Strong ties

Last October Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the strengths and limitations of Twitter and other forms social media. He compares the (successful) American civil rights movement of the 1960's with the (generally unsuccessful) colour revolutions of the last few years.

Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist

Gladwell's argument is that Facebook and Twitter are all very well for establishing the 'weak ties' that are great for disseminating information but no replacement for the 'strong tie' relationships needed to ferment political change. Tweeting your dislike of the government is not the same as occupying Tahrir Square. Friends are only of use to you if they're by your side. You need to bear witness to each others' commitment.

High-risk activism... is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So what we know can be expanded by 'weak ties' whereas what we do is rarely influenced in that way.

Last week I was in Birmingham helping a client refine their strategy for a new breast cancer treatment. The sales team has successfully established almost universal awareness of the product but the number of actual sales (prescriptions) has been disappointing. Cancer is a grim business and oncologists are thus quite conservative. Whilst no one wants to be the last person to start using a new therapy neither does anyone want to be first. This leads to chicken-and-egg scenarios, which is where my client finds itself.

The sales team is frustrated by doctors' reticence to make what they see is a very low-risk change to prescribing. Every rep I spoke to believes passionately in the product but that's just what they're paid for. They don't have any 'skin in the game'; no pharma rep will ever get the 3am call saying that a terminally ill woman has been admitted to hospital with an unexpected side effect that no one on staff has any experience of handling yet.

So what can my client do to get this group to act differently (ie start prescribing the drug)? By discovering and cultivating any 'strong tie' relationships that exist between the less conservative members of the population. The sales team has to act on the answers to two questions...

1. Which doctors out there believe in our product?
2. How do we connect them; first to each other and then to everyone else?

This is a well-established path in pharma marketing. The client will stage a series of educational meetings where less believing customers are given the chance to bear witness to the testimony of their peers. As non-peers, the sales team's role in all of this is peripheral; they have no real role in these 'strong tie' relationships. Frequently they get in the way at the worst possible time.

On the flipside of my life Andrew Watts is starting up a comedy club in the wilds of Wiltshire. He's been musing over best way of promoting what will undoubtedly be a consistently high quality night. Hopefully he'll dodge the all-too-common reliance on facilities like Facebook and Twitter to drag in the punters.

It's no Tahrir Square but many people find the idea of a night of going to live comedy stressful. The most cited reason for this is a terror of being singled out / picked on. I suspect that this is a polite misplacement; the larger, usually unspoken fear is that the acts will just suck. A night spent in deep sympathy for an audibly sweating twentysomething comic dying in an otherwise silent room is a highly unpalatable prospect.

One of the hallmarks of a (newly) successful comedy night in a rural or even provincial setting is a large number of group bookings. In Gladwell's parlance this is a 'strong tie' phenomenon in action; punters are less likely to view the night as stressful and so more likely to attend if encouraged to go as a group.

My advice to Watts is to offer a heavy discount for larger group bookings, at least in the early days. Once punters have come to the opinion that it's a quality night their stress level will dissipate and they're much more likely to return in twos and threes.

Of course it'll also help if he doesn't book comics whose acts rely on picking on the more unfortunate looking individuals in the crowd. That sort of behaviour's the height of rudeness down Devizes way.