Social Media Monkeys

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon
By Marvin Double


In 1952 on the Island of Koshima in Japan, researchers, studying a troupe of Macaque monkeys made a surprising observation. The monkeys liked to eat sweet potatoes but had a problem. It was difficult for them to clean sand off the potatoes before eating. A young female they named Imo solved the problem by washing the sand off her sweet potato with water; a behavior which was previous unknown in the troop.

Monkeys, Sweet Potatoes Marketing?
What the heck you might ask do monkeys washing sweet potatoes have to do with marketing - bear with me.

Imo went on to teach first her mother, then other members of the troop how to wash sweet potatoes The behavior created a primate buzz and went viral, in a monkey kind of way. After a few years it was estimated that 99 monkeys in the group were using the new skill. The whole group had benefited from the insight of one of its members.

Through cooperation and sharing of information through their social network the monkeys demonstrated the true power that also makes our technological human social networks like twitter so important.

This is Hardly News
True enough, information sharing across twitter or other social networks isn't news. It's so common in fact that it seems everyone is doing it. Ah ha, there's the rub - everyone is doing it. In fact there's so much information flowing across social networks that it's easy to just disappear in the crowd. This very fact alone is one big reason why social media isn't considered by many to be a good marketing medium - how is a monkey with a new idea going to get it noticed?

The Power of Ideas
What Imo did was to solve a problem and, her solution was something all the other monkeys needed. It was something unique and for those monkeys, a great achievement, something worth passing on through their social network.

What makes social media different is that it is driven by the power of ideas. Information tends to get sorted and sifted by importance and quickly passed along being filter for relevance as it goes. It is in many ways a network made of of millions of individual editors all pulling together bits of information that is relevant to them.

Is There a Moral to This Story?
Certainly, I wouldn't ask you to read through this without a bang up ending. If you aren't familiar with the book "The Hundredth Monkey" by Ken Keys, here's the short version. You'll recall that earlier I mentioned that researchers noticed that 99 monkeys in the troop had picked up this new skill passed on from the inventive Imo. An interesting thing happened with the one hundredth money began washing their sweet potatoes too.

Mysteriously and almost instantaneously researchers on other islands noticed monkeys in other groups washing their food too. This was a behavior which they said hadn't been previously seen.

Initially the researchers were baffled as to how this could have happened. Various theories were put forward to explain what became known as the "Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon" or HMP.

It was thought that somehow through some undiscovered connection, such as the collective unconscious, information was being shared between isolated groups of monkeys. The theory went that, once the hundredth money learned the technique this action formed a critical mass of thought which in turn stimulated a telepathic connection through which the information was shared with other monkeys.

The idea while being very interesting also garnered tremendous popular support and, generated considerable debate after publication of Keys book. Sine that time new theories have been put forward to offer alternative explanations for HMP but debate still persists. If the monkeys know what's going on they are keeping it to themselves.

The Moral
Twitter offers marketers a genuine HMP like potential for communicating real and valuable information. The key of course for marketers is, just like Imo, you need to offer something which actually does solve a problem, something that others want need or desire. If you've got that, then just as was the case with the Hundredth Monkey, others will know.

Oh yes, if you want a copy of the "The Hundredth Monkey" as of the writing of this post there were a few available on Amazon.