Herd Virality: The Power Connecting Formal and Informal Communication

Guest essay

Sergi Ferrete (Unsplash)

Do we really need “100% Engagement” or do we need to focus on engaging the right people?

As someone who spends a good share of my time working in the worlds of communication software and strategy, there’s an immense amount of talk about “engagement”: as a benchmark of organizational virtue, and, often concurrently, as a measure of the percentage of people reading or interacting with a piece of online content.

But one problem that unites these differing, but deeply flawed, worlds of content engagement and employee engagement is that they both treat “engagement” as a one-size-fits-all, and a one–person–one–vote concept. It’s on a linear scale of 0-100%, and all engagement counts equally and means the same thing.

As they said in the days before the “s-word” and “f-word” became routine, that’s “horse-pucky.”

Spreading Ideas

About 20 years ago I learned the most important lesson of my career as a professional communicator. I was managing the internal communication for easyJet’s acquisition of Go Airlines, its former British Airways-funded competitor at the time. My predecessor, the legendary Johnny Harben, insisted on having the change newsletter, Changing Times, published on paper, even though easyJet was an early and fairly religious convert to the gospel of the paperless office.

Every Thursday the newsletters were distributed at the combined airlines’ offices at London’s Luton and Stansted airports, hand-delivered to the office staff, and placed on aircraft to be distributed across the flight network.

Maybe 30% of the staff picked up a copy. But in the survey research I followed up with, more than 75% understood the key messages and recognized the official language used to express them.

Fast forward to 2021, when Covid-19 vaccination rates hit 50 percent, 70 percent in some countries.

Then, authorities started talking about “herd immunity”—a level of vaccination sufficient to substantially prevent the spread of infection in that society.

When someone was explaining herd immunity to me, it struck me that what I saw at easyJet-Go was the exact opposite phenomenon: “herd virality.”

Herd Virality

Herd virality? Essentially, the extent to which a small-but-sufficient number of people can drive needed information and messaging through an organization, community, or market.

Herd virality is effectively a function of having a motivated minority of people in an organization, community, or focused market who are willing to consume information and share it so that sufficient people get the message, even those who don’t wish to read or otherwise directly engage.

Internally, it’s a result of a functioning grapevine—integrating the roles of managers as formal ambassadors of the organization, and employees who function as informal influencers.

Externally, it builds on the work of the company’s external communicators and sales folk, combining with influencers and advocates, who can be either employees, customers, or product and industry enthusiasts.

At easyJet-Go, the process was illustrated by employees who didn’t read Changing Times noting those in their physical space who did. If you heard something or needed a question answered, someone who’d read Changing Times was the first person to ask.

How Many?

Is there a magic number? There’s some talk about that. Innovisor, the leading Organizational Network Analysis firm, says 3% of people drive 90% of conversations in organizations (and if you want to find out who that 3% of people actually are, Innovisor can help you do that).

Alternatively, other forms of quantitative and qualitative research can assess both your take-up of specific channels and recall and understanding of specific messages.

But the real magic number is that your optimal readership or usership can be far less than 100%.

Herd virality challenges the notion that communication initiatives need to directly reach 100% of the population to have sufficient impact.

It also lays waste to the notion that communication needs to be presented, delivered, and packaged so that everyone finds it equally appetizing, and opens up more radical ways for organizations to streamline the ways they connect with their internal and external audiences.

Recently, I advised a Dutch company to consider an opt-in list for its monthly newsletter. The client was surprised, but I said it had two advantages: you get a list of people who care, and they know they’ve requested your content. Anything everyone needs to know will spread accordingly.

Is “herd virality” the answer for everything? Maybe.

Is it perhaps a better point to start than trying to engage everyone equally? Unless your employees and customers really love emails, absolutely.

And it’s one lesson from the pandemic that has the potential to improve life for communication pros, while reducing today’s communication overload.

This article originally appeared in Strategic (paywall).