Let's go ahead and get the whole talk about influence out of the way—a debate that's been raging on for a while now. On one side of the aisle, you've got Malcolm Gladwell and his tipping point theory, which boils down to how a select few folks are the ones who start the trends. They are the early adopters, the mavens, the influential ones. Also on this side of the aisle is Ed Keller's book The Influentials, whose premise claims that "one out of every ten Americans tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy." Keller's research shows that these people are "market multipliers"—people who are disproportionately asked for their advice by others and as a result are more likely to offer recommendations.
Based on these theories—which seem to make total sense when one initially considers them—the rage today is for agencies and brands to try to find these prized influencers, these people with huge blog audiences or tens of thousands of followers on Twitter. They think that if they can seed their product with that group, then not only will they tell their networks about it, but since they are the cool kids, everybody will want to be like them and copy their every move and every purchase. Got it?
Now let's set that aside and look at the other side of the aisle, which features Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist from Columbia University with a long list of credentials. Watts's own research has found that "highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs" and that "your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend" (see FastCompany.com, January 28, 2008, Clive Thompson). In other words, it's not about the influentials at all; to take it even further, everybody is influential and nobody is an influential. Trends will happen when they are ready to happen, not because you seeded them with people you deem to be the authority.
So what theory does Brains on Fire subscribe to? Neither, or maybe both, depending on how you look at it.
Allow us to explain.
Rather than subscribe to any sort of influencer theory, we instead subscribe to what we call the passion theory, based on a simple premise: Influence can be made, but passion can't. In other words, with all the tools at our disposal these days (including the almighty dollar) and with the right secret sauce, you can manufacture, build, or grow influence. But try as you may, you can't buy passion. You can't create passion. And you surely can't fake it.
Everywhere you look, there are white papers, books, and marketing companies based on finding and using the influencers. They tie a nice bow around the would-be concept so you can pick it up and drop it into any of your campaigns. Oh, don't get us wrong; influencer marketing has its place in word-of-mouth marketing. But it's just one way, and it's certainly not the only way. Many companies find that it's much easier to try to seed conversations with these already established so-called influencers. And while the efforts with this group might get a quick spike in attention, the buzz soon dies away—and the company is left to look for its next quick fix. Not exactly sustainable, is it? Besides, the influencers have organized themselves and now see their influence as a business, and if you're looking at it like that, then the passion and slice-of-life aspects quickly get sucked out of the equation.
Do we want to ignore those people who take up a lot of space online and have a lot of other people's attention? Of course not. We want to have conversations with them. But instead of trying to rent them like a billboard and pray that they'll talk about us, we'd rather use them for insight. So we reach out in the initial stages of igniting a movement and ask for their thoughts and opinions on how to approach the task at hand. We don't ask them to be our leaders; we don't even ask them to talk about what we're trying to do. We just talk to them about their passion. As a result, we not only gain a lot of knowledge about the industry but because of the way we approached them—by treating them like the experts they are, and without any preconceived notions—they naturally start conversations about what we are doing in an organic, authentic way.
One of the best scenes from the mock rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap is when Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest) is telling Marty DiBergi (played by Rob Reiner) about his special Marshall amp head—an amp on which all dials go to 11. DiBergi asks, "Why don't you just use 10 as the loudest and make that the highest one?" and Tufnel replies, "This one goes to 11!"
Tufnel's special amp is a tribute to his passion for being the loudest band in the world. To get there, he needs one more click, one more push. And much like Nigel himself, passion is not logical. So what if we used the amp as a metaphor and asked what its equivalent within a company might be? How does passion relate to a company or an organization's customers? Passion is from the Latin word patior, meaning "to suffer or to endure." And we're sure some people would find that an accurate description of how they felt listening to Tufnel playing at 11. A more contemporary definition: "Passion is an intense emotion compelling feeling, enthusiasm or desire for anything, and often requiring action." If you want to stay with the metaphor, it's a great correlation to use when thinking about a brand's relationship with its most passionate customers. Companies should aspire to ratchet up their relationships with customers to be one notch louder.
Listen to what John Tanner, academic vice president at Brigham Young University, has to say on the subject:
According to [New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman, curiosity and passion are key prerequisites for education in a "flat world," where information is readily available and where global markets reward those who have learned how to learn and are self-motivated to learn. In today's world, he argues, it is more important to be passionate and curious than to be merely smart. Friedman has reduced this principle to a formula: CQ + PQ > IQ—meaning, Curiosity Quotient plus Passion Quotient is greater than Intelligent Quotient. Friedman says that he lives by this formula: "Give me the kid with a passion to learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over the less passionate kid with a huge IQ every day of the week." IQ "still matters, but CQ and PQ ... matter even more."
We've come to see that this formula has value for companies and organizations, specifically those that want to create long-term, sustainable movements. Passion, and not influence, should be the main driver behind the people companies choose to be internal or external ambassadors. Remember, most traditional marketers subscribe to the campaign mentality that treats customers like on-off switches, turning the marketing switch on with the start of a campaign, and when the campaign runs its multiweek course, turning it off.
But passion doesn't work like that.
Wouldn't it be preferable to treat customers as volume dials rather than on-off switches? Companies should embrace conversations that have a more sustainable long-term effect. The volume level should never go to zero, and the conversation should always continue. Sometimes it gets louder and sometimes softer, but it never ends or goes mute. There are no dark times with movements, because there is always a hum of activity.
We're using a new model for building fans these days. Musicians, for example, can control their own destiny by building a fan base through the grassroots level, social media sites and online followings. They don't have to rely on the old-school record label model. But the key to any musician's or band's success still remains the same as it ever was: the fans. Just like a company or brand's success is determined by its customers ... and sustainable success by its fans.
Creating a real passion dial requires a company to be willing to put itself out there, and not in the anonymous sense. We mean making the internal workings and people visible and transparent to outsiders, building relationships with fans, and then recognizing the opportunities to find authentic transportation to where the fans are. For instance, bands start with vans, then go to buses, and then airplanes. They travel from their neighborhood, to cities, and then to continents.
Additionally, a band's fan growth is usually tied to performance, and the same can be said for a company. Many bands have been successful by using social media, and while that's a great way to be available to their communities of fans, it's just a small part of the equation. This scenario also requires a balance between benefiting the community—less money for the band/brand, but more loyal fans who feel a part of your journey to fame and fortune—as opposed to the sell-out, which means more money in the short term and a lot of exposure. However, it will elicit a fan base that is always looking for the next best thing, which won't necessarily be you.
Thinking this way can keep your company's efforts honest and focused on the long term. From both the fans' and the brand's perspectives, that's what we want. Marketers and brands tend to lose focus on passion too quickly, or perhaps they simply place less value on it as time goes by.
So how does a brand reach an 11 on the passion dial? You might claim that Tufnel's Marshall amp really didn't reach past 10. But if he believes it plays at 11, does it really matter whether it's actually louder? Maybe he plays his chords tighter, sustains his notes longer, and reaches 11 by feeding off the energy of his fans. That's how a brand can reach 11, when its fanatical fans infect their fanaticism into the brand's internal band members. It's easy to stop believing and just go through the motions—until you see the real value you're providing to your fans. Moving the dial from 10 to 11 cannot be done by the fans alone.
We want the 11s. We want the ones who are always going "one louder" when they're proclaiming their passion.
The nugget here is that instead of looking for those influential folks in a category, we look for those regular, everyday people who just happen to have a deep passion about that category. Not the divas, the superbloggers, or the supposed influencers that everyone else is trying to get hold of. Since most people trust the opinions of people just like themselves, why not empower those people in the first place? We've seen how these everyday people have more sway and greater credibility: because they are, in fact, "just like me."
You better believe that we look for people who have the ability to become influential and social, because a hermit who has all the passion in the world about something is still, after all, a hermit. So as we have conversations, we ask people how they relate to others, what kind of activities they're involved in, what their hobbies are, and so on. And even these "interviews" reveal a lot about their personality. Though we don't have an official psychological profile that we're targeting, there are a few obvious characteristics that we seek in our leaders.
The first thing you need to know is that if everyone is expected to lead, then no one will. The second is that the right leaders provide an inspirational tone and a context for the community that a brand simply can't accomplish on its own. So many communities are DOA because the community is built to be about the brand. But as Justine Foo puts it, "Leaders ... re-energize that passion conversation over and over." And when you put people instead of things at the forefront of your message and movement, people look at you differently. In other words, like Scott Monty of Ford's Social Media Department says, "People appreciate having a personality associated with a company."
For example, the first thing we did for the Fiskars project was figure out who we needed to lead the movement. Now if you're not familiar with the crafting and scrapbooking world, you might assume that it's something your grandmother does. So we teamed up with Umbria Communications (now JD Power Web Intelligence), a company that dives deep into online conversation mining, to see what was being said out there, who was doing the talking, and where it was taking place. And boy, were we surprised at what they found.
First of all, our audience turned out to be members of Gen X and Gen Y—as far from your grandmother and her friends as you could imagine—and they were clearly driving the conversation. This was vital, since it helped us discover that our assumptions about the demo were way off base, and it would determine key components of the movement. Second, 25 percent of those who talked about crafting online did so a lot, on average, three times a week. (Yes, we're still talking about paper and scissors here.) And the last thing we found was that virtually nobody was using the Fiskars name in their conversations, so we were tasked to increase that number by 10 percent in our first four months.
Step two was about the influencers, so we began to reach out to celebrity crafters to gain their insight and input. We told them about Fiskars's intentions and the brand ambassador movement, which began to generate interest while empowering them and gaining their buy-in. It also let us identify cutting-edge crafters we could engage when we built the online and off-line tools to help authenticate the movement.
We used the conversations we had up to this point to identify the attributes we wanted in active brand ambassadors—a kind of informal psychological profile, if you will. It included personality attributes, the members of their social circles, how they connected with others online and off-line, and leadership attributes. We quickly learned from the first set of face-to-face conversations that we weren't looking for the best technical scrapbookers because those crafters only discussed that aspect of their hobby during their interview. (And keep in mind that we didn't ask them to talk about anything in particular.) However, those who weren't concerned with the technical aspect were the ones whose conversations centered on teaching, storytelling, and sharing their passion. The lightbulbs went off; these were the people we were looking for.
We were primarily looking for people we could empower to become ambassadors. While we wanted the movement's leaders to be knowledgeable and able to teach, if they were all high-level talent, then others might perceive them as unapproachable—not a good thing for a social community. Most crafters pursue this pastime as a hobby and are not highly talented, so it is easier for most to connect to someone on the same ability level.
We determined that the movement would be headed by four lead ambassadors: part-time, paid, contracted positions. We worked with Fiskars to identify four geographical markets to focus the search and interview process, and we ultimately chose Chicago, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Charlotte.
Then we took it to the streets. We collaborated with independent crafting stores in those areas and put out an open call for interviews for the four positions. Based on the online response, candidates answered a series of short questions to help us select 75 eventual applicants for face-to-face interviews in each city. Then our team traveled the country and spent two to three days in each city, holding in-person interviews in crafting stores. This was an important component, as we wanted to talk to the applicants in their own environment, a place where they felt familiar and comfortable, much like the places where they would be interacting with fellow ambassadors.
Each candidate had her picture taken and her interview videorecorded for future reference. We simply asked each of them to bring a sampling of their scrapbooking and crafting projects with them and be prepared to talk about them. Clearly, this wasn't about sales experience or resumes or the size of the candidates' social circles. It was about passion and personality, the ability to connect, and the desire to share their enthusiasm with others. We just sat down and had a guided conversation.
We listened intently to what each woman shared with us. We knew that the leaders had to be willing to talk about their lives—the good and the bad. It's a wide boundary. If you're not comfortable with discussing your dog passing away, the issues you face in raising your kids, or even if you had a bad day, then you're not what we're looking for. And while some of the applicants merely showed us their crafting work, others showed us their work and told us the story behind it. That's what we were looking for.
After reviewing all the notes and videos, four women were chosen from four different walks of life:
A 26-year-old single woman and former scrapbook storeowner
A 37-year-old married mother of one who was in law enforcement and a former missionary
A 30-year-old married mother and part-time teacher for hearing-impaired children
A 27-year-old married stay-at-home mother
They would be the ones who would carry the torch for this movement. And in the following chapters, we tell you how.
The Rage against the Haze movement posed both different and similar challenges in finding our leaders. Our search led us to a woman who had received a grant from the University of South Carolina to identify kids who were doing service-based learning—from tutoring to cleanups—across the state. That gave us a great opportunity to find motivated teenagers, those who—unlike the average student—were inspired to do something more than just what they had to do to get by.
So we got in our cars and traveled the state to meet with them where they lived and were doing remarkable things—from little towns to big cities. That journey introduced us to teens who were both inspired and inspirational. It wasn't about being popular or good-looking, although some were; these kids were different. One had only been in the States for one year, and even though we could sometimes hardly understand his broken English, we always understood his passion.
We knew the movement would take every type of teen: white, black, male, female, you name it. We needed the shy ones with great artistic talent, as well as the vocal ones who couldn't draw to save their lives. Together, they created this quilt of inspiration through which Rage drew strength.
"I was never alone, and I always had people my age or a little bit older to guide me," said Chris Ivan, a member of the Rage movement from the beginning. And that's just it. They were—and still are—all in this together, to feed off and inspire one another. It's a cycle that sustains itself with the right leaders in place.
You'd think that when it came to finding the leaders for Best Buy's Mi11 movement that the related gear of guitars, drums, keyboards, and DJ equipment would elicit scores of rock stars. And while we do consider our leads to be rock stars, when it comes to playing a musical instrument, there are the power chords, playing on stage, and the groupies, but there's also a whole technical world as well. It's full of custom-building tube amps, choosing the right wood for the neck of your guitar, and finding the combination of pedals that gives you just the right amount of fuzz. Let's face it, not all of us who enjoy playing our guitars are exactly rock stars (well, maybe in our own heads). So we had to make sure that our leaders had the chops to relate on a variety of levels. We could have just chosen the trendy ones, but as sexy as that might be, it's not reality. So we identified and chose approachable people who were also storytellers, people who could relate to someone who was about to pick up a guitar for the first time, as well as someone who'd been playing drums for years. That was the balance we wanted to find.
As Eric Dodds, the "Community Guy" for the Mi11 movement, put it:
The leads are what make this thing. It wouldn't work without them. They come from a variety of backgrounds; have a variety of expertise in each of their quivers; and [collectively] make up one of the most awesome music resources in the country. They were already doing entrepreneurial things to promote musical instruments at Best Buy. We are just giving them a channel and resources to do that [as a group] and invite others to [do it as well].
Best Buy's corporate offices reiterate this claim. "We have a really unique retail culture here. We wanted people that were good representatives of that," says Jamie Plesser.
Here's the beautiful thing: When you take the time to recognize someone and empower them with the tools they need to pass on the word, they will be much more loyal to you than the mommy blogger who is basically renting out her influence to the highest bidder and will be talking about something else in a matter of days.
Some people think they'll have it made if only Oprah will talk about them. But Oprah is going to talk about somebody different tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. And soon you'll be left on the shelf next to what she touted the day before your product. Oh, we have no doubt that you'll get a bump in sales and ride that wave as far as it takes you. But it's temporary.
In our experience—which is not driven by charts, data, or statistics but rather by hands-on experience—success comes when you give power to those who have the potential to influence others. It isn't always the coolest people or the giants in an industry, but they aren't unconnected slobs, either. It's the everyday people we've seen become influencers. They have risen in the communities they serve and have, in turn, raised others in the community as well. So now they are influencers making influencers. And so it spreads.
Authors and experts like Watts, Keller, and Gladwell are all great thinkers who have most definitely influenced our efforts to ignite sustainable movements and fuse them into the very core of brand identities. The only thing we have had to go on, though, is hands-on, frontline experience and our gut, both of which have served us well.
It's both great for the word-of-mouth marketing industry and healthy for all of us that there isn't only one camp to pull from. So as the debate rages on and both sides generate more data to support their views, we have no doubt that we'll all benefit from their thinking—or at least get some more reading that'll make your head hurt.
Rob Morris from Love146 gave us this nugget of insight in one of our discussions: "Will influencers give you sweat equity? No. But the passionate ones will."
In our experience, we've found that over time, influencers come to expect you to bring things to them. They sit back and start to get lax. They're influencers, after all. We should all listen to them, right? But the passionate folks—the ones who aren't afraid to roll up their sleeves and be a part of something bigger than themselves—are happy to contribute sweat equity, something that goes far beyond tweeting or blogging about something. Sweat equity is a personal sacrifice. When you give you sweat equity, you give your loyalty. Your time. Your effort.
And we'd take 100 passionate people who contribute that sweat equity just because they care, as opposed to 1,000 influentials who tweet once and never think about it again.
All it takes is one person to start a movement. That's right, one person. Not 100 influencers, not 50 bloggers, and not 1,000 ambassadors. One. Passionate. Person. That's all it takes.
But that one person has to be committed. They have to not care what others think, and they have enough fervor that they can do their own thing. And once they are out there, giving it all they've got, they can't help attracting kindred spirits who join the cause and start giving it all they've got as well.
In 2009, there was a great video that was randomly taped at the Sasquatch Music Festival. In it, a normal (and kinda goofy) guy got up in the field and started dancing (or maybe flailing around) to the music being played on stage. Some people laughed. Some people pointed. Some just sat and watched. Pretty soon, he was joined by an equally goofy guy who jumped up and started dancing with him. Then another. Then a few others. And within three minutes, people were sprinting to join the dance party. Hundreds of them. Do you think the guy who started the whole thing was an influencer? Or just someone who had to do his thing?
The people you need to look to for igniting your movement may not be the people you originally thought of. They might even be the quiet leaders. And as this whole word-of-mouth marketing thing keeps growing and evolving—especially with the rise of social media—we often overlook the quiet leader.
Quiet leaders let their actions speak louder than anyone's words ever could. People watch them intently, and they don't really know why. There is strength in their silence, and they choose their actions deliberately.
Quiet leaders leave ego by the wayside. They understand that ego is a powerful, ugly beast that can easily take over a typical influencer's life, and when it does, they're no longer leaders. Just noise.
Quiet leaders elevate those around them instead of always trying to elevate themselves. And when you elevate others, they never forget it. They are loyal. They are always happy to return the gesture.
When we were searching for leaders for Rage against the Haze, one of our most active and effective teens actually found us. Zack was a quintessential quiet leader. Both of his parents smoked, and his goal was to get his mother to quit. But in getting involved, he found that he had a voice. This guy was six-foot three and 15 years old, and he wore button-down shirts with pocket protectors every day—certainly not the type of guy to stand on top of a van and lead chants. Instead, he was having quiet conversations with kids who were struggling with the same issues he was. He was warm and approachable, and he is the perfect example of the assertion that it takes a lot of different kinds of people to move something forward. Zack was always there. He always showed up and was always the last one to leave.
On his last day with the movement, before he aged out of it and went off to college, Zack was having lunch at a Rage event in downtown Greenville. All the teens were going around the table reminiscing about the summer and about Rage events all over the state. When it came to Zack's turn, he couldn't say a word, because he was overcome with emotion. All these other teens, from all walks of life and all social groups, gathered around him and hugged him. That's the kind of emotion that you can't get from a campaign, and that's the kind of passion that brings us together.
So don't forget the silent leaders. They just might be the ones you've been overlooking, and they could very well be the key to your success. There could be one answering the phones at the front desk. Maybe there's one in the accounting department, or down in shipping. You never know until you start to listen to what others are saying and start to dig in and see where people are getting their input and information. Because in this case—even though it may be counterintuitive—silence is indeed golden.
Then you're going to have to move your company to dreamland, because that's where your head is right now.
Listen very closely: You cannot choose the people who will love your company. It's not up to you to do the choosing; it's up to them. People come in every shape, size, and color. They come from different backgrounds and espouse different belief systems. If you pick your leaders for their appearance, you're doomed. Because unless you're in the high-fashion model industry, that's not reality. It takes all kinds, and passion comes in a lot of different packages. So learn to deal with it now.