you have the wrong filters or draw the wrong conclusions it becomes false and will certainly lead you wrong. So the data has now become information. It is what we do with the information that determines the outcome and result. Finally information may turn into knowledge if we manage to embrace it and make the information our own and take it to our heart.

The process of turning information into knowledge is a sort of ecology. Ecology for me is how a thing circulates in a closed system, interacting with other artifacts in that system. In the interaction process it gives and takes parts from the surrounding environment and the context in which it exists. For example information is collected in one place. It then traverses different paths between people who act in different contexts. Depending on the circumstance for each person that person is affected by the information which is interpreted and filtered by his/her experience and taken into consideration. The person gives the information to the next person who handles the information (now changed a little bit, at least interpreted) according to his/her experience. The information may be stored at different stages in this process, so you can find the same information in different stages of interpretation at the same time when searching.

Does this makes sense? I don't know yet, I probably have to think more of it. But my general thought is to view "Information Ecology" as the process information traverses and becoming transformed as it is used and interpreted in different contexts/environments. This is the ecology of information. Hopefully it will come to use as it moves around and information is removed and added. Finally it becomes not only information, but also Knowledge, the key to understand the world around us.

Does culture matter?

To be able to answer this question one has to ask himself what culture is? There is probably a very good explanation on Wikipedia that I don't care to read. To me culture can be defined as the thought model that governs how one acts and reacts to things in the outer world. Or even better that governs how people think other will think and thus acts according to how they believe others will react.

Let me take one simple example. How close to the other person do you stand when having a conversation? In Sweden it's about 60-80 cm while in India I've been told it's less than 30 cm. The story goes that one Swede and one Indian had a discussion. The Indian tried to keep the distance of 30 cm while the Sweden moved away to keep the 80 cm. The were basically dancing backwards across the room. Very funny!!!

In groups of people with the same or very similar culture society is starving on input and new thoughts. Since everyone is acting according to how they believe everyone else would expect them to act no or very few new thoughts and ideas emerges. Whereas in groups of people with many different people from all over the world (or at least with a vast different background) there are always people able to see things that others miss because of their cultural filter.

This is way large groups in the world have such big problems. Arabic countries have very little input from other parts of the world. In China the Han-people are very homogeneous and up until very recently have not had much influence from abroad. Other parts are experiencing very dramatic idea generation and are very creative. Look at Europe for example with its large set of cultures and value systems. There has always been one part of Europe that has seen a new thing that was in the blind-spot for the others. The same for the east and west coast of US. A lot of immigrants from all over the world have created a boiling cacophony of ideas and values. You can see how many great companies that originates from these places.

The threat however to both Europe and US are xenophobia. Becoming afraid of strangers and stopping them from entering is major threat to this process. In the US they are trying to limit the number of green cards and foreign students. In Europe we're closing our borders and in almost every country there is a national party trying to get rid of foreigners to different degrees.

I believe it is of utterly importance that we keep US and Europe open to new people and new ideas. China and the Arabic countries has to follow and create a better mix of people, cultures and values to be able to boil a new soup for the future.

What have you achieved lately?

I usually sit down once every year to reflect on achievements and lessons learned the past year. It can be things that have been ongoing in my profession or in private life.

For example I managed a fairly large project which had a member of the steering committee that was always taking every chance to hinder progress. I became very frustrated with his objections and comments. It came to a point were I was feeling really bad and thought that I cannot lead projects. In that situation I consulted a former project manager colleague and we discussed what needs to be done in order to solve the issue at hand. We concluded that I had to think about his perspective and identify the information he needed. Of course one would like an executive manager to be able to pick the information he needed or if he misses some information be able to articulate that and ask for it. Also we concluded that I should try not to be to focused on what he said and didn't say. Of course all what this manager did was example of bad management, but I could choose between make my own career great or be a victim for the circumstance.

Anyway, in this process I also reflected upon the fact that I couldn't figure this out myself as others had already done before me. I mean there are people who seem to know already from the beginning what to do in a certain situation. It looks like it is embedded in their genes. Take Mozart as an example. He played better violin at age 4 than most people do after a whole life in training. How can this be possible? Is it only pure intelligence or is it something else? I don't really know to be honest, but I found an interesting article on Wired called What kind of genius are you?. In the article he concludes that there are two types of geniuses. One that sees from the beginning what shall be done and the rest is only implementation. Get it done basically. The second genius is the one that is developed over time. You make a move, take in the rest and improves the actions from the collected feedback. Personally I am a fond of the second type for two reasons. The first is of course that since I haven't done anything that will give me the Nobel Prize yet I have to trust that I will actually learn from my experience. The second reason is more compelling since it says that people can develop new skills over time and learn from them. In the end this is the most interesting since it will enable all of us normal people to actually develop some skills. We're not left with our starting ability to create great stuff, we can improve it! Actually I admire people more who have learned from past lessons than who trusts only the default skill set.

If you are interested about this I can also advice you of a recent article in Harvard Business Review called Discovering your authentic leadership.

The conclusion of this post is to urge you to reflect on your achievements. This is the only way to improve if your not born with an extraordinary ability. It is also the only way to develop your authentic leadership. So by reflecting over yourself you will by itself achieve new exciting things.