Hey Folks,
This is the very first post for my new impact factor blog!
So who cares?
- Ever feel like you just couldn’t get a word in edgewise?
- Ever try to launch a product only to find out that nobody cared?
- Ever want to change something in this frustrating world and find out that you had no power?
It’s not surprising that you’ve been frustrated.
There are multiple thousands of media messages competing with what you have to say everyday — and people are tuning out by the millions.
I’m doing research for my upcoming book and product, Impact 101: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions, Change Lives and Make a Difference in a Noisy World.
For a few years now I’ve been telling people to think bigger than they think they can possibly achieve and I’m trying to think VERY big on this project, because I ALREADY think that this can be huge.
So start with a huge problem …
If you are going to make a difference then you have to look for problems — after all what’s the point of making a difference if there isn’t any problem to start with!
Here’s the problem that I’m wrestling with:
I believe people want to have an impact on the world. They want to make a difference, to leave their mark, to have someone notice that they existed and hopefully leave the world a better place than when they got here.
But …
Most people think that it’s hard for one person get noticed or to make a difference in the very noisy world that we live in.
So …
Most people don’t try.
And if they do try …
They don’t have as big an impact as they could.
Why?
Because they don’t have the knowledge, skills, strategies and tactics that can help them to maximize their impact.
And they end up saying, “I’m just one person. What can I do?”
So that’s the problem, what’s the solution?
Here’s the bad news… There’s not one.
Here’s the good news…
There are lots of them.
Here are a few of the things that I’m exploring as I research my book to find the answers — in no particular order:
- Persuasion
- Propoganda
- What makes people take action
- Viral marketing
- Word of Mouth
- Media
- Epidemics
- Fads
- Sales Copy
- Motivation
- Influential People
- Mavens
- Connectors
- Sales People
- Automation
- Systems
- Management
- Recurrence
- Testing
- Expontential Effects
- Early Mover Advantages
- Influence
- Social Proof
- Authority
- Liking
- consistency
- Reciprocity
- Scarcity
- Celebrity
- Degrees of Intimacy
- 3rd Party Endorsements
- Traffic Patterns
- Live Events
- Web 2.0
- Prejudice
- Associations
- Social Impact
- How “New” ideas Get Accepted
- Immediate Perceptions
- Timelyness
- Trends
- Internet Memes
- And More, More, More …
So the next problem is …
Which ideas are important and how can we make it clear enough to have impact and make a difference?
It’s not enough to know that everything in the above list effects the amount of impact that we have.
If we want to have impact, we need to know which things are important and we need to keep things very simple.
Let me give you an example of something simple that had a real impact …
In September of 2004, Shimon Moore, a young musician, was working holding a sandwich board that advertised half-price shoes in the Pitt Street Mall in Sydney, Australia.
Shimon came across another young man, who he calls Juan Mann (a pseudonym), holding a sign that said, “Free Hugs.”
According to Shimon, “I went up and gave him a hug and asked him the same question everyone asks him which is: ‘Why are you doing this?’ He gave me the same answer he gives everyone—because he likes making people smile after they leave his company.”
And it could have ended there.
But it didn’t.
Shimon had just seen Morgan Spulock’s, Academy Award winning film “Supersize Me” which is a documentary exposé of the dangers of fastfood.
Shimon had made videos since he was a kid and wanted to make a film. Juan was something that Shimon thought deserved to be documented, so he decided to video Juan and they taped one day a week for two months.
Eventually the city considered Juan a public liability problem because if anyone got hurt while they were being hugged, they could sue the city.
Shimon and Juan put together a petition and within a couple weeks got over 10,000 signatures.
The city commission voted to allow Juan to continue to dispense hugs.
Interestingly nothing happened with the tapes.
In March 2005, Shimon left for Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune with his band, “Sick Puppies.”
The band was living in a two-bed apartment with four people and eating pasta and two-minute noodles.
One day, Juan called Shimon because his grandmother had died.
He was also caring for his blind grandfather and well … life wasn’t looking all that good.
Shimon wanted to do something for him. So he edited the footage into a short video for him in a single night using a song that he had written for the band as the soundtrack.
Shimon sent it to him on a disc as a present and wrote Juan, “This is who you are.”
Other members of the band suggested putting it up on YouTube and it had a quarter-of-a-million views over the first weekend that it was online.
As of today, the video has 13,326,272 views, has 26,743 comments and been favorited 79,979 times.
- The video clip was voted “Most Inspirational” in a YouTube poll released on March 27, 2007.
- Yu Tzu-wei, a college student in Taiwan began a campaign in Taipei in October 2006 to “hug everyone in Taiwan.”
- Free Hugs Campaigns were organized in a number of cities in Italy.
- Juan was invited by Oprah Winfrey to appear on her show Oprah after her producer’s doctor saw the video.
- Suddenly all over the world people were hosting “Free Hug” events.
Even the French Government is calling on its citizens to embrace strangers who hoist signs in the street offering free hugs as part of an initiative to combat discrimination against people infected with AIDS or HIV.
If you want to see some of the other results click here.
So, was this all the result of someone who held up a cardboard sign offering free hugs?
Yes, undeniably this would not have happened if the young man called Juan Mann had not held up his cardboard sign.
And …
No, because if it hadn’t been for many, many factors, no one would have noticed.
I’d love your comments about why you think people noticed, millions were motivated, lives were changed and a difference was made in a very noisy world.
Or just post comments on your own blog and trackback those comments here.
Now go give someone a hug!
All the best,
Kenneth A. McArthur
jvAlertLive.com
InfoProductBlueprint.com
jvAlert.com
AffiliateShowcase.com
11 Comments
Hi Ken,
I finally made it over here… A couple of your links in your announcement email and your other blog post have the wrong URL: impactfactor.com instead of theimpactfactor.com.
Best Regards,
Nick
Hey Ken,
What a remarkable story!
Unless you’ve left something out, not a single step
along the way was taken for profit. Wonder if that’s
a significant factor . . .
Fascinating project, this!
~ Kat
That’s a powerful story, Ken.
Most people want to make a difference. Unfortunately most of them are waiting for an invitation. Inspiration need no invitations, so we should just do it!
This blog is a great idea and will surely inspire many to take more positive actions.
Keep on keeping on,
Tom Justin
Hi Ken,
What a great story! It brought a smile to my face
I think Juan made such an impact because all of us, at our very essence, are love. And a hug is such a great representation of giving and receiving love to most of us.
What Juan did was re-connect people to their innermost selves – through simple hugs – and that’s why they left smiling
Since many people are living hectic lifestyles and don’t stop to give themselves (and others) real love, we’re hungry to satisfy our most primal need – to love and be loved.
So, of course! Many people wanted hugs, wanted to give Juan hugs, and wanted to share in the good they would feel knowing/seeing that the simple act of giving someone a hug could have such a positive impact.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if the people having the experience, or watching the video, wanted to share their good feelings of love with others, so they told someone else about Juan, or forwarded the link to their friends, and made it viral. Passing the love around . . . I just hope they also reached out and hugged someone!
Thanks for sharing. It’s nice to be reminded that an unselfish act of love can have such a positive rippling effect for all of us.
Three cheers for “Juan”!
I enjoyed your first post. You have a nice blog. I will continue to read your blog.
Shon Jimenez
http://www.bizoppcd.net
[...] In his new blog theimpactfactor.com, Ken McAurthur shares a powerful story that illustrates how one small seemingly insignificant act can grow and spread until it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. [...]
Ken,
I’d like to opine on the question you raised at the end. To do that, I need to tell a story.
I’m a Baby Boomer who turns 58 this Sunday. (At first I typed 48. Wishful thinking?) In the past 3 months, former schoolmates of mine, a couple of years younger than I, have died unexpectedly. We all come from a small rural community in central Ohio.
T, the first to die – from 2 sudden, massive strokes – was a character with a raucous laugh, a sometimes course sense of humor, a tendency to talk too much and a heart as big as you can get. The number of people at her funeral stunned me, and the diversity of backgrounds and social classes present was eye-opening.
D, who died just a few weeks ago in one of those freak (and grisly) farming accidents no one could predict, was a brilliant, complicated, one-of-a-kind farmer, writer, philosopher, pilot and Hospice volunteer. I was closer to him and his family than to T, because we were connected on a number of levels, primarily through our involvement in theatre work. The turnout for his memorial service was mind-blowing for such a small community. And the fly-by salute of his fellow pilots from the local airfield — about 20 small planes — was enough to bring tears to the eye. But the testimonies of so many who were there, out in the fields he farmed and in front of his hangar, showed not only the scope of his influence, but also the depth.
As I came away from both those funerals, I couldn’t help wondering what people would say about me and how many would bother to come to pay their final respects on my passing. To be perfectly candid, I could only think of a few people.
Since I came back to Ohio when my marriage fell apart in 2000, I’ve spent a lot of time licking my wounds, trying to pick up the pieces of my life, re-entering the workplace after being a stay-at-home mom since age 39, gaining some financial stability, only to have it pulled out from under me during downsizing. I found myself unemployed and virtually unemployable or at the least undesirable as an employee because of age. My clinical depression kicked in big time, I lost my car, had to move in with my mother, and this month I made a total of $150 at my part-time job. I have creditors hounding me night and day.
Not a new story, really, so I don’t think I’m unique. But because of all this “stuff” in my life, I, who normally surround myself with people, have isolated myself. My financial woes are somewhat known — just not the gory details.
How will people remember me?
The poor schmuck who lost her job and stayed down and out for 2 years while dreaming about an internet business and getting nowhere?
Truth is, the people here where I grew up don’t even know the real me. Then who will remember me? I can only think of a few people.
So what does this have to do with the hugs video? Well, the first point is that people have an innate need to be connected. You can’t connect much more intimately (in public anyway) than through a hug. Human touch is so powerful that it causes premature infants to thrive, even when restricted to isolettes until they’re able to survive on their own.
I came out of my “cave” and stopped licking my wounds (for the most part) because I craved human interaction. The people who went for those hugs from a stranger did too.
Here’s how I see this whole phenomenon:
The internet was just a vast, faceless, impersonal, realm of anonymity until people discovered that community could be global in nature, that folks from all over the planet could connect with like-minded individuals and feel as though they belonged.
I think the hug movie is a clear signal that people do NOT want to be isolated. That despite home theaters and home computers which keep us inside our houses in a safe environment, we still crave human contact outside our own walls. We MUST have connections to other people beyond our immediate family. We aren’t wired to be just some random collection of individuals doing our own thing.
During the Renaissance when individualism became a kind of religion, John Donne said, “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated… No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
My second and final point is related to Donne’s words. Having an impact on people, negative or positive, makes a difference in the whole of mankind. We’re interconnected through threads of experience we’re not aware of. Something you say impacts me. I share it with someone who doesn’t even know who you are, and it impacts them. They share it with someone neither you nor I know and it impacts them and so on. We don’t know what influence we have.
I, too, want to make a difference. If it’s only in a small way, so be it. But I want my life to be more than a pathetic whimper at the end. I want it to mean something to more people than just me. I want to leave this world a better place than when I entered it. I want to have a positive impact on people’s lives.
I hope that you, Ken, can help me do just that as you strive for the same.
Thanks for a profound and thought-provoking first post. Great beginning!
Hey Deb,
What a story you have to tell and some great points too!
It’s the little things that we do that have an impact.
Impact grows bottom-up, not top-down.
If you can do a lot of small things for a lot of people, you will have impact beyond measure.
Hang in there!
It’s great to have you as part of this community!
All the best,
Ken
Dear Ken,
You mad me cry!
What a beautiful story.
This reminds me “The Hugging Saint” Amma (http://www.amma.org)
I think we all do our little hugs – support the friend in need or just send a smile to a driver next us sitting in a traffic. I truly believe we all have a little child in us who wants to be loved and who wants to love. Some people just do not listen to that child.
You are such a great person Ken, thank you for an inspiration.
lots of hugs and love
Lucia
http://www.timelesslight.net
[...] Thank you, Ken McArthur, for sharing this story that is in your upcoming book. Ken wrote in his blog, [...]
Hi Ken! Awesome post, thanks! I am blogging about this right now.
http://glenndietzel.tv/2007/07/25/impacting-the-world-but-how/
Ken, this is my answer.
We all want to be inspired and to feel that we can be greater than we are. It is what Joseph Campbell calls the Monomyth – the hero’s journey. We all long to be great, but most of us don’t do the little things that would add up to big things.
This story is even more inspiring because the law – the Gatekeepers – tried to shut Juan Mann down, but it didn’t work. Juan Mann prevailed. Without the obstacles, this would probably not be as powerful a story. And also, Juan Mann wasn’t doing this to make a big stink about it, but someone publicized him. He was caught in the act of being great, and his simple greatness inspires us.
This story inspires me. Each one of those 10,000 plus huge that started a movement was one simple little thing. Not a huge thing – but the small kindnesses added up. It reminds me that I can do 10 or 100 little things to brighten someone’s day and in that way rise to my own greatness. It reminds me that I need to stare down my own mediocrity in the mirror every single day.
Thank you, Ken, and best of success to you with your book. If there is anything I can do to be of value to you, let me know and I’m there.
Ronda Del Boccio, The Story Lady of http://www.Storyation.com