DMC’s founder Justin Kirby is the keynote speaker on October 8 at Neuronio08, the annual conference and awards ceremony run by Portugal’s telecomms and postal giant CTT.

The conference theme is about gaining superior intelligence by learning how to communicate with the new breed of consumers.

Justin’s keynote speech ‘HAS WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING GOT A FUTURE?’ discusses:
What is word-of mouth marketing? Why are businesses so interested in it now? And are they getting carried away with a passing trend and missing the point of customer participation? Justin will present his take on the rise and potential fall of word of mouth marketing, and discuss why and how he thinks companies should involve consumers directly in product and service innovations and developments at the very heart of the business process - truly aligning demand and supply.

Other speakers include the Director General of web communications consultancy Seara, the Head of GE Money Portugal and the Director of Marketing Services at Nestle Portugal.

You can find out more about the conference here.

Is Google’s new ‘friend ranking’ a novel invention or just regurgitated spin to gain digital ad spend? DMC’s Justin Kirby finds out over on iMedia Connection. Read more here

DMC’s Justin Kirby reviewed Mark Earl’s Herd (How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing our True Nature) for Brand Strategy magazine in June. He found it entertaining but lacking in hard evidence and convincing theory.

Under the microscope: ‘Herd - how to change mass behaviour’

I recently co-authored a report with the LSE/LRCG’s Dr. Alain Samson on how UK companies are using customer advocacy metrics, and ways in which usage can be improved. Our research was prompted by the debate about the pros and cons of the Net Promoter® Score (NPS) metric. We believed it would be important and interesting to get the client perspective. So we went to meet around 60 senior marketing, research and strategy staff in major UK businesses to find out, among other things, whether or not they would recommend the NPS and why.

You’re probably wondering what this all has to do with Mark Earls’ 2007 book ‘Herd - how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature’. Well, Earls’ book was mentioned by a participant during our research into customer recommendation. So it seemed fitting that I check it out, not least because Earls’ theory regarding the influencing of mass behaviour places much importance on the NPS, whereas enthusiasm for the ‘One Number’ itself wasn’t matched by the majority of businesses we met who had used it.

One of the problems I have with business books is that I have a stack of them waiting to be read. The sad truth is that I rarely read much more than the introduction and conclusion, although I’ll usually scan the references at the back to follow up any interesting research, and even check out the chapter take-outs if there are any.

The reason for my lack of engagement is that so many books end up getting padded out with anecdotes and a wide array of facts stretched to fit the core theory, simply to make up the 80,000 words required by the publisher. Perhaps that’s why it has become de rigueur for what is really only a chapter or two of theory to be supported by a raft of inspiration thin-sliced from the social sciences, which then get spiced up with a dash of popular culture and maybe even a sprinkling of some network science thrown in for good measure. Rarely is much robust evidence ever presented in terms of hard graft from the coalface, which is probably why the theories don’t usually stand up to much in the way of any in-depth critical analysis.

Take Malcom Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point’. It’s one of the best-selling business books ever, but his ‘law of the few’ has been challenged recently by network scientist Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia and researcher at Yahoo! Watts argues that so-called influencers are not even a necessary condition for the spread of social epidemics let alone a sufficient one, and that much of the theory surrounding the power of influencers has relied on anecdotal evidence and post-rationalisation of a biased selection of events.

Personally, I’ve always found Robert Cialdini’s ‘Influence: Science and Practice’ more credible. It was simply better researched - but then he’s a professor and experimental social psychologist who actually embedded himself in businesses that depend on our compliance (salespeople, fundraisers, advertisers, etc).

That said, Gladwell is a fantastic storyteller and arguably this is the secret of his success, rather than any robustness in his use of science to support his theories, nor any hands-on practical experience. Annette Simmons sums this phenomenon up well in the title of her latest book on the power of narrative, ‘Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins’, which is well worth a read along with her previous book ‘The Story Factory: Inspiration, Influence and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling’. Perhaps this is the context in which Earls’ ‘Herd - how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature’ should be critiqued.

Earls also tells a good story and has clearly spent time trying to join the dots with regard to some of the key themes emerging from the changing media landscape. His aim appears to be simply to get people to think differently about how mass behaviour can be influenced, and he does this in an entertaining and thought-provoking way, ending each chapter by posing a number of questions for marketers. Some of his arguments, however, sound a little too like articles of faith, and ones shared by many other commentators in the blogosphere that end up being posted as manifestos on ChangeThis.com. So it’s no surprise that the book’s foreword was from the blogger Russell Davies (formerly of Wieden & Kennedy and Nike). However from a practical application point of view, I was disappointed with the how to part of the change mass behaviour content promised by the title.

It’s all very well citing Thomas Kuhn with talk about paradigm shifts, or championing the trial and error of experimentation by paraphrasing Karl Popper - ‘we learn from our mistakes’ - but one should also take heed of the poet and philosopher George Santayana who said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Take Reichheld’s NPS metric which Earl champions. A lot of money has recently been spent rediscovering what was already known: when it comes to prediction, multiple indicators are always going to be more reliable than one. The point is that there is a difference between an intuitive philosophy, such as ‘customer focus drives good profits’, and the practical utility of a metric, particularly one claimed to be the holy grail of marketing. Even Reichheld has now embraced the argument that the NPS metric is simply one aspect of an overall approach or system, and its importance should not be over-emphasised within that approach.

Earls espouses other beliefs that may turn out to be myths, such as the influentials theory mentioned before and word-of-mouth marketing. Word of mouth is an outcome, not a specific set of marketing techniques - no matter that some marketing practitioners have formed a trade association to promote the latter.

‘Herd’ is not the first book about mass behaviour. Check out ‘Propaganda’ by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the ‘father of public relations’ who was talking about the ‘engineering of consent’ back in the 1920s, although it’s not exactly what you would call customer-centric. ‘Herd’ will not be the last either, and it’s worth bearing in mind that even James Surowiecki of ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ fame clearly sets out the conditions in which he believes his theory applies. Surowiecki’s book title even alludes to the flipside of his theory, as explained way back in 1841 by Charles Mackay in his ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’, which could easily be updated to include the dot bomb and current credit crunch.

There’s no doubt that simplicity sells in business book publishing, even if things are sadly a whole lot more complicated when it comes to actually having to get your hands dirty at the coalface of business practice. If there’s anything the recent debates about Reichheld’s NPS and Gladwell and influencers tell us, it’s that intuition is no substitute for experience and the empiricism of the bottom line. So if you’re in the process of rethinking the future then you may be better off reading cyberpunk novels rather than the hypotheses of media commentators.

I recommend William Gibson’s two latest books - ‘Pattern Recognition’ (2003) and ‘Spook Country’ (2007). Set in a contemporary world, they are nevertheless food for thought for any marketer trying to figure out the social implications of technological discontinuity. They’re also a great read and a lesson in the art of storytelling.

DMC’s MD Justin Kirby is interviewed by Boards magazine in a discussion about the purpose, relevance, impact and enforceability of a UK and EU clampdown on non-transparent marketing techniques. Read the article by Ed White here.