Tonight, on a pitch-charcoal-black October evening with no moon in the sky and a tremor in our heart, we heard two sharp raps on our front door. We opened it -- and found no one there. Instead, a little brown bag filled with candy was on our doorstep, with a poem saying "you have been ghosted." It's a cute tradition in the U.S. suburbs. A week or so before Halloween, kids run around "ghosting" homes, leaving a bag of candy with a message that the homeowner has to do the same for two other houses.
Trouble is, this ghosting thing never seems to take off. You've heard of trick-or-treating, but you've probably never heard of "ghosting." We're all busy. We forget to buy candy weeks before Halloween. Tomorrow is Monday, the kids will be doing homework, we'll be doing dishes, and soon, no one else will get the viral prank.
This points out a difference between word-of-mouth failure and viral ideas that spread like wildfire. Word of mouth, alas, often has too much friction to make it big. You may tell 2 friends about your shampoo, and so on, and so on, but how many friends really pass it along? "Hey, I have this friend, who has a friend, and she says some shampoo is terrific!" By the first or second degree of separation, people lose interest. Word of mouth only works about one or two degrees along your social network.
Viral ideas, by comparison, spread wildly because of something else. There's a lot of talk about what makes some ideas viral, and how you can control this dynamic. We'll explore this more in our next few posts.
PS, the photo above has little to do with this post. But certain sources say this is a real photo of "the brown lady," a ghostly apparition captured on film in 1936. I'm pretty sure this is what left the candy on the doorstep.
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