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Our Like Minds experiment: Changing behaviour through social

Molly Flatt

24 May, 2012

When we were asked to run a session for this year’s Like Minds conference, we wanted to do something different. And we didn’t have to think for long.

The theme – Why what you do matters -gave us an idea for how we could challenge one of the most common missteps businesses make in social media: focusing on words, likes and content as opposed to action, purchases and behaviour change.

So, as you read this, we’ll be asking our attendees to get someone to do something using social media alone.

The objectives? In teams of three, they have 30 minutes to use social media to either:

1. Get someone to donate to the Exeter House School Justgiving page, quoting the hashtag #likemindsdoers in their comment.

2. Get someone to buy a Starbucks coffee, have the barista write the #likemindsdoers hashtag on the side of the cup, and upload a photo as proof.

The rules?

1. They have to use social media to do it – they can’t just go out on the street and ask someone.

2. They can use people they are connected to in their network but NOT people who they personally know or have met.

The outcome? Who knows. We can’t wait to see. We suspect that people might discover that it’s often much easier to get someone to take an action when you can speak them face to face rather than on social. We also suspect they might find the Starbucks challenge harder, because it includes an element of ‘offline to online’. But we could be wrong.

Keep track of the hashtag to see what’s happening and the comments below where we’ll update you on our progress. If you want to take part remotely, just let us know in the comments – we’d love to have you on board.

We’re done with Powerpoint presentations and lectures on Twitter strategy. From now on, we’re committed to tackling the important questions in interesting ways.

What do you think?

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  • http://www.mollyflatt.com Molly Flatt

    And so the #likemindsdoers experiment has concluded and what a fascinating 30 minutes it was. Check out the hashtag on Twitter to see what people were up to – unsurprisingly, that turned out to be the main default venue our team used. 

    As far as we can tell, no-one achieved the objectives in the time, which was an interesting finding in itself. But this was less about that, and more about how people felt and what they discovered in the attempted doing.

    Here are some of the key challenges and issues that emerged in our debrief:

    - Asking people you don’t know to do stuff (especially when it involves money or purchasing) can feel really quite uncomfortable. But is it better to be transparent about your motivations than hiding behind ‘warm and fuzzy’ creative tactics actually designed to drive sales.

    - Everyone jumped in straight away, threw out some tweets or Facebook wall posts and hoped they would stick. No-one sat back, spent 25 minutes listening and discovering people who were relevant to the task or whose behaviour was already leaning that way (people saying they felt like a Starbucks or were hungry for coffee, for example, or those who had already expressed support for similar charities) and then spent 5 minutes targeting them personally. Interesting….

    - Social media is not always the right channel to achieve your objectives. How much easier would this have been if you could just go out onto the street, explain the challenge and ask someone to help? Most of the content produced came from Phil and I being in a room with people face to face and engaging them emotionally. The second, virtual wave of reaction was when the difficulties started.

    - Ethics! Some people’s immediate instinct was to resort to bribery and piggy-backing off unrelated popular hashtags. Hmmm…!

    - Technology is not as seamless as we think it is. WiFi overloads, phones stop working. Are we really ‘always on’?

    What do you think? If you were an attendee, how was the experience? Take it away…

  • http://simbeckhampson.com Paul Simbeck-Hampson

    @1000heads:twitter cc/ @mollyflatt:disqus @philborge:twitter  - What a great way to engage people at a conference – a fun team hashtag action-frenzy. It was refreshing to see some ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking applied here, though not really surprising coming from those connected with the Like Minds conference.

    Thanks to Molly for providing the debrief feedback in the comment above, it certainly has me thinking about the objectives both individuals and brands have when wanting to engage in social channels, especially from a transparency and trust perspective.

    Looking through the stream of tweets I did find some pictures of coffee cups but not ones from Starbucks, though in the time allotted it was perhaps expected. I’ve not heard if any money was raised for the Exeter charity, perhaps the 1000heads team can update us.
     
    I took the liberty of gathering some stats, as I’m one of those who likes to measure things, the results are pretty impressive for a 30 minute activity!

    108 tweets generated 185,045 impressions, reaching an audience of 73,798 followers. Of the 108, 59 were original 21 were RT’s and 28 were mentions. The top 10 by number of tweets were 1000heads – 19, imyril – 13, boudicca77 – 8, englishpostcard – 7, alinexeter – 6, beckyatorganic – 5, thesmbod – 3, kimberleywillis – 3, simonatorganic – 3

    I used hashtracking.com to surface these results. http://www.hashtracking.com/fast-report/?hashtag=LikeMindsDoers 

    I was really inspired by this idea today and am already plotting how I can use it with clients in the future. Thanks to Molly and Phil for an entertaining, educational and fun event – and it’s certainly worth remembering “Social media is not always the right channel to achieve your objectives.”

  • http://www.mollyflatt.com Molly Flatt

    Paul – thanks very much for your feedback and support. Great to see your measurements – which also give a peek into the Like Minds community that engaged with the exercise, an inspiring group of people very much worth connecting with.

    I think this was a very raw first draft for the kind of stuff that could be interesting to explore in the future. The loose format and willingness to experiment that events such as Like Minds espouse gives a real opportunity to engage very bright people in a different way. Rather than lecturing or sitting back and fiddling with our phones, we can instead collaborate together to explore pressing questions and challenges with open minds.

    Personally, my favourite thing about this exercise was that I had no idea what would happen, and that I learnt so much from just giving it a go. Long live gatherings such as Like Minds that give us all an opportunity to come together and basically play, in the pursuit of some real insights.