How to make a movement. Lessons learned from dancing guy. | Hacker News Reader

How to make a movement. Lessons learned from dancing guy.

sivers.org

75 pointssivers25 comments

This video is great.

So my startup is a social news site for Chicago over at WindyCitizen.com

I worked on this thing for 8 months with interns, recruited writers with fancy titles etc. And traffic went nowhere.

Around the New Year, I decided to "fire" most of my volunteer "editors" and resolved to just start posting tons of links myself every morning from 8-noon and adding context to them in the comments. When I had something that was interesting, I'd e-mail it to local bloggers and invite them to add their thoughts.

Five months later we're picking up about 20 new members a day and every blogger and professional web editor in Chicago is posting stories and commenting on them. I don't know that we've hit critical mass just yet, but we're getting awfully close.

The key was for me to just give up trying to be cool and to start doing something simple and easy to join in on. People saw that I was posting up links every morning and they started joining in.

Good submit!

speaking of which, the WindyCitizen.com front page is giving me a binary dump right now, starting with the message, "Notice: Undefined index: q"

ha. That'll teach me to turn on error reporting at 3am...

Having real writers probably made it hard for people to join, because they felt they needed to do really well. This guy, on the other hand, doesn't dance very well, which makes it easy to join in and not look bad.

I think just simplifying things helped a lot. When have you ever seen a "web magazine" (lots of topics, no single focus or content type) that you came back to again and again and again? The sites people return to are the ones they can customize and participate in.

Of course, that same dude probably did that a dozen times and got less positive reactions. Being a leader means having the guts to get rejected. If you carry on after rejection because you are driven by your own joy and not social feedback, you may start a movement. Don't expect this to happen on your first try.

If you search YouTube for 'Sasquatch Dancing Guy', you'll see that the same guy in black shorts in several different instances of dancing (other times/songs) like he is the lord of the dance. Other video segments of the same Santogold song show he was dancing all the time.

But does that invalidate the mob/snowball/inspiration-to-act effect captured so well here?

To answer your question, no, that doesn't invalidate the effect captured here. However, if you are trying to duplicate this effect, you should realize that these things are probabilistic, and not deterministic, like so many phenomena in human society.

I didn't think it invalidated the effect. I guess I wasn't clear.

Contrast with this staged dance at the Antwerp Train terminal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k

Maybe it took him dancing to all those other songs to get his first follower... Surely he had been noticed by many at the festival before he was unstoppable.

Yes. IMHO the party was started by the second guy.

Full version is pretty interesting.

Dancing Guy was dancing non-stop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU7dxkIz1Vs

A pastor friend of mine twittered a similar link a few days ago. I didn't post it b/c I thought the source might overshadow the content, but I quite like the "Seven Keys to Starting a Movement". All relevant to the startup world with the possible exception of #6.

> 1. One man can start a movement.

> 2. A movement need not be started by the most skilled member of the movement.

> 3. When beginning your movement and you look around and no one else is joining the dance, just keep dancing.

> 4. When the one guy who joins your movement slowly fades away, keep going.

> 5. Before you know it, the people joining your movement won’t even know you started it.

> 6. When your movement takes a life of it’s own, just let go. There will be no stopping it.

> 7. The very people who are staring at you like your nuts as you movement alone, will be the very same people dancing the hardest in the end.

Edit: Here is the link http://www.ragamuffinsoul.com/2009/06/youre-bad-idea-may-sta...

Reminds me of Arlo Guthrie's tale of woe at an induction center: "And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."

#6 is very relevant to startups. Many startups fail because the founder(s) are too clingy to their initial vision. There needs to be a bit of a 'surfing' mentality -- you are not the wave, you are harnessing the energy of the wave. Try to dictate to the wave, and you get wiped out.

This is a great metaphor for the infamous chicken/egg problem. To have a dance party, you obviously need a lot of dancers. Typically, however, nobody wants to join a dance party unless its already packed full of people. Just like this party snowballed from one extremely devoted dancer(user), a site relying on UGC can do the same.

With that being said--hundreds of onlookers and the presence of mind-altering substances surely didn't hurt the situation.

Amazing video. Some guy just became a prophet while tripping balls.

Some comments ::

I'm glad no-one had a camera on me when I was at Glastonbury or Gatecrasher. It may have been called "How to make an Exodus"

This "lone-dancer-inspires-group-love" is the wet dream of mobile phone advertising companies and will quickly be perverted to their promotional ends.

I hesitate to generalize from this, but it seemed to reach critical mass (and hockey stick like growth) when the first girl arrived.

In other words:

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? - http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

I'd never heard this song. I can't help but wonder if the lyrics were part of the motivation behind the followers. The guy himself was "unstoppable" and he had to be unstoppable!

Full song, better quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIRpKa5ZMA

The critical mass was three people.

Inspirational.

Most important thing to me is that you better start dancing in the right environment. If you start doing that in the middle of the street, rather than in a music festival, people will call the cops.

I want to do a table of time between joins.

    0:00 first dude is already dancing
    0:19 green shirt
    0:53 black shirt
    1:13 2 more
    1:17 6 more
    1:26 1 more
    1:30 4 more
    1:40 dozens

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