{"id":2899,"date":"2011-11-21T06:23:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T13:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/?p=2899"},"modified":"2011-11-20T19:54:55","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T02:54:55","slug":"the-power-of-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/the-power-of-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy’s Note: This guest post was written by Toby Branz, great Friend of the Dragonfly<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0In an adult life filled with serious responsibilities and high expectations, it’s easy to forget that we once saw the world as our playground. \u00a0As children, we just wanted to have fun.<\/p>\n

Guess what?\u00a0 We still do! \u00a0There are plenty of ideas out there about why we engage so readily through fun. \u00a0As we discuss in\u00a0The Dragonfly Effect<\/em>, one important and possibly surprising\u00a0element of successful social movements is the\u00a0fueling effect of fun.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Game designer and author Raph Koster wrote, “Fun is just another word for learning”. \u00a0Positive psychology explains fun in terms of flow.\u00a0Flow<\/a>\u00a0is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of involvement,\u00a0energized focus,\u00a0and success in the process of the activity.\u00a0 Neuropsychology boils down the ideas of flow, learning, fun and addiction into one word: dopamine.\u00a0 The release of dopamine is associated with pleasure, motivation, concentration,\u00a0learning,\u00a0reinforcement, and addiction.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And finally, life experience and common sense tells us that\u00a0everyone loves to have a good time<\/strong>.<\/wbr><\/p>\n

Consider the success of Volkswagen’s viral marketing campaign dubbed\u00a0the fun theory<\/a>.\u00a0 In\u00a0one video<\/a>, Volkswagen converts the stairs at a train station into a giant piano, resulting in 66% more commuters choosing the stairs over the escalator.\u00a0 In\u00a0another<\/a>, 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”.\u00a0 People are so delighted that they even start picking up other people’s garbage to experience the fun again.\u00a0 The videos quickly went viral, and the stair video and trash can video now have over 19 million combined views on Youtube. \u00a0 The campaign infuses fun into everyday activities to encourage people to do the right thing.<\/p>\n

\"phpdY7MoJPM.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n

Don’t underestimate the power of fun.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0It 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.\u00a0 On the Silversmith Vineyards\u00a0Facebook page<\/a>, 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.\u00a0\u00a0The wine-making process becomes a game, and anyone can be a player. \u00a0Every step of the process is explained in clear, short videos posted to the Facebook page by Matt and Tom Johnson of Silversmith Vineyard. \u00a0In this way, even those of us who aren’t wine buffs or part-time sommeliers can enjoy playing the wine-making game. \u00a0\u00a0“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. \u00a0Matt 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. \u00a0“We will open up and pre-sell first to our Facebook participants,” \u00a0says Matt.\u00a0“This is the first time I’ve heard of a winery inviting outside participation in crafting a wine…\u00a0This may be the best use of social media in the wine world<\/strong>.\u00a0 Tom and Matt do their own Facebook posts and tweets.\u00a0 It’s just the two of them taking on this crowd-sourced wine project.\u00a0 It doesn’t get any more authentic or real than that.”In her Huffington Post\u00a0blog,\u00a0The WineFashionista<\/a>, Mary Orlin writes:<\/p>\n

Of course, authenticity is an integral part of engaging your audience.\u00a0 If you’re not truly moved by the story you’re telling, no one else will be, either.\u00a0 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\u00a0have as much fun making wine as we do.<\/strong>”\u00a0 Sounds authentic to me.<\/div>\n

“We had 150 to 200 Facebook fans when we started this,” says Matt. \u00a0Now they have over 800 fans. \u00a0“We didn’t have\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0at all.” \u00a0Now\u00a0Silversmith has 457 followers. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0It 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.<\/p>\n

Read Mary Orlin’s excellent full article\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, what action can you take to make your company or non-profit more fun? \u00a0\u00a0Go ahead, take a risk.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Who knows?\u00a0You might just have some fun yourself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n
Toby Branz is an opera singer, educator, fun-seeker and all-around talent. You can find her here<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy’s Note: This guest post was written by Toby Branz, great Friend of the Dragonfly \u00a0In an adult life filled with serious responsibilities and high expectations, it’s easy to forget that we once saw the world as our playground. \u00a0As children, we just wanted to have fun. Guess what?\u00a0 We still do! \u00a0There are plenty … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Power of Fun”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[152,7],"tags":[226,74,230,223,228,231,232,229,225,227,233,224],"class_list":["post-2899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engage-2","category-happiness","tag-dopamine","tag-facebook","tag-flow","tag-fun","tag-fun-theory","tag-koster","tag-orlin","tag-silversmith-vineyards","tag-vineyard","tag-volkswagen","tag-wine-fashionista","tag-winemaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BBCq-KL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2937,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions\/2937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}