As I was eating lunch under blue skies yesterday, I looked out over a field covered with the yellow hues of the infamous dandelion.  Ever since buying my first house, I have been fascinated with the polarizing nature of the dandelion.  People either curse its existence or relish its role as a harbinger of Spring.  However you feel about them, dandelions provide an apt metaphor for digital media.

Spend a few moments reading upon on dandelions on Wikipedia and you’ll find out a number of interesting facts.  One that caught my attention: “There are usually 54 to 172 seeds produced per head, but a single plant can produce more than 2000 seeds a year.”

Okay, so what do dandelions and digital media have in common (aside from starting with the same letter of the alphabet)?  At its very essence, a dandelion seed is nothing more than data.  More specifically, it is code - genetic code in this case.  Even better, it is code packaged up in a form that is easy to transport over long and short distances, with help from the wind.  

When that seed lands on fertile soil, it can take root and grow into a mature dandelion that produces head upon head of seeds.  If, by chance, it lands in rock, sand, and other infertile environments, the seed wastes away.  

If your scoring at home, here’s how the metaphor can be dissected:  

• The dandelion seed is some sort of content (video, blog post, news story, website, or some other idea).  
• The soil is your mind, which either engages with the content or not.
• The new dandelion plant is the platform you choose to replicate and share this content (Forward-to-a-Friend email, a blog post, Facebook application, Twitter, etc.)
• The seed head is the accumulation of all the times you’ve shared it.
• The wind is the internet.

Now, I’d like for you to understand and appreciate that this metaphor is born from my frustration.  For the past few months, I have been attempting to document the global travels of the “Are You Relevant?” video we launched via a microsite in December of this past year.

This witty video was created for the Association of Fraternity Advisors, who wanted an opening video that would shake up their annual conference and define the conversation for the entire weekend.  Even before it debuted, we knew we had a potential viral video on our hands.  When the conference ended, we went to work on launching a microsite for everyone who attended to share the video with anyone they though could benefit from it.

In the following months, we have fielded inquires from a wide variety of industries and geographic locales.  A hospital CEO in Dekalb, Illinois, the CEO/owner of a record storage company in Cincinnati, state and national leaders of masonic organizations from Illinois and Nebraska, Head of Information Services at Toorak College in Australia, and a university bookstore manager in Vancouver, Canada are among the random people who have reached out to us because they stumbled upon the video.  At least one has even become clients.

Each time I heard from someone outside our typical market (defined by geographic boundaries and industries we have penetrated), I would inquire how they found out about us.  It was kinda like my personal game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.  With enough inquiries, I figured I could find one or two people I could connect directly to the AFA conference in someway, no matter how many degrees of separation.  What I found, instead, was that the more time passed, the more difficult the task became. 

So far, I have been able trace a few inquiries back 2 degrees, but that’s as far as I have gotten until I reach someone who cannot remember where they came across the video.  Most people either got it from a speaker at some other conference, read about it on a blog, or saw it on their Twitter stream.  

The one thing that I was able to find was the one thing they all had in common.  They were wrestling with the concept of relevance.  Librarians seeking ways to redefine their roles away from just print collections.  Membership-based organizations who have seen their membership roles shrink.  Community hospitals trying to prove they can serve the community outside the walls of their clinics.  Companies who are seeing their traditional income sources dry up and new market opportunities arise. 

So as I was eating my lunch looking over the field of bright, yellow dandelions, the realization smacked me upside the head.  I was like a groundskeeper trying to trace the genealogy of the dandelions in my yard back to the “Eve” of the dandelion species.  The best I could do was find nearby patches of dandelions - like Jenny Luca’s blog who got it from Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.

Now that we’ve come a pretty long way in this post, it’d be nice to walk away with some sort of lesson.  In that spirit, here are a few things to keep in mind when you want to create your own dandelion experience:

1. Make your story engaging
2. Make it easy for people to find your story
3. Make it easy for people to share your story 

That’ll guarantee that your one dandelion creates fields upon fields of dandelions around the world.  And for those who have an aversion to the yellow menace - just replace “dandelion” with the name of another flower/seed combo that works for your sense of style. 

So what kind of “dandelion experiences” have you had lately?  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:44 pm and is filed under change, marketing, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.