19th Century biologist Sir John Lubbock had a great job – he got ants drunk.
He wanted to study the effects of alcohol by testing it on insects, and I guess the ants responded the best.
Interestingly, he noticed that the sober ants would carry their drunken friends home, provided that they were from the same colony.
Strangers were cast aside (to sleep it off I imagine).
The lesson in all this, aside from ‘choose your drinking partners wisely’, is that we all strive to make connections with people like us.
A community isn’t something that can be invented or simply willed into being.
Communities happen naturally, when people find each other through a shared connection – that might be geographical, cultural or preference based.
The key for brands is not to control the community, but to find a way to become part of it.
And you have to be convincing, or you run the risk of being cast aside too.
This week's tagcloud
What's on my mind
About Me
- Kevin Jackson
- The glasses are important, since I’m almost totally blind in one eye. This means I have zero depth perception. Instead of making snap judgements, I have to think around a subject and look again to try and gain a sense of perspective. And that’s what I’m doing here - taking a different view of the trends and patterns around us to see if they’re as close as they seem, or further away than we thought. There’s not a discipline within the communications mix that I haven’t spent time in – what connects them though, is my passion for igniting advocacy and word-of-mouth. I’ve also worked on multi-platform campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, we are all on first-name terms. Ultimately, whether it’s a consumer, business or internal audience, no one is exempt from my belief in engaging experiential communications. Over the last four years ago, I’ve been busy developing relationships across the telecoms, technology, FMCG, retail and energy sectors, to name a few.
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