The Power of Fun

Andy’s Note: This guest post was written by Toby Branz, great Friend of the Dragonfly

In an adult life filled with serious responsibilities and high expectations, it’s easy to forget that we once saw the world as our playground. As children, we just wanted to have fun.

Guess what? We still do! There are plenty of ideas out there about why we engage so readily through fun. As we discuss in The Dragonfly Effect, one important and possibly surprising element of successful social movements is the fueling effect of fun.

Game designer and author Raph Koster wrote, “Fun is just another word for learning”. Positive psychology explains fun in terms of flow. Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of involvement, energized focus, and success in the process of the activity. Neuropsychology boils down the ideas of flow, learning, fun and addiction into one word: dopamine. The release of dopamine is associated with pleasure, motivation, concentration, learning, reinforcement, and addiction. Every time an activity releases a jolt of dopamine, you connect that activity with a pleasurable or fun feeling, which motivates you to do that activity again and again. And finally, life experience and common sense tells us that everyone loves to have a good time.

Consider the success of Volkswagen’s viral marketing campaign dubbed the fun theory. In one video, Volkswagen converts the stairs at a train station into a giant piano, resulting in 66% more commuters choosing the stairs over the escalator. In another, the Volkswagen crew wires a regular trash can with motion-activated depth sound effects, so tossing in some trash yields a dramatic whistle and a loud “splat”. People are so delighted that they even start picking up other people’s garbage to experience the fun again. The videos quickly went viral, and the stair video and trash can video now have over 19 million combined views on Youtube. The campaign infuses fun into everyday activities to encourage people to do the right thing.

Don’t underestimate the power of fun. It can drastically increase your audience’s willingness to engage with your company or non-profit, as we can see with Silversmith Vineyard’s inventive new Crowd-Made Wine Project. On the Silversmith Vineyards Facebook page, anyone who “likes” the winery’s page can instantly participate in the wine-making process, contributing to such decisions as when to press the wine, when to rack the wine, and what type of barrels to use for aging. The wine-making process becomes a game, and anyone can be a player. Every step of the process is explained in clear, short videos posted to the Facebook page by Matt and Tom Johnson of Silversmith Vineyard. In this way, even those of us who aren’t wine buffs or part-time sommeliers can enjoy playing the wine-making game. “We can tell through the comments we get that some people have lots of winemaking experience, but for some it’s clear this is their first rodeo,” Tom says. Matt and Tom are, of course, hoping the crowd will eventually want to buy this wine, in one or two years after the entire process is finished. “We will open up and pre-sell first to our Facebook participants,” says Matt. “This is the first time I’ve heard of a winery inviting outside participation in crafting a wine… This may be the best use of social media in the wine world. Tom and Matt do their own Facebook posts and tweets. It’s just the two of them taking on this crowd-sourced wine project. It doesn’t get any more authentic or real than that.”In her Huffington Post blog, The WineFashionista, Mary Orlin writes:

Of course, authenticity is an integral part of engaging your audience. If you’re not truly moved by the story you’re telling, no one else will be, either. Tom and Matt state their objective clearly in the first video, “We just want you to like our Facebook page, participate in the process, and have as much fun making wine as we do.” Sounds authentic to me.

“We had 150 to 200 Facebook fans when we started this,” says Matt. Now they have over 800 fans. “We didn’t have Twitter at all.” Now Silversmith has 457 followers. The Johnsons use social media to connect with people by getting them involved in the process. Their end goal is to make wine-making fun, and eliminate the intimidation factor that too often prevents people from understanding the wine world. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a lot of fun to watch each video, as Matt chats directly into the camera, and then cast your vote about that particular stage of the wine-making process.

Read Mary Orlin’s excellent full article here.

Now, what action can you take to make your company or non-profit more fun? Go ahead, take a risk. Who knows? You might just have some fun yourself.

Toby Branz is an opera singer, educator, fun-seeker and all-around talent. You can find her here