For Social Media, Reach is found in the Long Tail!
Written by Paul Dunay on August 6, 2008 – 9:15 am -
When it comes to Social Media there has been tons of talk about those few influencers who are able to spread your message like wild fire. But finding those few influencers has been the proverbial challenge.
Several good books have been written about this topic by some really smart people. But when doing some data mining on my blog using a new tool called SM2 from Techrigy (special thanks to them for helping me get trained on this tool), I noted that the far reaching impact of my blog is found in the proverbial Long Tail. (see graphic below)
What this says is that the conversation about topics on my blog and where they are occurring is coming from the long tail (dang it, that Chris Anderson is right again!)
So what I think this means is that exclusively looking for reach with your social media initiatives by targeting a selected few influencers is a flawed concept (sorry Ed Keller from WOMMA). To me this graph says it needs to also contain a component that delivers adoption (ie Reach) through the Long Tail of bloggers out there.
The bottom line is Social Media is fluid so you might as well go with the flow!
Tags: , blogging, Communities, Interactive Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0
Posted in community marketing, conversational marketing, marketing 2.0 |
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August 8th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Paul,
Interesting post. I checked out SM2, nice tool. Your point about the Long Tail is well taken. It seems to me that it relates to the issues discussed by Clive Thompson in “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” at Fast Company earlier this year.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html?page=0%2C1
Referring to Duncan Watts’ assertion that Influentials do not catalyze social trends the way many who think about social networking believe, Thompson notes: “It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. ‘A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.’…He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.”