New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans

Its primary goal is not that its content be read, but that it be shared.

Creating Actionable ideas is about more than trolling for “likes.”

It asks an organization to consider how action by its community can be embedded in the very structure of its communications.

It is a philosophy, not a technology, with the core principle that your community members are there to do mor...

Capturing people’s attention can only get you so far.

those people turned out not because the candidates had compelled them to, or because the ad at the top of their newsfeed exhorted them to,

but because it is

what they saw their frie...

When we think about how ideas spread in the twenty-first century, the experiment makes it clea...

A big idea is made stronger if it is designed to pass between sma...

“People actually begin changing behavior when [an] idea gets validated by their community, rarely when it has not.”

This is why “connected” ideas matter so much.

Today, the most resonant ideas are not those that get flashed at the hi...

but those that become individualized expressions of affiliation and ...

online sharing, even at viral scale, takes place through many small groups, not via the single status post or tweet of a few influencers.

While influential people may be able to reach a wide audience, their impact is short-lived.

Content goes viral when it spreads beyond a particular sphere of influence and spreads across the social web via…pe...

Connectivity can be supercharged when it links someone, along with her peers, to a larger belief or philosophy.

For an ACE idea, going viral is not just an explosion of sharing.

It is allowing every carrier of the message to add a mutation that makes it more contagious for his or her own networks.

The Ice Bucket Challenge, by contrast, for all its “new, creative and organic” elements so absent in the telethon model, has proved a lot less reliable.

Every organization whose boss or board has laid down the order to its staff “We want our own Ice Bucket Challenge!”

has missed the point.

What leaders can do is blend ACE principles into all of their efforts, and build the capacity to do this work consistently, rather than p...

The Islamic State may want to take us back to the Dark Ages, but its propaganda machine is multi-platform, multi-pronged, and distinctly modern.

much of this online activity isn’t generated from ISIS “headquarters” but is driven by admirers churning out content without any initiation or direction from above.

The future will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster, and more durably.

grapple with a painful reality: that new power can supercharge hate and misinformation.

for all the energy of these moments, people went home and things tended to pretty quickly go back to normal.

The big organizing challenge was not just to rally people for a single passionate protest, but to find a way to channel that passion again and again.

THE FIVE STEPS TO BUILDING A NEW POWER CROWD

it has become harder to break through because these days everyone is trying to rally some kind of crowd.

Step 1: Find your connected connectors

supporters would be encouraged to “tell a friend,” and that person would turn into a recruiter, bringing their own—similarly minded—contacts into the community.

its initial energy relied on a very specific and passionate slice of society who spread its message sideways

Think of this group as the “connected connectors,”

those people who share a worldview, are networked to one another, and are inf...

For any new power movement, identifying and cultivating t...

connectors is often the difference between tak...

Step 2: Build a new power brand

Every company or institution must make key early decisions about how it will project outward into the world.

It has to come up with a name and settle on a visual aesthetic and maybe some iconography; it needs to refine a “voice” for how it speaks to consumers or clients. These things define its “brand”—the way a produ...

The same questions are vitally im...

launching a new power ...

one of the key signs that you have launched a successful movement is that it starts moving without you.

with the unusual corporate title “Global Head of Community,”

behavioral science concept of

“optimal distinctiveness,”

the right recipe for building an effective group is making people feel like they are part of it and t...

Old power brands created by big organizations are typically accompanied by strict rules—use