Viral Marketing – Is it about people, ideas or context?

von | Jan 22, 2008 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing

Is the tipping point toast? This is the title of a rather interesting article on fastcompany magazine.

There is a lot of thinking and research going on in order to find out, what will trigger a viral (marketing) explosion of any sort. Is it the people, the context or the actual idea? Or would it be a mixture of all? Most people will have read Malcolm Gladwells „Tipping Point“ or similar literature. In his book, all three are important, yet most marketers have started to focus too narrowly on the people part of the equation.

Now Gareth points me to an article to that article on fast company magazine. And it seems from this work that the ‚who‘ is not really what matters; instead it’s the context and, most importantly, the idea itself that matters the most when it comes to the spread of new things. Like in a forrest fire, where nobody would expect the person causing it to be highly influential or the match extremely flammable. Instead it is crystal clear that the forrest was ready for it…

„If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,“ Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an „accidental Influential.“

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. „And nobody,“ Watts says wryly, „will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.“

Duncan Watts, the originator of this not really new, yet still untrendy thought (I guess the context still isn’t right), calculated this with computer models:

That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but last year, Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. He programmed a group of 10,000 people, all governed by a few simple interpersonal rules. Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of „infecting“ another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The „people“ in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability–some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe. In essence, it was a virtual society

So, a computer model, a rather static even, I would assume, is behind this? Not sure if I want to really believe in the validity of this approach. But hey, I am a marketer – and it says in the article that us marketers are amongst the heaviest doubters of this research.

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn’t think it’s possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex–too weird and unpredictable–to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can’t most companies do it reliably?

True, damn it, very true. I wish there would be a reliable mechanism, of course I do. We do try to design built viral campaigns along the learnings of past campaigns, because that is the only thing we have.

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they’ve broken out. „They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they’ve identified the people who did it first, and then they go, ‚Okay, these are the Influentials!'“ But who’s to say those aren’t just Watts’s accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn’t their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

What you can do, and that is part of the conclusion of that article, is to offer a mechanism to spread your ideas to every single person who might actually be able to send it on to at least one other person. Doesn’t sound like a great strategy, but if your goal is maximum spread, why focus only on so called influencers – i.e. focus too narrow. Spread to everyone, as far and wide as your own resources allow you to. Start with the people you consider influencers, granted – you have to start somewhere, but once you’re done with those, include everyone else, too.

Downsides of Participation Inequality

von | Okt 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing

Jakob Nielsen has some interesting views about the downsides of the 1% rule that I blogged about. In his article
Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities he lists those „Downsides of Participation Inequality“

The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:

  • Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
  • Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
  • Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the „netroots,“ it will almost certainly lose because such candidates‘ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
  • Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.
  • Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

    • In addition, he also lists some point on „How to Overcome Participation Inequality“.
    But the main point still is: you can’t overcome participation inequality. You can only optimise the way content is produced an sorted, trying to make it more suitable and/or relevant for the average users.