Recently Chris Quigley did a post entitled when viral food goes wrong on the Rubbertopia blog.
I saw another episode of Jamie’s show last night (I don’t watch much television, but happened to also see the first episode) I was surprised to see how much Jamie has improved his chances of teaching people how to cook.
For strangers to this blog or myself, I work on Seeding Virals through the Viral Ad Network at Rubber republic – and as a viral marketing company, we spend most of our time trying to encourage “advertainment” content to be spread through word of mouth.
Jamie’s basic idea is simple – start by teaching a group of people how to cook a simple meal, and then let them teach some other people. Hopefully the people they teach will teach still more, and eventually the number of people that know how to cook grows massively.
For those who didn’t see it – the first episode started with teaching several people who had never cooked to cook a simple meal, and then getting them to teach a friend – who in turn would teach another friend. The equivalent of this would be if every time we started to seed a viral, we sent it to a few people via email, and asked them to pass it on.
The problem is that for this method to work straight out, you have to expect that each person you send it to will send it to at least one other person. How large this number is doesn’t really matter in the long run as long as it’s more than one – if it’s less than one you’ll quickly end up without it being passed on any more. (Well, actually you have to expect more than one as it gets passed on further, but that’s a good approximation for the first few stages.)
What actually happens here, is that you end up with the message (how to cook in this case) passed on only a few stages before stopping.
Jamie’s initial mistake was in asking people to pass the recipe on to one friend. This means that when you include all the people who either don’t bother, or don’t have time to send the recipe on you end up with an expected “pass-on” rate less than one: In fact the only way that his initial plan could have worked would have been if every single person who was taught a recipe passed it on to a friend – no exceptions.
Not surprisingly, this method didn’t work very well – it quickly ground to a halt after a couple of stages. Given that he had very few people to start with, the final number ended up under 30 people.
Jamie’s newest technique (which was on television last night) started far better. His technique this time was to find 20 local companies, and get them to bring 50 members of staff along who wanted to learn to cook. Taking groups of companies at a time, his first group of 10 cooks (from the first show) would each teach five people, and those five people would then teach two more people, who would teach two more, and so on – up to the total of 1,000 people taught to cook in a day.
Why do I think this method is more likely to work?
Jamie has two massive factors working against him this time – firstly it relies on all of those employees having close enough friends outside of work who they want to teach to cook, and secondly since these 1,000 people weren’t chosen as carefully as the first group they are less likely to actually pass it on at all (the first group responded to an ad asking if they would like to learn to cook and pass it on, and have Jamie Oliver breathing down their neck to make sure they do).
But: Even though only five groups of 50 staff actually passed on the recipe (10%), that’s still 1,250 people in total – making 250 more (“new”) people who may pass it on in the future (along with the first 1,000) – compared to about 10 “new” people who had the recipe passed onto them from the first technique (closer to 100%).
In fact, after the recipe has been passed on just a few stages you aren’t really in control of what kind of people the content has been passed on to – so the chances they will pass it on becomes the same however you get to them. That means that Jamie should reach around 25 (that’s 250/10) times more people from the second method – and probably more than that due to the other 1,000.
What did Jamie get wrong?
One thing Jamie did notice was that the recipe that he taught changed slightly as it got passed from one group to another, and responded by making the instructions more clear. In my opinion that was short-sighted. If he had instead learnt from what it had been changed onto then he could have ended up with a recipe that was more liked by the local population, and more likely to be passed on. Harnessing the social effect of this could have also been useful – perhaps picking several of the best and naming them after the company that produced them – giving the cooks more of an attachment, and making them more likely to pass it on to more people.
He also tried to persuade the entire company to pass the recipe on in one go to 50 people from another company after the event – by encouraging this he relied on bosses providing cooking utensils and time off for staff to teach another group. Perhaps by encouraging people to teach their friends privately he could have increased the percentage of people that got taught – and got it closer to the magic number one.
Tim W
