The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (44)

Phone a friend

Everyone knows that word-of-mouth recommendation is the best way to spread your idea, build a business, and gather connections by a million miles.

To recommend yourself is one thing, but to be recommended by someone else and even someone else who has paid for your services is quite another.

It's the principle upon which all the review platforms work, but it's always been this.

On Friday night, Alison and I got the tram into Nottingham to attend a candlelight event. There's a link here if you want to look at them.

Fever is a global organisation that organises extraordinary events through a franchise model, I think. They hold small events in about 170 cities around the world.

The Nottingham setup is quite active and vivid, and you can see by what they do with the candlelight that they're doing something remarkable and different. It's something that you may want to tell your friends about and write about.

And so, what we saw in the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham was a tribute to Coldplay by three violinists and a cellist.

It was an orchestral representation of some of Coldplay's tracks but in a dark room with about 500 battery-operated candles for about 120 people.

If you look at the website, you'll see some of the photographs of what this stuff looks like.

It is quite extraordinary and totally different.

We went into the Galleries of Justice and we were sat higher up in the balcony area (remember there's only 120 odd people in the room) but I was immediately blown away by the whole venue, the acoustics, the appearance, the atmosphere.

So, when they started out with the first track, Clocks, I felt almost overemotional listening to it because I was quite overwhelmed by what I was seeing and how cool it was.

It lasted for 60 minutes. They have a pop-up bar, so you can get a drink when you go in, and it's just one of the most extraordinary evenings I can remember.

Alison and I had gone into town and gone for a drink at a friend's bar, walked around the corner, gone to the Galleries of Justice, had a drink in there, listened to an hour of Coldplay played by a string quartet and then got the tram home.

For us, at our age, at our stage, it was an extraordinary evening.

But my point is that what they're doing is different, and they have a minimum viable audience, just 120, most of whom will go and tell someone else how great it was and how different it was, and other people will come.

I'm sure this is going on in your city and if it isn't, it will be soon.

But just go back to what you're doing yourself in your work, in your place, in your job. Are you doing things that other people would talk about and say, "That was worth more than I paid for," because Friday Night was definitely worth more than £28 a ticket?