5 Tips From Social Science on How to Seed Content
I’ll be honest — I’ve been part of numerous conversations in agency settings where we’ve discussed an “influencer strategy” (building relationships and seeding content with influential individuals) without a clear idea of how effective it might be. Will a young Canadian actually be influenced by what beer brand a semi-famous Canadian indie band is drinking? Doubts like these have continually vexed me, so I was pretty excited to pick up Paul Adam’s (formerly of Facebook and Google) well researched social science-based book about influencers, Grouped.
Over the past ten years, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory— the idea that certain people hold vastly greater influence and importance when it comes to spreading new ideas (aka influencers) — has been taken as gospel by many marketers.
In contrast to Gladwell’s theory, Grouped says that social science research points to a paradigm whereby information is spread through interconnected groups, of which we are all a part of. Within these groups we are connected to everyone with ties ranging from strong (i.e. the inner circle) to weak (i.e. acquaintances). The average person has about five to 10 strong ties. Adams claims that our strong ties are the people whose opinions have the greatest influence over us.
As for the opinion of that “influencer” on Twitter? Not as important.
“In independent studies, Forrester, Polara, and Edelman all found that people were three to four times more likely to trust a friend or acquaintance than a blogger or expert for product purchase advice.”
With this paradigm in mind, I want to share and expand on a few of the tips Adams provides for marketers that I think are the most helpful:
#1. Seed with a large number of regular people
“Instead of looking for overly influential people, businesses should look for regular people who are likely to be interested in what they have to say. Targeting a large number, potentially in the thousands, is more likely to spread ideas than trying to find a small number of influential individuals.”
For example, if I was working for a tech company targeting small business owners, I’d locate entrepreneurs. For another client my target might be moms, or young women into fashion. You might find them in a social listening exercise from a mention on their blog or Twitter feed, but rather than target a handful of super users, target a lot of people with average followings. As a bonus, you might find them to be genuinely delighted to hear from you!
#2. Focus on the emotional connection between close ties
“We communicate with the same 5–10 people 80% of the time. Keller Fay found that 27 percent of our conversations are with our spouse/partner, 25 percent are with a family member, and 10 percent are with a best friend… only 5 percent of our conversations are with acquaintances, and only 2 percent are with strangers.”
Think about who your audience is thinking about — the people closest to them — and build marketing campaigns that revolve around these close social bonds. To use an example from the Adams’ book, 1–800–flowers.com did a campaign on Facebook that had mothers vote on which bouquet they would most like to receive for Mother’s Day, to be seen by their children in their Facebook newsfeeds.
To take another example from Grey (my former agency), Playtex Tampons built a Facebook app that allowed their young audience to select three friends to be quizzed about, leveraging their friends’ Facebook profile information. The person that the contestant knew best was declared their #BFF (a sharable status update).
Basically, be specific (i.e. here’s some heart disease awareness info “you might want to pass along to your Dad”) rather than general (i.e. “tell all your friends!”). Design everything around who your audience might share with something, and why. Hitting the right emotional note is key.
As a marketer you’ll be much more aligned with the way people actually think (and therefore more successful) if you encourage them to share with or invite only a couple of strong ties.
#3. Use the methods of communication favoured by close ties
“Aside from face to face interaction, people communicate with their strong ties primarily through voice calls and text messages, as they view those as being the most reliable communications channels… Research on social channels has shown that they are primarily being used to strengthen existing relationships, rather than build new relationships… On average, people have 160 friends on Facebook yet communicate directly with only four to six of them.”
This is an interesting idea; when’s the last time you thought about phone calls or text messages in your marketing campaign? It definitely encourages digital marketers like me to think more about how we can craft marketing communications that can jump from online or mass communication to the offline communications channels that strong ties are using. The idea of a grassroots program involving reach-out to community groups, meet-up groups etc. (i.e. real-life social circles) comes to mind for me.
#4. Measure your reach as brand enthusiasts x 5
With respect to analytics for social channels, it’s very tempting to think of the potential network of your fans as them plus 160+ of their Facebook friends — but we know this isn’t true.
“Reach,” or word of mouth, is however a very important metric. To get an approximation of reach in lieu of hard numbers, think about your brand fans — i.e. people who have opted-in to engage with you via Facebook, email etc. — and include the potential reach of their close ties (+5 people) as a key performance metric.
As Adams points out, if you have 500,000 fans, each with 5–10 people to whom they are highly connected, that’s potentially 5-million people hearing about your brand from someone they trust. That’s a pretty rosy number.
#5. Design for repeatability
Rather than asking for time-consuming one-off interactions with your brand fans, design interaction for repeated exposure through lightweight actions. Encouraging people to repeat visible, lightweight actions is a great way to reinforce behavioural change among your audience, and will increase the likelihood of conversion within their networks. Word-of-mouth conversion is more effective when someone hears something multiple times from multiple people.
So for example, if you're designing a contest that requires a person to visit your Facebook page to enter, consider designing the contest to allow for multiple sweepstake entries that take 30 seconds to complete, rather than one entry that takes 3 minutes. This will encourage the behavior of returning to your Facebook page, as well as potentially offer multiple occasions for their friends to see online interaction with your brand.
So what about “Influencers”?
You might be thinking, what about the impact of notable bloggers with large followings like Yummy Mummy’s Erica Ehm or social media expert Scott Monty? In my opinion, these folks have become more like media and act more like media than Influencers. As for Adams, he doesn't specifically address the superblogger set, but if I were to take anything away from his book on their role it’s basically that while they do have visibility, they don’t have nearly as much influence as close ties do, and therefore aren't as important.
That said, Adams’s overall paradigm lends itself to an alternate definition of Influencer. I think they are the everyday guru’s in your life: your colleague who’s into indie music, your girlfriend’s brother who knows everything about cars, your son who’s always up on the latest tech gadgets, or your friend who’s just been through the whole baby thing.
They are the people who might be interested in your product or content, especially if it’s niche and fits nicely within a hobby/interest area (i.e. it’s about a tech device… not toilet paper). These people don't necessarily have a blog or a Twitter channel, much less one dedicated to a niche subject matter. But as subject matter experts they are influential not only with their close ties, but with some weaker ties too, making them an ideal, more or less “regular person” to target in a seeding program.
As a marketer, you won’t know your influencers by name (if you’re doing it right, because there will be too many to track). You can find them by leveraging the power of social listening, data-driven sponsored advertising, strategic partnerships in the community or with other organizations and even grassroots seeding. Focus on getting them to opt-in and continue to give, give give in your content marketing strategy.
Don't pay influencers, pay celebrities
While the “traditional” Influencer Strategy route of seeding your content with 30 high profile Bloggers is not necessarily a bad idea, I think the issue is that it’s not enough. It likely won’t provide enough penetration within the countless social circles out there to reach a significant portion of your target demographic, e.g. Moms with babies in Canada. With pay to play bloggers, the ROI is probably just not there.
That sort of program will however provide a bunch of nifty screenshots of “mentions” to share with clients and executives — i.e. shiney objects. But if you’re like me, you want to make a little money go a long way and do stuff that makes a difference to business.
If there is a budget for influencers and you are determined to spend it, I would instead encourage you to look at hiring one bonafide celebrity (or more than one if you can afford it) to co-create branded social media content (articles, videos etc.). I've been part of great campaigns involving Curtis Stone for Great Grains Cereal, Sarah Richardson for The Missing Children’s Society of Canada, and MTV’s Jessi Cruickshank for Alesse. I really love what Calvin Klein recently did with Kendall Jenner and Justin Bieber (among others) by having them post casual, intimate selfies of themselves in their Calvin’s on Instagram (#mycalvins).
The pay-off with celebrities is not so much about reach as it is about brand building. It’s about borrowing the celebrity’s sub-cultural meaning to furnish your brand with personality and authenticity, and create great content that will resonate with your audience.
