003: How An Idea Can Spread
What Does Twitter (And Family Planning In South Korea) Have In Common?
For starters, they were both ideas that needed the support of others for them to spread.
In this week’s article, I wanted to share with you two of my favourite stories from sociologist Damon Centola.
I introduced you to Centola in last week’s article, referring to research undertaken by him to determine the proportion of people needed for an idea to spread. His research revealed that if 25% of a social network successfully adopted an idea, the idea would reach tipping point and could then spread organically throughout the rest of the group.
His book, called Change, is an excellent read. It gives lots of examples of how ideas spread, why some ideas spread easily and others do not (known as simple and complex contagions) and how the current thinking around ideas spreading like viruses is fundamentally flawed.
If you’re looking for a brief overview of this book, in 60 minutes or less, Damon Centola has been interviewed by Shankar Vedantam on a podcast called The Hidden Brain. You can listen to the individual episode here.
THE GROWTH OF TWITTER
Twitter is synonymous with our day-to-day lives.
I’m sure many of us couldn’t imagine a world without Twitter these days. But of course, once upon a time, Twitter was a new platform that hadn’t yet spread across the world. It was merely a fledgling idea, concocted by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone in 2006.
How did Twitter gain mass global adoption? You might have thought, like I did, that this was down to the infinite digital connectivity provided by the world wide web. Twitter could be *everywhere* at once, it could transcend national and geographic barriers and it could replicate itself through an endless stream of 1’s and 0’s. However, it didn’t spread like that, not initially anyway.
You may have heard the growth of Twitter was down to the adoption and promotion of influencers such as Oprah Winfrey. It was thought that Oprah was the catalyst for growth when she posted her first tweet on the Oprah Winfrey Show on the 17th April 2009. The problem with this theory, as Centola points out, is that Twitter had already entered its fastest *ever* rate of growth before Oprah posted that tweet. In fact, this rate of growth was never matched again, even with the backing of such an important individual.
So, there must be something else going on here.
THE PROBLEM WITH INFLUENCERS
The problem with influencer’s, according to Centola, is that they tend not to support an idea unless other people - the people that follow them - support the idea as well. An influencer typically wants to maintain their influence, so they are usually the last to adopt something new (rather than the first). Think about it, what would happen to the perception of an influencer if they adopted something and it didn’t catch on?
Influencer’s are conventionally attractive to those that want their idea to spread. Their reach and power, effectively harnessed, should seemingly fuel the growth of an idea throughout a population. But if an influencer won’t pick up an idea before their followers do, we still have a distribution problem.
Many brands have harnessed the power of influencer’s by buying their support and using them as advocates for a new product or service. This can certainly work in certain circumstances, but today’s consumers are far more savvy, aware and in-tune to these marketing ploys.
And just because a celebrity influencer promotes something on Instagram, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will leap.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WITH TWITTER?
Twitter grew through word of mouth. Records show that it started in San Francisco and then spread from household to household, neighbour to neighbour, over the fields and through the towns of California - long before it got to another major city.
In fact, before Twitter users started appearing in Los Angeles, registrations started appearing in Boston, Massachusetts. And then, growth followed a similar pattern, expanding through the streets and suburbs of the city, one member at a time.
What is the explanation for this unusual growth pattern? Why did growth leap from California to Massachusetts before it ever appeared in Los Angeles and New York?
Well, as Centola points out, the people who were spreading the idea in Boston were people in the tech industry. These individuals went to university with like-minded people from the tech industry in San Francisco. So, the growth was organic - from friend to friend, neighbour to neighbour, colleague to colleague and family member to family member.
It grew through personal recommendation.
The power of a recommendation from someone that is close to you is *extremely* important. It’s how we decide on which plumber to use, whether we should buy one product or another and is how we determine the way in which we should behave in public and in society. This advocacy cannot be bought and it cannot be influenced. It’s how ideas are proven to really grow, naturally and organically, because we are far more likely to listen to someone close to us than we are a celebrity influencer.
And this grass roots spreading of an idea is what fuelled Twitter’s most intense period of growth. I find that thought incredible considering the global tech behemoth we have today.
AND ONTO A VERY DIFFERENT ISSUE IN SOUTH KOREA
In the 1960s, South Korea had a problem.
Before this time, when healthcare was poor and malnutrition was widespread, rural families would have greater numbers of children in order to maintain the status quo. Infant mortality was so high that you needed to have more children (or, sadly, rolls of the dice…) in order for your family to be able to survive. This became so engrained in South Korea, that it became part of a culture - embedded habitually into the way people lived their lives.
This was the norm until the effects of technology created by the industrialised West began to trickle through to the rural villages. With improved healthcare, a growing economy and advances in food production, there was a very real threat of crippling overpopulation.
What options did the government have?
Well, they could have introduced legislation limiting the number of children in a household. A ‘stick’ (or potentially a ‘carrot’, depending on how its framed) approach to solving the problem.
Would this have really been enforceable though - given the countless rural villages across the land? And would it have really worked? It is certainly not a proactive way to get the public to *choose* to buy into the idea of family planning.
To further reinforce the fallacy of a top-down ‘stick’ approach, here is another example (and an extract from the book):
“As a reference point, consider that the US’s government’s ‘War on Drugs’ began in the 1970s. In 2011, after nearly half a century of battle and billions of dollars spent, the US Congress conceded that not only had it failed to win the war, the problem of drug use had actually gotten worse.”
WHAT OTHER OPTIONS Did THE SOUTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT HAVE?
They could have started an advertising initiative to encourage (or entice) people to change their behaviour. Again, these kinds of initiatives tend to fail quite spectacularly, soaking up lots of money in consultants, advertising and broadcast media spots with very limited success. In actual fact, the South Korean government did try this approach in the 1950’s and it failed.
As I’ve mentioned before, shouting *at* people is unlikely to get them to change their behaviour.
Could an influencer in each village be chosen (or bought) to promote the initiative? Logically that would make sense. People should listen to an important villager and mimic their behaviour, right? Well firstly, see paragraph on influencers above. And secondly, one voice against everyone else is unlikely to be powerful enough to move the status quo. For that to happen, considerable momentum and backing is required.
The remarkable thing is that the South Korean government did succeed in getting an entire population of people to choose (that’s right, they chose) to change their behaviour. The population did this in an incredibly short period of time, fully adopting contraception and family planning initiatives within two decades. In fact, it was so successful, there is now a fear that there are too few children being born in the country.
If we think about the adoption of electric cars, changing our attitudes to meat, cutting back our individual carbon emissions, or achieving something simple like eating five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day, mass adoption is slow going and hard work.
How did they do it in South Korea?
Well, to confirm, they didn’t spend millions on expensive advertising campaigns, enlist celebrity influencers, introduce legislation or provide cash incentives or perks for compliance.
They made one very important distinction. It wasn't *who* they targeted, but *where* they targeted that was important.
Rather than focusing on the mass market or an influential person, they targeted closely knit women’s groups that were established in every rural village across South Korea. These small groups of villagers, comprised of completely ordinary, every day people, were given the seed of the idea, the advice they needed and the form of contraception they preferred. The idea then bounced around these tiny groups, self-supporting and reinforcing itself as a good idea. From here, the idea began to spread by word of mouth outside of the group to other social clusters. Before long, families had shared it with families, neighbour to neighbour, friends to friends… you get the idea.
It became a new norm, a new societal expectation. Because society, itself, had changed.
It’s a rare privilege to have a positive idea share so rapidly and so successfully. Rather than shouting louder to get your idea heard and adopted, what do you think you can you do to earn the right of having others choose to recommend you?
James
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