KARL MOORE – This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak to my colleague, [assistant professor of organizational behaviour] Brian Rubineau.
Brian, you have been looking at social contagion. Tell us about your research.
BRIAN RUBINEAU – We know that social influence generally exists, we're influenced by the people we have relationships with. Organizations have been using social influence for marketing efforts for quite a while. Essentially, viral marketing has been trying to use this social contagion process to achieve behavioural changes.
The problem with that is that they tend to have very small percentages in terms of whose behaviour they actually change – they essentially get one in a thousand people whose behaviour they change.
Now, if you are marketing to thousands or millions of people, then you are changing behaviours of hundreds of thousands of people – you are getting a lot more customers and that is great. But within an organization, if you are only changing the behaviour of one in a thousand, it is not going to be very good for supporting your change efforts.
This actually is a problem that has been solved in the area of public health and studying actual health contagion. So viral marketing essentially assumes that it is really easy to change people's behaviour, it is kind of like influenza, and if you cough on somebody, then they are going to get it.
[But] in terms of actually changing behaviour, it tends to be pretty hard, it is not just like, "Oh, I am going to mention something to somebody and they are going to change their behaviour." What you actually have to do is have some kind of more consistent interaction, more frequent interaction, and it is more like something that is more difficult to transmit more like say a blood-borne illness or something like that, where it actually takes some effort to change the behaviour.
KARL MOORE – So what is the implication of how do we more effectively lead change then?
BRIAN RUBINEAU – So the practical advice is you identify who are the core spreaders in an organization. So if you can identify, much like you would in public health, who are the core spreaders of a disease, who are the core spreaders of influence and behaviour in organizations?
What we found in my research is that you can identify these core spreaders using data such as the server logs from your e-mail system, and you can actually use social network analysis methods to identify the core spreaders. If you target these core spreaders, then you can actually have this contagion process diffused, so that if you are trying to have a change effort, where you are trying to promote adoption of certain kinds of behaviours, you want staff to participate in webinars and these kinds of things to support change efforts, targeting these efficient core spreaders is a really good way to change behaviours.