A recent report in the New Scientist describes how Spanish researchers claim to have found a way to accurately predict how quickly and widely new pieces of information, or memes as they are called, will spread.
Apparently the ability to forecast this viral behaviour would be of great interest to ‘sociologists and marketeers, among others‘. Sociologists, marketeers and others (I’m assuming ‘others’ is an academic euphemism for PR sociopaths) are always trying to identify ‘The Influencers’.
Even though The Influencers sounds like a 1960′s TV series about spies with special powers (or was that The Champions?), PR executives claim that influencers actually do exist and describe them as that mysterious group of people who have the special power of being able to influence other people.
Although it would be intriguing to explore why most modern PR methods are based on the plots of 1960′s TV shows, we can only the imagine the feverish excitement as PR lackeys identify the host influencers who will facilitate the spread of their latest viral campaign.
The purpose of these viral campaigns is invariably the promotion of pointless consumer goods that no-one really needs or the ongoing deification of some manufactured idol who is quite good at lip syncing and who also enjoys a bit of elective surgery.
Luckily for PR machines everywhere, influencer and influenza are derived from the same Medieval Latin etymology of īnfluentia, (so called from the belief that epidemics were due to the influence of the stars).
So to fully leverage the influence of the stars, hip and happening PR gurus are now designing their campaigns using epidemiological tools developed to analyse the spread of biological viruses, such as H1N1 swine influenza. The fundamental purpose of these campaigns is to use the stars to influence those unfortunate and ignorant herds of humans who don’t even know what they are missing.
However, these PR campaigns always end up treating their client’s potential customers in that same way that farmers treat pigs. They see a customer as a dumb pink animal to be monetised, in the same way that a farmer sees a pig as the raw material for ham sandwiches and bacon rolls. Either way, they need to have some bread wrapped around them at some point or they are effectively worthless.
And like pigs, customers are usually seen as annoying, smelly and very often pig headed about changing their behaviour in any way. If PR firms actually started treating potential customers as human beings rather than as pigs, then they would find that they can actually positively influence far more real people. These real people also have real money, unlike viruses who tend not to have bank accounts and credit cards.
In Dreamwork, we identify the glimpses and fragments of the dreams that reflect the identities, needs and beliefs of the people who we work with. As described in Dream Offers, the best way to persuade someone to connect is by reflecting their dreams. By creating space for them to dream and to connect with those dreams, we make them a dream offer that is almost impossible to refuse.