An Example of the Power of One

It’s quite convenient that so shortly after I wrote my “The Individual in Group Influence” post a great post was made over on Jakes’ CommunityGuy blog with a story of how a single individual is going to great lengths to promote LEGO.

Education Wants Me-To Products

The reason me-to products keep happening? A great GiddleBit answer for this one.

I was sitting in one of my business classes today, attempting to ascertain some amount of knowledge that would help me in the business world. There were a some such points where I learned something in between when I was explaining the power of blogs which my teacher felt was worth mentioning, but didn’t feel he could properly explain (Not to say that I know everything – not at all. But for the first few chapters, i’m familiar). Then, something very sad happened. My professor made the following statement when explaining the importance of competition to your business.

“If your competition is better than you, see how they do it and try to do it the same way. Try to imitate what they do so you can do it better.”

I kid you not. That last sentence really is as bad as it sounds. It’s no wonder we have me-to products coming out. It’s what us poor business students are taught. See what the competition does, copy that, and slap on a new feature to make it “better”. Honestly, I am both sad and happy about this. I’m sad that we’re subject to the promotion of me-to products. Conversely, I’m cynically happy that my classmates are committing this to their memory as a guideline. It means in the future, I get less intelligent competition. A me-to product is fine if you don’t mind second, third, fourth, etc. place. But I want first.

I am currently working on a personal research paper that analyzes the edges of a market in comparison to the “me-to middle” part of a market. I hope to have this written up nicely so I can hand it to my teacher before the end of the semester. Perhaps I can help future fellow business students.

“To Read” Site List

I am often pressed for time and there are simply too many things that I’d like to read on the internet, but never get the chance to. I imagined it would be nice to have something where you could bookmark a page, adding that page to a list of bookmarks that you could later go through and read. While it isn’t near as nice as the webapp I was thinking of writing myself, someone else has written something similar. It’s basically like Del.icio.us’s Firefox plugin, and in fact, is for del.icio.us but is itself a bookmark and uses javascript.

The site with this easy to use “plugin” can be found here. I’ve already used it a couple of times today.

The Individual in Group Influence

A few nights back I went to a social that was being held for the apartments I live in. This social was primarily a dance social – I make this point because it lead me to an observation that I see people often forget – the influence of a single individual.

At this dance, everyone wanted to dance… but no one did.

The initial number of people, and the number for a good hour before more started coming, was around 35. This consisted of a maximum of around 10 males, and the rest females. This is where the interesting dynamic occurred.

Over the period of at least 15 minutes, some of the groups attempted to get the dancing started. The female groups tried dancing, but no one followed, so they stopped. A few of the males tried to be cowboys and danced on their own with no success. I managed to start dancing with a girl, but she and I also stopped shortly after when nobody else joined in (to my shame).

I was about to leave the party when another group came through the door. However, it wasn’t the group that is significant, but a single person within that group. Within a few minutes of when that group came in, one guy in that group started dancing, and the group followed. Almost immediately after, about half of the people in the room started dancing, too. I thought this was incredible. But it was even more incredible when that same guy in the group stopped, then his group stopped, and then about half of the room stopped.

This one person influenced not just his group, but somehow influenced a fair number of people he hadn’t even met – both male and female.

Some people have that reason, that factor, that GiddleBit that causes them to be an influential force. Because we don’t know who that person may be we aught to treat everyone as if they were that person. This is especially important to the front line of a business. Every customer who comes in contact with your front line must be treated as if they were that influential person at the dance because if they leave your company with a bad attitude, half of the room won’t buy your product. But if they leave your company with a positive attitude, half of the room just bought your product.

Some additional info on contagious behavior.