Mister Three Sixty

What did we used to do before the Search Engines? The answer is: Offine Search. Mister Three Sixty is saying that Search isn’t in itself very new. But it is a useful metaphor for thinking about word-of-mouth campaigns.

Needing a new car? Looking for a holiday destination? Deciding on a school for the kids?  Long before they typed a term into Google, people asked their friends and family. They were particularly interested in anyone with highly relevant information or experiences to learn from. One thing you can say about people is that they are damn good at imitating each other.

Then, as now, the searcher would often hear the same names repeated again and again. It was an old-fangled version of the Page Rank. Humans  are herd animals and they all tend to talk about the same things at the same time. Witness the sudden explosion in popularity of Twitter below. 

Search Volumes for Twitter on Google

But Mister Three Sixty hears you cry; what does this mean for people working in Marketing Communications? Two clear implications. First, whatever discipline you are working in, you need to make your communications so memorable that when someone asks for a recommendation, your brand pops-up top of the list. Second, go for fame. However good your creative idea, if people don’t end-up talking about it, it won’t be driving successful ’searches’ for your brand – so make sure it’s talkable if you want word-of-mouth. Chris Anderson tells a great story here about using King Gillette driving offline search for razors.

If your brand is top-of-mind (think page rank), then you’ve got attention (think traffic) and you can start to monetize it (think Google’s ads).  There’s much more to be said on this says Mister Three Sixty, but that’s quite enough for now…