

How to make a movement. Lessons learned from dancing guy. - sivers
http://sivers.org/dance-lessons

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brandnewlow
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!

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

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

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jacoblyles
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.

~~~
wallflower
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?

~~~
jacoblyles
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.

~~~
wallflower
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>

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jwb119
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...](http://www.ragamuffinsoul.com/2009/06/youre-bad-idea-may-start-a-
movement/)

~~~
KC8ZKF
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."

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ABrandt
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.

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

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tezza
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.

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

~~~
SwellJoe
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>

------
pj
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>

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jaytee_clone
The critical mass was three people.

Inspirational.

------
crocowhile
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.

------
joshu
I want to do a table of time between joins.

~~~
joshu

        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

