On Tues­day even­ing I had the pleas­ure of attend­ing Mal­colm Glad­well’s talk at the Lowry. Hav­ing just read Tip­ping Point and star­ted What the Dog Saw I was keen to see how and what he would deliver in a live lec­ture. What he talked about was serendipity …

Of course he didn’t simply give a lec­ture about serendip­ity, he out­lined three dif­fer­ent types and layered them. At the bot­tom of the pile is ‘Columbian Serendip­ity’ (mak­ing a new dis­cov­ery through pure dumb luck), above that is ‘Archi­me­dian Serendip­ity’ (know­ing what you want to find, but find­ing it in an unex­pec­ted place) and on the top is ‘Galilean Serendip­ity’ (build­ing a new tool or cre­at­ing a new pro­cess and dis­cov­er­ing some­thing unex­pec­ted and new through its use). And through the medium of story telling — a method that read­ers of his books will be famil­iar with — when on to explain how these con­cepts are used.

On the jour­ney home I had time to think over what he said and thought “can serendip­ity be applied to digital mar­ket­ing strategies or, at least, some ele­ments of it?”

Take mul­tivari­ate split test­ing of emails for example. Nor­mally, you take a small per­cent­age of your tar­get group then send one ver­sion of an email to half of those and a slightly dif­fer­ent ver­sion ver­sion to the other half. Whichever one gives the bet­ter res­ult you then send to the remainder of the group. But why limit your­self to a simple A/B split? If your email list is large enough, why not use four ver­sions of the email or even eight or more? Given a lar­ger test group, you may just find the email that yields the best res­ult con­tains an ele­ment of attract­ive­ness to that group that you hadn’t considered.

You can poten­tially apply a sim­ilar method to on-site SEO. Research your key­phrases, but try a greater vari­ety. Check your ana­lyt­ics often, you may find you are get­ting traffic from a phrase you never con­sidered or even a phrase that exists within a doc­u­ment on your site and not in the site copy itself (this actu­ally happened to me recently!).

Of course, the pur­pose of a strategy is to try to elim­in­ate or at least anti­cip­ate ran­dom events that will affect the object­ives, but per­haps there is room in cer­tain areas for such a thing as serendipity.

Update: quite a few of my fel­low MSc stu­dents were at the event as well, you can read Ally’s report on the talk here.