Posts Tagged ‘followers’

February14

Meet in the Middle

By: Spike Jones

Irony can be very entertaining…especially in the social media fishbowl. On one hand, we hear the SM kids shouting from the rooftops that it’s all about one-on-one conversations. How it’s high-touch. How pushing out messages from the top-down is no longer effective. It’s about grassroots and bottom-up now.

And then they tell you to reach out to influencers.

Do you see the irony here? You reach out to influencers in hopes that they’ll broadcast the message to their audience (we’ve talked about before). Which, you know, wreaks of top-down marketing.

When it comes to building communities or ambassador programs, both ways – top down and bottom up – can be effective. But here’s where it gets interesting. We will use influencers to broadcast that we’re looking for a specific type or person – and one of the qualifiers IS NOT which social sites they are on or how many followers/friends they have. The main qualifiers are based on passion. That’s the core that we’re looking for. And believe it or not, most of the time those good folks are what us marketers would refer to as “the bottom” when it comes to influence and status on social media.

So it takes both. But instead of starting at the top and hoping that your message gets pushed down, or starting at the bottom and hoping something magical will happen, you need start at both ends and meet in the middle. It might be counter-intuitive, but it works.

Posted in: lessons learned, marketing, word of mouth2 comments

April6

Odds and Ends

By: Spike Jones

I’ve got a lot of things floating around in my head, so I’m going to use this post to get them down on “paper.” They will be random, but stay with me.

1. Derek Sivers recently gave a talk at TED about how to start a movement. I wrote a post about this based on the same video he uses back in June, but David pulls some new insights from it. My favorite quotes, “Nurture your first few followers as equals, so the movement is not about you.” “Leadership is overglorified. The first follower is the one that transforms the lone nut into a leader.” “If you really want to start a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow.”

2. I’m about to take the Foursquare/Gowalla plunge. I’ve held off for just about as long as I can. And what fascinates me about these new apps and what’s left out of all the buzz is that these are some of the first (popular) apps out there that are bridging the gap between online and offline. We are about to witness a rapid evolution and will be able to trace it back to these two.

3. As I’m prone to do, I’ve been thinking more about Social Media consultants lately. First of all, I’d like to clarify that I’m not a hater of all SM consultants. But if you know me, you know that I put all my stock in successful practitioners instead of those who talk a big game, but have no real success stories with clients to show for it.

Like I said, I’ve been rethinking that. And I believe these folks who spend all day on Twitter trying to build and maintain their following and who have no real experience are actually good for the industry. Because while the rest of us are actually doing the work, they are doing all the yelling – which gets the industry attention. So they do serve their purpose.

I told you they were random thoughts.

Posted in: junk drawer, marketing5 comments

March25

Who are you influencing?

By: Spike Jones

The latest thing that most social media types are complaining about is an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “The Social Media Bubble,” where Umair Haque (Director of the Havas Media Lab) launches into his theory of “thin” relationships via social media channels like Twitter. “Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable.”

As you might imagine, just about everyone who has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and makes their living preaching about the importance of social media is disagreeing. And I’m not going to go there.

Instead, it got me thinking about those people that DO have thousands and thousands of followers. Many out there would consider those people “influencers” because of the followers they have amassed over time. And here’s my question: WHO are they influencing? We all know it’s quality over quantity these days, but what if you’re influencing the WRONG people?

The social media preachers on Twitter have large followings of, well, social media preachers. And really what’s the point of influencing them? They all are trying to get business. They are all service providers. And they all spend their time telling each other how great they are. When brands approach them to drive a car across the country for them or give them a new camera to use, they are just broadcasting those messages to a bunch of other marketers. And that really doesn’t make sense to me.

So I believe a key question needs to be inserted into your digital strategy: Sure you want to attract those who have “influence” (even though I’d argue for the “passion” model over influence). But we need to make sure they are influencing the right kind of people for our communications and conversations to be effective. Just because someone has a huge following doesn’t mean they are going to be effective.

Maybe we need to take a closer look at what influence really means in this brave new world.

Posted in: lessons learned, marketing, word of mouth2 comments

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