Tomorrow We Ride...

Oh please, please interrupt my dinner by cold-calling me and attempting to solicit goods that you know for a fact I do not want. Interruption marketing.

Let's try this again: If I am hanging out with a friend and that person tells me about a wonderful product they've encountered, I am much more likely to check it out. Word of mouth has the power to accomplish anything. Random, meal-interrupting phone calls are much more likely to attain the 2% or less positive response they seek.

In the last few months of my senior year of high school, some students sought to organize a "senior skip day," in which all the seniors would show up at the school parking lot one morning, and then proceed to carry out an unauthorized field trip to some of the more trendy and risquee districts of Tokyo (I was living in Japan for my latter high school years). Some students had an examination and could not attend, but 76 of 78 graduating seniors failed to show up for roll call that particular morning.

Did any of us know what facebook was? Being in Japan, we just didn't use it. Nor did we use AOL Instant Messenger. Some people used Yahoo or the more popular MSN messengers... but not many. How did 97% of our class find out what day "senior skip day" was, when to meet, and how much money to bring/where we were going? Good question. The same way Firefox had 25 million dowloads in its first 99 days of existence. (As Scoble tells us in Naked Conversations, pg. 36) Word of mouth!

The day before this planned coup against the administration was to take place, the student council president gave very detailed instructions to a few notoriously bad students, concerning the procedure for the following day's events. Before the end of the school day, everyone knew when and where we were meeting, how many Yen to bring, what to tell their parents, how to write a phony note, etc. The detail was incredible. The two students that did not attend our jaunt had an examination. Funny thing: The school staff and administration were completely blindsided- through all the word of mouth, not a word reached their ears.

The moral of the story is that if one person had sent a mass e-mail to all the seniors, the word "sketchy" probably would have well characterized everyone's thoughts regarding this proposal. But the fact that everyone told his and her friends made it personal. Your friend was skipping, so you were going to as well. It was a chain reaction. "I don't think I can..." was just not an option. It was legitimate; it was going down tomorrow; your friend was not coming to school: That's all there is to it. This is how ICQ, AIM, Firefox, and Skype have found so much success: Everyone wants to have the coolest, latest thing to lighten up their lives. In my case that was ditching a single day of school after 12 hard years of work. : )