We Believe What we Want to Believe
29 July 2008
No CommentSeth Godin made two excellent points in his latest blog enty “What does Santa look like?”
- Most people want to believe.
- And we’re most comfortable believing what everyone else believes.
I completely agree with him here. I made a similar point, but on a completely unrelated topic. The last 4 years or so I have been an admin at Talklfc, a website for Liverpool FC fans. As most football fans will know, there are two transfer windows in the European football leagues. This means that clubs can buy players in January and during the summer between the end and start of a new league campaign.
Each and every single year we get people onto our website claiming to be an insider. In fact, as a small experiment I pretended to be an insider. I fabricated an article about a player joining us and due to the fact I was part of the admin staff and that most people knew me and I never really posted rumours, people tended to believe me. It spread like wildfire on the internet and people were even defending my story on other websites claiming that I was a valid source of information.
That tells me one thing….rumours carry more weight when they come from a trusted source, but that’s not exactly rocket science.
What is interesting though is to look at the players mentioned. If the player is considered rubbish people are more likely to dismiss the rumour, simply because they don’t want it to happen. However, if it’s a player who is consired as a worthy addition to the team people tend to take the rumour more seriously.
I don’t have any figures to back this up, but this is all purely from my experience on the particular forum on which I post. I did discuss this with people who post on other sites and they tended to agree.
It’s also funny to see the sheep mentality which creeps in sometimes, which proves Seth’s second point. When a more respected poster of the site (respect is typically earned by time spent on the site, or number of posts) has the tendency to lean favourably towards a rumour, other members more easily accept the rumour as fact too.
From a marketing point of view this shows that it’s important to understand who the leading figures in a (online) community are. They can help persuade the masses.
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