Egg Watchers is a slippy idea. It’s been firing round the web like a bar of soap.
It got me wondering what makes this idea so transmittable. My top-line conclusions are that it is:
Easy to understand
Easy to describe
Smart / cheeky, but not immersive
It made me think of Nik Roope’s ‘Fast Food For Thought‘.
(Currently a holding page; soon to be a blog), but more importantly a string of words that help describe the ‘slippiness’ of the eggwatchers idea. It is both throwaway but smart at the same time. A silly, light idea but with just a smidgen of substance, causing you to think of greater possibilities.
People talk about ‘sticky’ ideas. The ones you can’t put down, that leave a mark on you and keep you coming back. Sticky is hard to do consistently.
Slippy ideas are attractive, but with little or no friction. They ask nothing of you, but they are great social currency. We want to share stuff – that energy already exists. A slippy idea is ready to go.
Like communal bars of soap in the web’s shower-room (cough) they are propelled between people effortlessly. There are natural paths of communication that are gagging for slippy ideas; like Barclaycard waterslides shooting between twitter accounts, friend feeds, blogs and EVEN real people.
Of course, slippy AND sticky would be nice. But that metaphorical path looks hazardous.
Tags: change, lessons, postulations
The whole post looks like it could get messy at the next bend.
:) Yeah I bailed fairly quickly. I think there’s a more interesting point under all that shit I just wrote. Just don’t have time to curate it ;)
super groovy insight albeit the Oz analogy (oh wait it wasn’t jail, just ordinary men shower)
Slippy ideas are the direct result of the fast, info-super-highway culture of the (social) web. without getting to bogged into semantics all the characteristics of what previously thought of as a sticky idea (simple, easy to describe/understand, instant gratification) are at work here.
We hardly have time/attention for immersive ideas anymore. I mean of course we do (reading books, playing World of Warcraft, watching The Wire etc) but Twitter, or snack culture created and amplified our crave for 1-3 doses of sticky/slippy ideas a day.
(1)you stumble upon – (2)you like (“aha!”, “funny!” “smart!”) – (3)you inclined to pass on – (4)you forget about because new one has arrived on your stream – and back to (1)
From a marketing perspective slippy ideas are the currency of the present – smart brands need to put some $$ aside for the development of constant stream (drip drip) of cheap, clever, throwaway ideas.
PS – i was the first one to write about eggwatcher – where’s my link? ;-)
Exactly mate. Glad someone knew what I was trying to say :)
Slippy is really just a ‘cute’ word for frictionless. Lives, ideas, content and conversations are in constant flow. Rather than always disrupt that flow, a slippy idea can ride the waves and spread very quickly. That current is waiting to take ideas that are happy to get carried by it.
To continue entertaining the comparison between sticky and slippy, I’d argue that stickiness is something that you want to kick in afterwards, once the idea has been fired off again by the recipient. Like the fast food for thought concept, you want people to be left with a lasting impression even if their interaction with your ‘meme’ was fleeting.
P.s. I had your eggwatchers testimonial tattooed on my left buttock. You’re a legend.
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