The Iron Law of Irrelevant Anecdotes

PR guy Peter Shankman wrote up the epic tale of how he asked for a steak to be delivered to the airport, and got it. That’s great! And it perfectly illustrates what might be called the Iron Law of Irrelevant Anecdotes:

In a world with social networks whose follower counts have a power-law distribution, the relevance of an anecdote is inversely proportionate to your odds of hearing it.

This was a pretty simple cost/benefit analysis for Morton’s, and Shankman’s popularity is a direct multiplier on the “benefit” side. Even if they’re nice people, and even if they value customer service, they are probably a lot nicer and probably value customer service a lot more if they’re dealing with someone who can make whatever they do famous.

People like Shankman can’t be fundamentally convinced that they’re getting special treatment. They can understand it on an intellectual level, but mostly to the point that Shankman might concede that Morton’s was twice as likely to do this for him as it would be to do this for an everyday person, versus thousands of times more likely. Shankman accidentally illustrates this later on, when he shows a screenshot of the Morton’s Twitter feed, which responds to nearly every mention of Morton’s with “Cheers!”

If you’re famous like Shankman, you get steak delivered to the airport. If you’re like most people, you get seven characters (copied and pasted, no less).

That’s not a problem, of course. People like Shankman have worked hard to get famous, and they deserve to benefit from it. Meanwhile, Morton’s did something clever that got them lots of positive attention for a low cost. But Shankman’s view of Twitter will be colored by this experience. And since Shankman is famous, his views will get lots of exposure and a bit more automatic agreement.

The anecdotes that matter are the ones from people with fifteen followers and a poor command of the English language. They’re more typical Twitter users, and their experience is pretty uniformly disappointing. Inevitably, you won’t hear about it.

(This is the converse of our articulate whiners piece.)