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Study: Popularity is Determined More By Peer Pressure Than Quality

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This morning I came across a fascinating study (via NPR) done by Princeton professor Matthew Salganik who attempted to learn why works of art become popular.  In essence, Salganik wanted to know if popularity was based more so on the actual quality of the art, or does social influence play a role?

To find the answer, Salganik surveyed 30,000 teenagers and let them listen to 48 unknown songs by unknown bands.  What Salganik did was divide these teenagers into one of two groups.  The first group would listen to the music and then rate the songs from one to five stars.  Then after listening to the songs and rating them, the person would then have the opportunity to download the song for free.  This was the ‘independent’ group.

The second group was called the ‘social’ group, and it was divided into eight smaller groups.  Each person in each of these eight groups follows the same process as the independent group.  They listen to the songs, then rate them and finally are presented with the option to download the song for free, or not.  The big difference is that with the social group, every member can see how many times every song has been downloaded by members of their group.  In short, they can see which songs are popular within their group and which ones are not, and they have this information available to them before they rate each song.  But they are only able to see the popularity of the songs within their group (of eight groups within the larger social group).  They can’t see the popularity levels for the songs in the other 7 groups of the larger social group.  Also, in some cases the songs are ordered based on popularity (most popular listed first) and in other groups the popularity of each song is shown, but the list isn’t sorted by popularity.

What Salganik found was that when participants were made aware of the popularity of the songs (but the songs were not sorted based on popularity) that the more popular songs were rated more highly.  When the songs were actually sorted according to popularity, this affect was magnified.  So the popular songs became much more popular and the songs that were lower ranked became even less popular.

Salganik appeared at the Thought Leader Forum in 2011 and explained in more detail some of his findings from this study:

There’s this idea that the more people can see what other people are doing, the more they’re going to find the best thing. But in fact, what we see is that when people can see what other people are doing, they start following people, who are actually following other people who are following other people. And this process of following can become decoupled from the underlying reality.

To give a concrete example from these experiments, there is one song, “Lockdown” by 52 Metro, again a song no one has heard of by a band no one has heard of. In one world, this song came in first. It was the most downloaded
song. In another world, this exact same song came in 40th out of 48. This exact same song competing against the exact same other songs.

But you can see to the extent that when we have these kinds of feedback processes, when people are following what other people are doing, slight initial fluctuations at the beginning can become locked in, and then that leads to
very different outcomes, even for the exact same song.

Isn’t that fascinating?  All of this points to a fundamental truth: We as human beings gravitate to that which other human beings have identified as being ‘popular’.  We trust each other and seek out input when we are choosing, especially when given a wide variety to choose from, as the participants in Salganik’s study were given.

The takeaway for your business?  That much of the purchase decision the average customer makes is simply based on feedback from other customers.  Which is exactly why your business should be embracing and engaging with its most passionate customers so that they can help connect with other customers before they make a purchase.

Remember, rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars, they are rock stars because they have fans.  If you want to be a rock star brand, you need to learn to connect with your most passionate customers in much the same way that rock stars do.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Since this study was rooted in music (where ‘quality’ is more subjective), does that mean peer pressure has less impact on the popularity of products such as say, travel luggage, where the criteria for what defines a quality product is less subjective?

Pic via Flickr user Gonzalo Baeza  

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Sharing Your Expertise Without Being ‘The Expert’

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Here’s the transcript from tonight’s #Blogchat.

If you think about it, there’s a lot of seemingly contradictory advice being passed around about how to improve your blog.  On the one hand, one of the best arguments for blogging is that a blog allows you to share your expertise.  This is completely true and one of the best arguments in favor of blogging.

However, one of the problems that many bloggers of all stripes encounter is a lack of interaction and participation on their blog.  They create this place where they can share their expertise, and then no one wants to talk to them.

Often, there’s a reason why.  Because experts are scary people.  When you encounter an expert, the assumption is that they know more than you do.  And for many people it’s very intimidating to discuss a topic with someone that you believe knows far more about said topic than you do.

This is exactly why #Blogchat has a ‘No experts allowed’ rule.  Because when people are identified as the expert, what that really signals to everyone else is that you’re not the expert here.  And that shuts down communication.

So if you are the blogger, you need to walk a fine line of sharing your expertise without coming off as ‘The Expert’.  It’s a very tricky proposition, and even veteran bloggers struggle with this.  For example, I recently wrote a post that I was really excited about.  The topic was a bit more advanced and I envisioned it as creating a more high-level marketing discussion.

Instead, it got zero comments.  Because when you start a conversation at a more advanced level, you are setting the participation barrier at a high level for your readers.  For example, if you start a 301-level conversation about a topic, anyone that feels that they are below that level or ‘not as smart’ as the writer, likely won’t comment.

So if you are blogging to establish your expertise and also want to have engagement on your blog, you need to strike a balance between the two.  You need to share your expertise, but not in a way that discourages your readers from engaging with you.

That’s what we’ll discuss tonight at #Blogchat: How do you strike a balance between sharing your expertise and building engagement on your blog?  Please join us at 8pm Central tonight (3-2-2014) for the discussion.  Come on, who wants to watch the Oscars anyway?

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How to Better Track the Ability of Your Marketing Efforts to Drive Sales

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Yesterday’s post from Kerry on a Ford Blogger Outreach program she’s involved with led to a fascinating discussion in the comments on tracking the effectiveness of marketing channels in driving sales.  Thanks to Jerome, Hugh and Kevin for chiming in with their thoughts.  The point was made that it would be difficult to track actual sales that resulted from the blogger outreach, then again it would likely be even moreso with offline marketing channels such as television or billboard advertising.

So then the question becomes how does a brand do two things:

1 – Better track actual sales generated from marketing efforts.  In other words, how can brands better understand which marketing touch point ultimately converted into a sale.

2 – Give its customers the tools they need to help convert those sales.  And which customers should have these tools?

First, let’s talk tracking.  If your marketing efforts have an online element, there’s really no excuse not to at least attempt to track online conversations generated, if not actual sales.  Typically this is done with coding, like a coupon or sales code for tracking purchases or now hashtags are being used more frequently to track online conversations.  The great thing about hashtags is they can be used in print and television advertising as well.  It’s a bit more difficult on radio, other than ‘Like us on Facebook!’ or ‘Tell ’em Jim sent you!’.

It’s imperative to think backwards and ask yourself ‘If this marketing campaign generates sales, how would we be able to track that?’  Other than measuring metrics and looking for clues, think about how you can give customers ways to signal to you that they are either driving sales via word of mouth, or that they interacted with your marketing and decided to purchase.  This approach still isn’t perfect or foolproof (for example if a customer had 4 different encounters with you marketing via different channels, it’s difficult to determine which channel by itself truly generated the purchase, if any).  But it gives you a headstart.

Now as for giving customers the tools they need to help convert sales.  This is important because it’s critical to distinguish between giving referral tools to everyone (such as ‘Refer 5 friends and win a $50 gift card!) versus giving tools to only certain customers.

For example, yesterday Kerry talked about the blogger outreach she’s doing with Ford.  And let’s say when she picked up the C-Max, Ford gave her some advice/training on how she could tell others about the car, if she wanted to.  Maybe use this particular hashtag on Twitter, maybe give them this code for an extended test drive, etc.

But what if Kerry got the C-Max and then hated it?  And here’s Ford, that had given her the tools and ability to tell other customers about her experience with the C-Max, without considering that Kerry might hate it!  

On the other hand, what if Ford gives Kerry the C-Max, then a few days later they follow up with her to see how her experience is going.  Kerry communicates to Ford that she’s in love with the car and has already been telling others about it.  At that point, Ford gives Kerry the tools they want her to have to attempt to refer sales to them, etc.  Ford waits until Kerry has identified to the brand that she is pleased with the C-Max.  It’s a bit more work, but from Ford’s end it pays to sort of qualify Kerry as being excited about the C-Max, then giving her the tools and ability to share her excitement with other customers!  For example in Kerry’s example she’s already proactively created her own hashtag to help Ford track conversations she is generating about her experience, she’s also reached out to Ford to see if they could transfer the car to other friends locally and let them drive it for a period.

So with the tracking it pays to first think about what actions you want your marketing efforts to result in.  It could be sales, or perhaps another action that your brand has tracked in the past as being an indicator of a future sale.  For example Ford might want to track test drives that bloggers in its outreach program generate because it has found that in X% of the test drives, a purchase is made.  So Ford may want to track test drives (it also gives them a way to track the conversion rate from test drive referrals from bloggers vs the larger customer base to see if there’s a noticeable difference).

Figuring out what action to track also needs to consider the audience for your message.  For example, if the marketing effort is aimed at a wide audience, like a television spot, something like a hashtag makes more sense because it can help you track activities toward the bottom of the sales funnel, where you’re in the awareness stage versus action.  But with a more precise effort like a blogger outreach, it makes sense to track actions closer to an end sale since the people involved would be able to have more individual contact with potential customers, plus they would likely have a closer relationship with them.

As always, the more planning you invest, the better results you’ll see.

The question I’d like to pose is, should your strategy for what to track vary according to the marketing channel used?  For example, if you run a television spot should you focus on trying to track increased conversation (hashtags) or should a sale be the goal (call now!).  Do certain channels lend themselves to different outcomes and different tracking strategies?  What do you think?

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Blogger Outreach: How Ford is Getting it Right

Last November, I replied to a tweet from my friend, C.C. Chapman. Given the choice, C.C. asked, would you prefer a free Tesla or a free Mustang. The replies came fast and clearly favored the Tesla, but I’m a muscle car enthusiast, so I replied that I’d take the Mustang.


That same day, I received a direct message from someone working with Ford, inviting me to an Orlando-area event for women bloggers.

Although late November is a busy time, I attended the event, and sat next to Chaun Avery, Orlando Regional Ford Lincoln Sales Operations Manager at Ford Motor Company. We talked about Ford’s new models, some of which we’d get to see later that afternoon. I casually mentioned that I’d be interested in an electric car, but didn’t want the hassle of finding an outlet to plug it in away from home. That’s when Chaun recommended I try the C-Max, which recharges every time you brake.

I drove the car that afternoon, and already hated to give it up.

Chaun offered me an extended test drive, and after a few emails, I was at her office, signing some simple forms to borrow the car in a “blogger loan.” She came out for a test drive, explained the car’s features, and sent me on my way.

That was it. No hard sell. No sell, period. Brilliant!

Here’s what happened. I loved the car. My family loved the car. I tweeted some pictures of the car, including a disclosure that I’d received a free extended test drive.

People asked, enviously, how I’d managed to get an extended test drive. “I asked,” was the simple answer, although of course I happened to meet the right person to ask! I drove the car to work, and let my co-workers see it. I drove Kim Garst to lunch when she happened to be near my office one day, and let her check it out.

When Lynette Young came to Orlando, I contacted Chaun and let her know Lynette was in the market for a hybrid car and would probably love driving the C-Max as much as I did. Lynette and Chaun exchanged some paperwork, and I handed over my new favorite car for a week. (Of course, I got it back afterward.) Lynette loved the car, too. She even tweeted about it.

For marketers keeping track, this entire process has involved very little cost to Ford: one event, social monitoring, targeted outreach and a genuine passion for letting people try the cars.

And the smartest move on Ford’s part? No move at all. Hand over the keys, and let me drive the car.

Well played, Ford, well played.

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How NASCAR is Building Its Fanbase With Social Media

While most sports finish its season with its biggest event (such as the NFL with the Super Bowl), NASCAR is different in that its biggest race is the season’s first, the Daytona 500.  And two years ago marked the most bizarre Daytona 500 on record.  First, rain showers moved into Florida, postponing the race’s noon start-time on Sunday to noon the next day.  Then the rains picked up again the next morning, and NASCAR made the decision to move the race to 7pm Monday, marking the first time the race had been postponed as well as the first time it would run in primetime.

The race began and for the first time all weekend, things got back to normal.  But all that changed with 40 laps left in the race.  There was a wreck, and what typically happens with a wreck is that there will be debris on the track and possibly liquid from the cars involved.  So trucks will be sent on the track to clear the track and while this is happening the race will be put under caution.  Meaning cars will stay on the track, but their speed will be greatly reduced (from 200 MPH to 50-60 MPH) and their position is frozen and so is the racing until the debris is cleared from the track and officials signal to the drivers to resume the race.

Driver Juan Pablo Montoya had reported some problems with his race car just before the wreck, and during the caution as his car was circling the track, something ‘broke’ and he lost control of his car and it spun out of control into one of the trucks on the track to clean up the mess.  When his car collided with the cleanup truck, the truck literally exploded, creating a huge fireball.  Luckily, both Montoya and the truck driver were fine.  NASCAR immediately ordered all drivers to stop their cars on the track where they were, as they cleaned up this additional mess.

And then, serendipity struck.  As the drivers were sitting in their cars on the track unable to move them, it turns out that one of them, Brad Keselowski, actually had his phone with him in the car, and took a picture of the track, and tweeted it to Twitter.  Marking the first time in the sport’s history that a driver had taken a picture and shared it during a race.

Brad Kesolowski, Twitter, Daytona 500, Fire, TideAnd just like that, NASCAR discovered social media.  Brad gained 55,000 followers just in the hour or so it took to clean up the mess, and during the downtime while waiting for the race to resume, Brad’s sudden fame on Twitter became the story.  Fox Sports showed Brad out tweeting and other drivers talking to him asking him what in the world he was doing.  Over the next few weeks, several of NASCAR’s drivers and on-air personalities started using Twitter, and the sport began pushing Twitter as a channel to connect before, during and after the race.  Typically with NASCAR races, since they are run outside, if there are any weather issues such as rain, the race will be delayed until the weather clears.  During this downtime, drivers will use social media to stay engaged with the fans, while the broadcast teams will interview the drivers on-air during the delays.  Fox has reported that some of its best rating periods for races actually come during delays when its able to interview drivers and get ‘behind the scenes’ chats and give fans a better sense of what their lives are like at the track.

On Sunday night, NASCAR kicked off its 2014 season with the Daytona 500, and again dealt with a rain delay that caused the race to be postponed until primetime for only the 2nd time ever.  But the wait was worth it for NASCAR and many of its fans, as the sports most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr, won The Great American Race.

And then he celebrated by joining Twitter.

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What I love about Dale’s Twitter account is how he’s using it.  Even though the account has only been up for a couple of days, Dale has been giving fans like me a behind-the-scenes look at what he’s been experiencing since winning the Daytona 500, including pics from Victory Lane, and trips to do media appearances with David Letterman and ESPN.  This is exactly the type of content that fans want to see.  And to NASCAR’s credit, the organization has been very open to its drivers using social media.  They immediately saw the impact that Brad’s tweet from 2012 and how it resonated with fans, and the sport realizes the ability of Twitter in particular to drive interest in ongoing races.  Plus, NASCAR has always been a fan-friendly sport.

As for Dale’s Twitter account, the sport’s most popular driver is pretty popular on Twitter too, racking up over 300,000 followers in his first 6 hours on the site.  If Earnhardt can parlay this fast start into his first points championship this season, the business of NASCAR will get a huge boost.  And if the past two years are any indication, its fans on social media will be along for the ride.

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Skateboards, Sex, and Why We Are Always Chasing Numbers

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Last night I watched a Frontline episode called Generation Like.  The episode followed several teens that were learning how to use social media and learning how to create content that brought them popularity.  Switching from interesting to depressing, the show walked us through how teens were training themselves and each other to learn what type of content drove social sharing online.

From a business standpoint, the episode focused on how teens were building audiences for their content, then leveraging those audiences to secure payments (typically in the form of sponsorships) from brands.  Often it was in the form of products that would then be used in their videos, but sometimes cash was involved as well.  The story that I thought was quite telling (and also depressing) was of a 13 year-old skateboarder that was trying to create videos of his skateboarding that would be popular enough for him to make money off them so he could help his impoverished family.  He started out making videos just of him performing skateboarding tricks and stunts, but found that those only generated enough views on YouTube to land him sponsorships from companies in the form of skateboarding gear and clothes.  So he had to find a way to get more views for his videos (because more views means more money).  He started (again, 13 year-old boy) adding older girls to his videos, showing him dancing provocatively with them and performing sexual poses, basically videos that had little or nothing to do with skateboarding.  He would also make videos where he went around doing all sorts of silly stunts with complete strangers.  These videos had far greater reach than just his skateboarding videos, which meant he could make money off them, versus just getting product for his skateboarding videos.  The kid then talked about a friend of his that was a far better skateboarder than he was, but the friend admitted that he couldn’t get high views for his videos (even though his tricks and skills were better) because his videos didn’t include the sexual overtones and raunchy humor that were making his less talented friend’s videos more popular.

These teens are getting a crash course in a basic reality of this social media age: If you build an audience for your content, that opens doors for you.  It’s no different from how I leveraged this blog’s readership and my Twitter following to help land a book deal.  When I was talking to publishers about Think Like a Rock Star, they wanted to know about my online audience.  Every readership and following stat I could show them pointed to a greater online reach and the ability to more easily move people toward a piece of content.

But aside from the business implications, the episode also touched on how the teens wanted and even needed to see their content be Liked online.  Teens would dissect each other’s Facebook pages and question why one girl’s cover photo got hundreds of Likes compared to the others.  At one point a small group of teens were analyzing each other’s Facebook content and they all agreed that when the girls posted selfies that these would get more Likes than when the guys did.

The race for Likes is a race for validation.  Just as the teens do it in their circles, their parents are as well.  Everyone reading this blog knows that in general, if you have bigger numbers (more followers, more Likes), your content is typically viewed as being more trustworthy.  As I was talking to Daniel about last night on Facebook, the best content doesn’t always get the most exposure, it’s typically the content that’s shared via the largest platform that spreads further.  We want to see bigger numbers associated with ourselves and our content because it helps to validate that we are helping others, and quite honestly, we need the external validation that the numbers provide on some level to enhance our own sense of self-worth.

Yet our need for numbers to provide external validation isn’t a social media condition, it’s a human condition.  This is a popularity contest that’s been around much longer than Facebook has.  When I was in 9th grade I attended an extremely small country school that didn’t have a student body large enough to go past the 9th grade, so it ended there.  My ‘graduating’ class in the 9th grade had 9 students and only 6 of them went on to the 10th grade.  Moving onto the 10th grade meant literally changing schools, and where I lived, there was only one option, transferring to the much bigger high school in a nearby city.  While the school itself offered a much better education, for a shy introvert it was at first a nightmare.  I went from having 8 classmates in the 9th grade, to having 175 in my first year of high school in the 10th grade.  What’s worse, the kids at the high school had already made their friends in the 9th grade, so everyone had established friendships and even cliques by the time I arrived in the 10th grade as a complete outsider.  In fact my 10th grade in high school was definitely one of the most miserable of my life.  But by midway or so through 11th grade, I started making friends, and got to be a bit popular with classmates.  I remember that in 10th grade I bought an annual, which students would get to sign for each other.  I hated my 10th grade annual because I only had a handful of signatures from classmates, but I loved my 11th grade annual.  By then I had made friends and I got a lot of signatures.  Those signatures were my ‘numbers’ and external validation that I was no longer an outsider.  I still to this day remember asking someone to sign my annual and they said ‘Wow Mack, you have so many signatures already!’, and I remember how proud I was of those signatures.

Looking back, I realize now that everyone else was doing the same thing I was, they were seeking signatures from each other, the more the better.  If you went to sign someone’s annual and they already had a ton of signatures, that mostly meant that they were popular, and that everyone wanted to sign their annual.  Nevermind that most of the signatures were a result of me asking them to sign it (follow me on Twitter and I will follow you back, so both our numbers go up).  Ironically, I see the same thing happening today.  Often I will have a stranger tweet me ‘Hey Mack I followed you, will you follow me back?’  The need to raise our numbers, and the sense of self-worth we tie to the numbers, is always there.

With any luck, either from enlightenment or simply tired legs, we learn to stop chasing numbers and external validation.  We begin to realize that we don’t need others to tell us things about ourselves, that we should be confident in our own abilities and value.  I’m not completely there yet, but since those days as an insecure 10th grader I am relying less on strangers to tell me things about myself that I already know.  I hope you are as well.

Pic via Flickr user LeoHidalgo

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Brands, Stop Chasing New Customers and Ignoring Your Existing Ones

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Now is a good time to be in the market for a new satellite television provider.  The two main competitors, Dish and DirecTv, are throwing all kinds of incentives at you.  iPad minis, free DVR upgrades, free Visa cards.  Free, free, free.

The catch is, you typically have to be a new customer to take advantage of these offers.

It’s backwards, and it’s bullshit. When you reward new customers instead of existing ones you are training your customers that it pays to leave you.  Valuing new customers and ignoring loyal ones basically mocks your repeat customers.

Many industries do this, especially when the space is dominated by 2-3 competitors with very similar offerings.  Companies have to constantly offer new and additional incentives for new customers because they aren’t giving loyal customers any incentive to remain loyal.

Rock stars typically do the exact opposite.  Fans are rewarded.  Fans get special access, they get VIP treatment.  They typically get the best seats at concerts, they are the ones that get secret shows, they are the ones that get first access to new products and breaking news.  With rock stars, new customers are ignored in much the same way that many markets ignore existing customers.

I’ve talked about this before, but you build loyalty and create fans with rewards, not incentives.  Offering me products if I will switch to your company doesn’t win my loyalty to your brand, it simply gives me an incentive to take advantage of the offer.  I may have to sign a 2-year contract to get all the goodies, but if you have ignored me and my business, guess what happens in 2 years?  I will switch to your competitor, because they just offered me prizes and incentives for switching.

You are training your customers to leave you.

It’s not about offering incentives for new customers, it’s about offering rewards for existing customers.  Because referrals from happy customers is a far better marketing tool for you.

If the goal is to acquire new customers then you need to follow the rock star marketing model: Focus on delighting your existing customers, with the understanding that this will encourage your existing customers to become fans who will bring you new customers.   

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How to Turn Your Blog Into A Platform, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

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Here’s the link to the transcript from tonight’s #Blogchat

Tonight at #Blogchat (2-16-2014) we will discuss how to turn your blog into a platform for your ideas.  Many of us blog because we want to share our ideas and our voice with the world.  But if you are truly committed to having your ideas reach as many people as possible, then you need to build a platform.  That’s what we will talk about tonight at #Blogchat.

To turn your blog into a platform, there’s certain steps you need to take:

1 – Understand that it will take a LOT of work to build your platform.  Look at the most successful bloggers, the one that have built a platform for their ideas.  They blog almost every day.  They create content in multiple forms.  Many of them also have podcasts, they are active on Twitter and Facebook, as well as other tools.  The point is, there is a lot of hard work involved in building a platform.

It’s great to want to see your blog grow and reach readership milestones, etc.  But you need to be honest with yourself about the work involved in reaching those goals.  Granted, as you reach your goals, more doors will open for you, but you have to first invest the work necessary to get there.

2 – Decide why you want a blogging platform.  What’s the end goal here?  Do you want to leverage your platform to launch a public speaking career?  Do you want to eventually write a book?  Why do you need a platform?  What goals are you trying to reach?  Once you’ve figured out why you need a platform, that will help you greatly in developing your strategy for building one.

3 – Narrow your focus.  It’s almost impossible to build a platform around 5 different topics, even if they are complimentary.  Focus on 1-2 core topics that you want to build your platform on.  Or think of it this way, if someone mentions you to a friend, that friend would say “Oh I know her, she’s the ______ gal!”  What would go in that blank?  Do you want to be known as “The WordPress gal!” or “The Facebook gal!” or “The #TwitterChatNameHere gal!”  Think about how you want others to know you.

4 – Build the Castle first, then the kingdom.  What will be the foundation of your platform?  In many cases, I think your blog is a great choice, so focus on first building your blog.  Think about how you can build your blog and turn it into a platform to help spread your ideas.  Think about how you can create better content and MORE content.  Simply writing better posts and blogging more often will be huge drivers in helping you grow your blog’s audience.

5 – Build a support network for your platform.  How can you use other tools to help build your platform?  For example, I use Twitter extensively to drive traffic back to this blog.  In the last year I’ve also started growing an email newsletter that helps send people here.  You want to think about how you can use other tools AWAY from your blog to help build out your blog.

 

So those are some of the areas we will cover in tonight’s #Blogchat when we talk about building a platform for your ideas.  #Blogchat will start tonight at 8pm Central.  I think this is an incredibly important topic, and here’s one reason why I think building a platform for your ideas is so important.

Since my book Think Like a Rock Star came out, I have become enamored with not only my book’s progress, but I also watch when other books are released by people in this space.  I want to see what I can learn from their efforts, but I also want to compare their results against my own.

One thing I began to notice a few months ago was that even though TLARS had excellent reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, some books that didn’t have as many positive reviews were selling better than mine.  I started trying to figure out what they were doing differently, then I realized that in every instance, these authors had a bigger platform to promote their book from than I did.  They had the popular blog PLUS they had 100,000 followers on Twitter PLUS they had 50,000 people on their email list PLUS they had a popular podcast, etc etc etc.  It helped me realize that simply having a great idea/book isn’t enough, you need to have a platform in place that helps carry that great idea to other people.

Tonight let’s talk about how you can build the platform that your ideas deserve.  See you at #Blogchat!

Pic via Flickr user PhotoAtelier

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Sharing Your Voice Versus Building a Platform

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Yesterday was the best traffic day ever on this blog.  I checked and the 2nd best traffic day came in January of 2011 and the 3rd best in July of 2009.  In other words, it took a long time and a lot of work to reach yesterday.

Something else I noticed as I was going through my Google Analytics yesterday was to look at how the day-to-day traffic increased.  Today I would immediately know that something was ‘wrong’ if I ‘only’ got 500 visitors tomorrow, but back in 2010 or 2011, that would have been cause for celebration.  Hopefully in 2-3 years, if I get the same amount of traffic as I did yesterday, I’ll be disappointed as well.

Whenever we talk about the significance of blogging, people always offer that they blog because they want to share their voice.  I’m a huge believer in the power of blogging for this very reason.

But there’s also incredible power in sharing your voice and using your blog to build a platform for your ideas.  And I mean ‘build’ literally as it is a LOT of work to build a blogging platform.  Since June of 2009, I’ve currently written 655 posts here.  So many hours spent on creating content.  But that content is helping me to build a platform.  In June of 2009, this blog averaged about 84 visitors a day.  Currently I get that here every hour.  That’s a huge increase in exposure for my ideas.  And yet, as I was giddy watching my traffic go up yesterday, and as I saw yesterday’s post top 250 retweets, I realized there are many bloggers that see every post get that type of exposure.

Your platform has incredible value.  Yes, it takes a ton of time and energy to build it, but that platform can open doors for you.  It brings your ideas to more people.  If you are a brand, it expands the reach of your content to more potential customers.  It becomes ‘proof of concept’ if you want to sell a publisher on why they should buy your book idea.

Want to know a secret?  Many of the people that are viewed as thought leaders today in this space started building their platform 5-10 years ago.  No one knew who they were then, but today they have a blog that’s read by 100,000 people every month, they have 100,000 people following them on Twitter and have an email list with 50,000 names on it.

All because they invested the time and work to build a platform that would allow them to share their ideas with more people.  Isn’t your voice worth the same attention? 

Pic via Flickr user nigelhowe

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That Esurance Super Bowl Stunt and Finding the Real Value of Social Media

Esurancetweet

So here’s the deal: Instead of buying a Super Bowl ad, Esurance bought the first ad AFTER the Super Bowl.  And they saved $1.5 Million in the process, then gave away that money.  If you wanted to win the cash, all you had to do was tweet the hashtag #ESuranceSave30 within 36 hours of the ad being aired.

AdWeek lauded the stunt as a huge success, and cited these results in making that claim:

• 5.4 million uses of the #EsuranceSave30 hashtag
• More than 200,000 entries within the first minute of the Esurance commercial airing
• 1.4 million hashtag uses in the first hour and 4.5 million in the first 24 hours
• 2.6 billion social impressions on Twitter
• 332,000 views of the Esurance commercial on YouTube
• 261,000 new followers on the official Esurance Twitter account—an increase of nearly 3,000 percent
• A 12x spike in visits to the Esurance website in the first hours of the sweepstakes

Does that look like a successful social media sweepstakes to you?

Augie Ray has an exhaustive analysis of the social sharing results Esurance saw from this stunt, and is critical of the rush to laud these results as being a sign of a win:

I am deeply disappointed to see Esurance’s Super Bowl sweepstakes results widely celebrated. Six years into the social era, I thought we had reached a certain point of social media maturity where we realize that fans and followers are not leads and that relationships are built through shared values and meaningful interactions. I naively thought that we had turned a corner, with widespread understanding that winning in social media occurs by providing great experiences that build long-term relationships and not with campaigns that yield short-term spikes of activity. I was wrong.

It’s easy to look at the results and be wowed.  But as Augie pointed out in his post, let’s not lose sight of the fact that these engagement figures are based on Esurance giving away $1.5 Million dollars.  I’m betting any of us could do the same thing on Twitter and get a shit-ton of new followers.

Augie also points out in his post that ESurance has already lost 15% of the followers they gained from this stunt.

And to me, this is the key point.  How well does Esurance convert these new followers and visitors into customers?  A 12X spike in website traffic is significant, as long as those visitors didn’t simply go to the site for 15 seconds because of this sweepstakes, and then never return.

On the other hand, if Esurance found a way to stay engaged with those new website visitors, then that does have value for the brand.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the people that engaged with the brand immediately after the ad likely had no loyalty toward the brand, they just wanted to win the cash.  So while the ‘eye-popping’ social engagement numbers look good, they are the social media equivalent of farting in an elevator.  It gets everyone’s attention…till the doors open up and then everyone moves on with their lives.

The ultimate success of this stunt will be dictated by how many new customer relationships are created as a result.  If Esurance built into this ways to leverage the new exposure into an ongoing relationship, then the chances of this stunt being a success increase dramatically.

My guess is they (and their agency) are thrilled with the extra ‘pr value’ they got from this.

What do you think, do the above results make this a successful initiative in your mind?