Many years ago back in 1993, the year Tom Hanks starred in “Philadelphia” and more than 1 million people in favor of gay rights marched in Washington, D.C., the great Anna Quindlen wrote a column in The New York Times called “The Power of One.” Homosexuals at the time were fighting to end discrimination and news reports were disputing the number of people who actually marched; Quindlen took the issue up one level writing, “Now we have a numbers game. How many gay people are there in the nation? Ten percent? One percent? Four percent? It depends upon whom you ask…” Segueing to stories about heroic military personnel coming out, she concluded, “So the ice melts. The hate abates. The numbers, finally, all come down to one.”
Take the treat-gays-fairly issue up another level, and all of this is a lesson for today’s digital advertising, mobile and social media obsession. Marketers or publishers playing with these emerging channels are obsessed with volume: How many unique visitors does a website receive? What is the number of impressions? How many people were engaged? What volume of leads were generated? What retweets? Likes? For business, marketing expense divided by volume of new customers is a critical and vital metric. For meme propagators, the dissemination of an idea in a network is all about total numbers.
But unfortunately, individual human beings are starting to play this same game. Spurred by social media UI that shows bulleted number of responses (usually in the upper-right field of vision), we worry about the quantity of retweets or blog comments or Facebook Likes tied to each of our hiccuping missives. The volume of people we influence is all that seems to count, despite the deeper logical knowledge that any human being following 1,000 people on Twitter and a few hundred on Facebook may have truly engaged with our individual post for about 0.2 seconds. We touch others’ souls as feathers in the wind, but instead of thinking about true impact we knit our brows about volume.
Quindlen had it right. “Now we have a numbers game.”
But what if you influenced one soul? What if a being out there, connected to you only by the virtual threads of social media, stepped away from suicide or got a new job or was inspired to change her worldview because of something you said? Perhaps your Klout score is in the tank and your Twitter follower count is down, but if you could truly guide one person for the better, would that trump the fictitious totals in the gamed system of social media tied to your profile?
Would you be satisfied if you influenced one person, with the power of one?
velmotus 