Crowds, Surfers & Sinkers

Here follows a personal round-up of the crowd surfing successes and failures of 2008.  It also gives me the chance to highlight a bunch of case studies that are too recent to have made it into the book … maybe Crowd Surfing II?  Alternative suggestions for any of the categories would be welcomed. 

CROWD OF THE YEAR … the group that took consumer empowerment to the next level.  This was a closely fought contest, with strong bids from:

• The American Family Association, which, by threatening a boycott of Heinz’s US business, forced the company to drop an ad featuring a gay kiss that only appeared in the UK.
• Paddy Power punters, who demonstrated an unparalleled ability to predict the demise of businesses and business leaders – the wisdom of gambling crowds.
• The viewers of Strictly Come Dancing, who took a wonderfully perverse pleasure in winding up the judges by voting for John Sargeant.

But there is only one winner … actually there were 160 million winners … these were the internet users of China, who used the power of video sharing to bring down a party official, whose assault on a young girl had been captured on CCTV.  When even the all powerful Chinese state proves itself incapable of controlling the crowd, you know that empowerment is an unstoppable force. 

CROWD SURFER OF THE YEAR

I will resist the obvious choice of Obama – who has all too predictably been named as Time magazine’s person of the year – and instead go for Radiohead’s Thom York. 

York and his fellow band members continue to demonstrate an acute understanding of how to engage devoted Radiohead fans.  Inviting them to download the superb In Rainbows album, for whatever price they thought appropriate, was a brilliant PR move and didn’t appear to weaken conventional sales.  York and his fellow band members also broke with the convention of hiring top directors to film their promo videos, by inviting members of the public to produce an animated video for any track on the album.  Here is the winning video for Reckoner, directed by Clement Picon:

Radiohead also provided fans with the technology on iTunes to help them remix their own versions of a couple of the album tracks, cementing the band’s reputation as true pioneers of fan engagement. 

Honourable mentions to:

• The marketing team at Cadbury’s, which encouraged the emergence of a social media based movement to bring back the iconic Wispa chocolate bar.
• Justin Billingsley at Orange for his enlightened response to the orangeproblems website … “We should realise this is a privilege.  We can see what the problems are and if we solve it, thousands of people know about it.”
• Alex Marks and the team at Microsoft for advocating the importance of ‘allowing your work to get messed up’

SINKER OF THE YEAR … the King Canute award, for trying and failing to stem the inevitable tide of consumer empowerment, can only go to the BBC, which showed itself completely incapable of managing the crowd that emerged in response to the Ross/Brand controversy.  Caitlin Moran wrote a great piece in The Times last weekend on how the BBC seems incapable of dealing with the changing nature of the broadcaster/viewer relationship: “viewers effectively control the plot of programmes … blurring the divide beween viewers and programme makers.”

The crowd surfing lessons from the Ross/Brand debacle are pretty straightforward: understand your crowd (in this case, Middle England) and take the initiative by responding quickly (even when the boss is on holiday).

Other notable sinkers in 2008 included:

• Nick Faldo, for allowing his Ryder Cup players to decide where they wanted to appear in the final day’s line-up.  The result … by the time his best players were on the course, Europe had already lost.  Compare Faldo’s approach with that of his rival, Paul Azinger, who admitted that his team’s final day line-up had “been in his head for two weeks.”  He listened to the crowd – his team of highly paid, often egotistical golfers – but the final decision was down to him.
• Hazel Blears, for arguing the political bloggers have a ‘distain for the political system’ … no Hazel, these people care enough about politics to write about it … you may find them difficult to control, but they are most definitely the future.
• The judges on Strictly Come Dancing, who failed to recognise that the more they criticised John Sargeant, the more likely they were to appeal to the British public’s subversive streak.

Merry Christmas and Happy Crowd Surfing in 2009.