Watts made a good point that as marketers we should only pick highly connected people to spread the word when we literally have nothing else to go on. He said that if you wanted to get an idea across that had something to do with Russia you would first speak to someone who could speak Russian or who lived in Russia - if all else failed you would go 'blind' to someone who knew a lot of people. I buy this.
Another good analogy was that it makes no difference what sort of match one uses to start a forest fire - if the conditions are right it will spread. It's crazy to spend lots of money on trying to find the perfect match if it's been raining or there has recently been a fire.
The thing to do is to look for where the chain is vulnerable and work out how you can aid the spread, build bridges and stuff like that. And far better to give your message to someone, anyone, who actually talks to their close friends regularly and meaningfully than some uber blogger who probably gets loads of freebies every day. And in this day and age isn't it cooler to do things that no one else does - ie not spread the word?
All good interesting stuff. It was also nice to see a few faces from London there. I swapped wild US bureaucracy strories with Faris and spied Ajaz from AKQA lurking in the corner. This led one of the Fast Compmay writers to ask if there was a brain drain going on. I said I couldn't possibly comment.
James Cooper
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 17 Nov 2009
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