Think for the crowd.

On running campaigns, bomb-slide an open mic, and fiction/concept that we universally believe in and accept.

It’s been five months since last time I wrote something on Medium. Lot of things happened. But let’s just unfold things down as I write this blog alongside my overpriced green tea in western side of Jakarta.

I learn a lot with rapid-changing environment around me. There’s just so many happening in the world while we speak. Livestreaming war on another side of the world, comedian getting slapped by an actor, until mourn to governor’s son who’s lost in Aare river.

I used to think about how ‘life isn’t defined by numbers’ and such but the word ‘KPI’ scared me now. I used to think that calling people only when you need is rude, but I understand how precious our energy now. I used to think to fight for another people’s attention is evil-ish, but I get it now. I used to think that forever ever after is exist, but I let it go now.

To being idealist is one thing, but to think about such elements and how we all connected is another thing/realization.

On January, I write about how my work contract almost ended. I got an extension and this time, I’m taking care not only content as an associate product of podcasts, but also thinking for the crowd while concepting one product of my own.

Now, how to think for the crowd?

Look at the mirror and think about yourself. Because you’re a human, and you’re part of the crowd too.

Think about, what would appealing enough to you, what would make you stay and consume more information about something. Now that’s how the crowd works. You need not to know nor memorize every book about how to win the crowd. You need to learn and know yourself more, and that is a never-ending journey by itself.

You need a good hook, you need to think about how creative your ‘thing’ so it would be a head-turner. Maybe it’s the title, maybe it’s the color, maybe it’s the headline. It could be anything.

While they looking at it, there’s another data-counter for how much minutes they spend on it. How many seconds/minutes they will stay on your ‘thing’. We called that as stickiness.

Stickiness is another thing because that would be different one another. That’s where taste, experience, preference, and every single aspect in one’s life contribute to how they consume the thing you made. I’d rather call it grey area because we really can’t put ourselves in another shoes.

Yuval Noah Harari said that money was the first universal fiction and concept that human approves and believe together (fiction/concept such as, you’ll be good because good deeds will be rewarded. Only human could do that, monkey wouldn’t believe that if it doesn’t eat banana today, it would rewarded two bananas tomorrow. And yes, money was the first concept because not all of us were in the same religion).

Now, we don’t need one world-scale concept to believe in together, but we tend to grouping with people that have the same similarities to us, to the same concept that this small group(s) approved.

You believe in this football club to win the league? Go on. You believe in this person to win this year’s election? Sure. You believe that matcha taste like heaven? That’s totally fine. People are so unique that they believe in much different things with different personalized experienced and preferences each own.

And that’s what the crowd is, added the element of preference. A group of people with same preference towards some concept/fiction that they believe in together.

To think for them doesn’t necessarily means you need to be one of them. You can research more about them, you can think about all others factual similarities that they shared such as their age group, genders, workplace, etc.

And that applies to anything. I run campaigns in work and I need to understand how the persona of the people that we would believe would follow our campaigns. What they believe, what they consume, how they would react and possibly joining the campaign. We learn their journey and we try our best to simplify them.

It goes the same way for every content you made in the internet.

It is also works on the offline crowd that you face every single day and I have to admit I learnt it quite hard way. I do this open mic one day in my work event, which I understand it should be called as ‘corporate stand-up’. I tell jokes and rants about the similarities we have, the experience we shared in the office, the feelings that we all have.

And I failed gracefully because my jokes wasn’t hit them hard enough, or our director standing 10 meters next to us.

But that’s where I hit the bottom. I realized that you can only pave your way as far as to work on your thing. The feedback is something you can’t really control, as they could be various.

Even with the big crowd that believes in the same one thing, each of them still has different perspectives and preference on how things done. Comedian, for example, still possibly getting heckled on their own big show. A football team is also another good example of how they could be booed after different output that the crowd getting, even if they win the game.

That tells us a lot about people and behavior on their own. We’re unpredictable, we’re unique, and we’re influenced by our experience and knowledge. We’re all so connected with each other in ways we probably couldn’t ever think of.

Life, also unfolded itself as train of stories to made and moments to walked every day. There’s so many about life that we don’t know and about us that we also don’t understand before. I think if anything I could learn for the last six months, and 2nd quarter of the game I’m in right now, is that change is the only constant, so embrace it.