Refocusing Popularity Marketing – Thoughts Inspired by @samfiorella

As part of my research for the graphic I’m creating about how social media, search etc integrates into a full marketing plan, I’ve been trying to get into the minds of how other people perceive social tools. Figure it’ll be that much harder to express why there’s a different, useful slant, without starting where the current prevailing views are.

That led me to zero in on some of the smarter articles on influence by people whose I respect.

I was reading an article on Influence marketing by an oft-brilliant acquaintance named Sam Fiorella entitled “Get Off Your Ass; Identify Your Own Influencers”. It’s a good read – quick example:

Can we change the public discourse from what a social influence score is or isn’t and, understanding that this virus is incurable, focus on how to successfully use it to our advantage? What would that look like?

Found that utterly fascinating, because that’s basically the topic of a book I wrote in 2009 called “Secrets to Social Media Success”. Totally different focus than the idea of simply finding so-called influencers and getting them to market your company for you, which is really just popularity marketing.

I’m in the process of updating it so it’s a little hard to find at the moment. If you want a copy of the new version, join the newsletter by sending any blank email to zerogridlock@aweber.com. Back to popularity marketing though…

Does anyone else get the impression that relying on influencers and the hope of content to go viral is a type of marketing laziness? Can we not do better than that?

Popularity marketing can be gamed because it plays the odds, and is often based on implied reciprocity of one kind or another. Add to this that most people don’t read before they share, and all we really have in the end is an Internet traffic jam, with a few nice cars to look at while we sit in gridlock.

Here’s an idea;

Instead of finding the popular people in class and hoping that if you beg them to vote for class president, they’ll listen, maybe there’s a smarter way. Not just getting up off our asses and finding our own influencers.

What if we combine that with looking not just for the people with the biggest networks who talk the most, we drill down even further and find the pivotal people who actually care.

We could get to know them, just a handful, a representative sample, if you will, and talk to them like people.

We could figure out how we can serve our intended targets through them.

If our focus is on serving our ideal customers and clients to the best of our abilities, doesn’t it follow that the rest will take care of itself. That’s certainly been my experience.

Which is not to say I don’t market – as we discussed last time, I’m advocate of using every weapon at your disposal to win the war against business failure.

The conundrum, I realize is that only people and companies who truly care can achieve this.

So if you’re the head of your company, and you care, yes, you can make it a mandate that people in marketing reflect that in their advertising, content, social outreach, etc. But you can’t mandate caring.

You can attempt to hire passionate people who are also patient enough to wait for the effects of this conduct to kick in.

But how do you make that more teachable? Because some of the desire to serve, and further, to accept that the giving you do may not be reciprocated, HAS to be innate.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. In the mean time, click on the question mark and Twitter bird in the graphic below to reach Sam at his site or on Twitter.

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