My good friend Rory Sutherland writes a fantastic blog for Campaign Magazine over in London. A recent post really resonated with something which we know in social media – allowing people to discover and find their own reasons for using a product can be far more powerful in terms of generating adoption than ‘push’ advertising.
He makes the point that if an agency had been asked to promote SMS when it first was released, we would have probably ended up with an advertisement which depicted a bunch of teenagers of various ethnic origins excitedly texting and this would have implicitly conveyed the message that texting was unsuitable for any other age group.
Quoting Rory directly, “In the event, with no excuse to reject it, people discovered their own various reasons for using SMS. For some people it saved money; for school kids it was a furtive way of messaging in class; for grandparents, interestingly, it became a non-embarrassing way to communicate with grandchildren. It is a triumph of universal adoption. And of not advertising too early.”
Most of the time we are driven by the need to show results this quarter but the SMS story speaks volumes about patience and belief in both the product and in people to find cool uses for that product.
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