In the era of digital semi anonymity, personal contact wins. In the era of corporate email broadcasting, personal contact wins. In the era of TV adverts to vote, personal contact wins.
Political campaigners will tell you that a one to one conversation is worth thousands of digital clicks
Within the organization we may have lost the personal connection other than within concrete structures such as teams. The blank broadcast with a documentation, guidelines, policies etc. is the default. Of course there is often a problem of practicality and scale but not always, or less than you think
In a current Viral Change™ programme, a small number of senior leaders took upon themselves the task of informing their peers about the programme in its initial phase. They took peer-to-peer seriously. They first created a short home-made video and posted in YouTube privately. Then they made each of them, 20 or more telephone calls each to their peers. It sounds a lot, and these are indeed lots of calls, but it did pay off enormously. The call to action was first personal and second it did not come from their top boss, but a peer. So powerful!
There is nothing particularly surprising about the power of the personalised contact, other than it is more infrequent than we think.
Call to action, whether in the corporation, in a social movement or in political campaigning, is personal or it isn’t a real call.
I’d love it when I see clients planning: in the next two months I will make 20 calls to… as opposed to, OK, we will cascade down the information pack.
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