One reason to have a lot of followers is to impress your grandparents and relatives who live in rural parts of the world.   The other reason you may covet a lot of followers is that you think more followers means more influence.  I hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t work that way.  A group of researchers analyzed over 54 million Twitter accounts and concluded:

popular users who have high indegree [indegree is just fancy talk for number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions

Of course I don’t need to analyze 54 million Twitter accounts to tell you that. Follower count is a potential signal of influence but, by itself, it is a pretty lousy signal. Twitterers with a lot of followers are often hard core spammers or just really aggressive salespeople.  Getting a high follower count is super easy…just follow a lot of people who automatically follow you back. Influence may lead to a lot of followers, but a lot of followers doesn’t lead to influence.

So how do you gain influence on Twitter? You do it the old fashioned way. Do something noteworthy, say smart things, entertain people, be interesting, piss people off or make people laugh. Or you could just be Ashton Kutcher…go figure.

It isn’t that people don’t like marketing gurus. Seth Godin has a lot of fans (myself included). The problem is that people don’t trust braggarts, especially marketing braggarts. You can tell someone what you do, but you can’t tell someone how well you do it with much credibility.

In order to gain credibility you have to earn trust. A good marketer figures out how to build trust. Bragging to total strangers about your unsubstantiated awesomeness is not the way to do this. Marketers know this. Marketing gurus know this very well. A true marketing guru doesn’t have to claim the guru title because other people do it for them.

*I made that up and we did no such study.

In this presentation, I highlight how businesses should be thinking about their brand and marketing efforts, given the rapidly evolving media landscape. This video is private and password protected. If you need the password, just send us a message on our contact page.

If you’d like to download the presentation slide deck click here.

I have to hand it to the magazine industry; at least they eat their own dog food. The magazine industry is spending $90 million on an ad campaign to convince the world of “The Power of Print.” They claim that both the internet and magazines are growing.

The “Power of Print” campaign states:

“What it proves, once again, is that a new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one. Just as movies didn’t kill radio. Just as TV didn’t kill movies. An established medium can continue to flourish so long as it continues to offer a unique experience.

Movies didn’t kill radio, but movies with sound killed silent movies.TV didn’t kill movies, but color TV killed black and white TV. The internet isn’t going to kill magazines, but it will force their evolution into something very different.

Fighting evolution is a bad idea. How will magazines evolve? I don’t know, but it most likely won’t involve cutting down trees, running paper through printing presses, loading tons of that paper on trucks and delivering generic content to millions of doorsteps. If the magazine folks want to avoid the fate of the Sears Catalog, they need to put down the quill, cut out the silly ad campaigns and innovate.

For more levity, check out the “Power of Print” YouTube video. Of course, they disabled the comments so feel free to leave your comments below.

I recently read a very interesting study (PDF) on “individual-level psychological processes shape collective outcomes such as the transmission and prominence of culture.” For normal people, this translates to “what content is compelling for people to share?” The researchers analyzed the top emailed stories from the New York Times and tried to determine what type of content people were likely to share. To save you a little time, they found that the following factors influence a person’s propensity to share:

1. More awe-inspiring content will be more viral
2. More practically useful content will be more viral
3. More surprising content will be more viral
4. Positively valenced content will be more viral than negatively valenced content
5. More affect-laden content will be more viral

This study was very thorough and they used sound research techniques and even some fancy math. They wisely controlled for a bunch of factors including:

• Article positioning
• Author fame
• Author sex
• Writing style
• Time of day
• Topic of article
• …and some other smart stuff, but you get the idea.

The study did a great job of determining reasons why someone might pass along an article after they read it, but the researchers failed to analyze what made people click on the article to begin with. Once an initial reader shares an article with their friends, the title of the article is going to be the deciding factor in determining whether their friends actually read it.

As publishers and marketers know, clever titles dramatically impact the percentage of people who will read content. For example, the difference between a 1% and 2% click-through rate means that any given article starts out with double the number of people who are likely to pass on the article. The click-through rate impact continues down the chain of people who receive the article. Sensational headlines dominate the media for a reason; they are important. Without controlling for click-through rate (or impressions), this study only tells half the story.

It’s a big week for mobile news as the Mobile World Conference runs its course in Barcelona. All the tech giants are fully represented and new operating systems, devices and apps abound. The promise of mobile web and market opportunities has been buzzing for years now, even as critical mass adoption rates remained gradual; but 2010 may indeed be the year the mobile market achieves that promised growth.

Smartphone ownership increased from 11% to 17% of mobile users in 2009, while 3G phone ownership increased from 32% to 43%, according to a recent report released by Comscore. Smartphone penetration is estimated to reach 50% of the market by the middle of 2011, and a quick glance at the cell phone market reveals quality, choice and affordability among devices are on the rise. Google’s Eric Schmidt announced in his conference keynote on Tuesday that Google is currently shipping out 60,000 Android handsets per day.

More choice and affordability will mean a wider range of consumers, but presently, Smartphone owners continue to be predominantly male, are 65% more likely than the average mobile user to be between the ages of 25 and 34, and nearly two times as likely to make more than $100,000 a year according to recent Nielsen findings. Critical mass won’t be a reality until these social gaps are reduced. When the time does come to allocate significant resources toward mobile marketing efforts, the emphasis on email, search and social media use is not likely to be much different. Mobile traffic currently mirrors internet traffic in that respect.

More important will be the social media apps which work well or are enhanced by mobile platforms, such as Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook, which just announced a 54% increase in mobile use in the past six months. Also, as Search Engine Land points out, the evolution of search as it moves to a mobile platform – more emphasis on the local and social, as well as behavioral targeting – means more opportunity for small business owners who know how to properly leverage the tools.

ReadWriteWeb published a recent article titled, “Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search.”  The article reviewed recent numbers released by traffic analyst firm Hitwise, indicating that social networking site traffic has surpassed search engine traffic among web users in Australia.  This data builds on recent research findings from Nielsen and Razorfish that show social media have caught up to aggregators and search engines to become one of the leading content gateways of the internet.

Capitalizing on the trend, Facebook recently encouraged users to start using the platform as a news syndication service.  From the FB blog:

At any given time, the news on your home page can consist of celebrity gossip posted by your sister, sports scores from the ESPN Page, and a political debate among your friends as they cite their favorite blogs. With so much information at your fingertips on one site, Facebook can serve as your personalized news channel.

So what does this mean for online marketing?  For one, traditional SEO strategies will be increasingly augmented by social media’s value as a navigational tool.  Beyond its brand building, link building and CRM capacities, social networks have become an important vehicle for getting your brand discovered.  Secondly, Facebook’s continued growth and critical market share should underscore it as a top platform in social media marketing strategies.  Its incorporation of news feed syndication, in addition to its status update function and established popularity, will continue to keep large amounts of users from wandering to other social sharing platforms like Twitter and Google Reader.

The average consumer doesn’t want to deal with a bunch of different web apps, especially if their current online community provides all the same services in one location.  So while Twitter and RSS may work well for B2B marketing initiatives, a successful B2C social media strategy should put a heavy emphasis on actively engaging consumers through Facebook.

Crowley made the following comments on his blog

Shameless. At least innovate on top of it!

With an avalanche of money at stake in local online advertising,  there is good reason for a little tension. Grand proclamations have been made about the potential of local internet marketing for years, but companies have been slow to figure out how to rob the grave of the yellow pages, with the exception of Yelp. Now the newcomer, Foursquare, wants in on the action.  Yelp has a big lead on Foursquare in terms of traffic and user-generated data, but Foursquare seems to be getting a lot of viral growth lately.

So far, Yelp has been the go to resource for local reviews.  When it comes to local restaurant reviews, Yelp seems pretty dang useful.  When you want to check out a new restaurant, Yelp is a helpful validator.  The number of reviews and the rating is a pretty good indicator of the quality of a restaurant.   The problem with Yelp is that there are really only two meaningful indicators: ratings and number of reviews.  It is hard to trust a 4.5 star rating when there are only five reviews.    So people look for both a lot of reviews and high ratings.  Fine, but what does that really tell you? It tells you where the popular restaurants are, which you probably already know.

Yelp will tell me that Avec is the most reviewed place in Chicago and most people love it. But I don’t care about most people (sorry most people). I care about getting the lowdown from people I know.  Fat Tony knows his pizza joints, skinny Jenny finds the hot vegan spots. Foursquare puts the review within a social context and that is more valuable than a large database of reviews by people I don’t care about.

Unlike Yelp, the check-in feature is core to the Foursquare functionality.  Yelp is great for reading reviews, but Foursquare is more of a social experience.  Yelp may think that slapping a check-in feature on its site will do the trick, but I’m not so sure users are going to dive in.  Foursquare’s co-founder should calm down about the Yelp check-in knockoff.  Yelp is the one that needs to be a little nervous.

• Number of monthly searches for “how to market” on Google: 201,000
• Number of monthly searches for “how to spam” on Google: 49,500
• Number of monthly searches for “how to build trust” on Google: 3,600

Every business person wants to know to market, promote, sell, advertise, pitch, convince, cajole and spam prospective customers.  These tactics all seem like marketing. Marketing is one area of business where deception is not only accepted it is almost expected.  You don’t see this in accounting, HR, finance or law.  Ok, maybe law.  In every other aspect of business it is generally understood that being ethical is not only good for getting a good night’s sleep, it is also profitable in the the long run.

Being honest isn’t always thought of as being profitable in marketing. Back in the day, if you were selling snake oil from town to town, honesty probably didn’t work out so well. Door-to-door salesmen weren’t exactly known for their integrity.  Honesty didn’t pay because people weren’t connected enough to get the message that there is a sleaze ball in town or down the street. Even with television and print ads, people didn’t pick up their phone and call 20 people who had tried the product so deception trumped reputation.

The world is connected now.  Credibility and reputation is being is researched and communicated online through connected social circles. Product reviews on blogs, review sites and social networking sites are written with breath-taking frequency. People connect easily and instantly.  Seeking advice through an instant message, text or tweet  is much more practical than it has ever been.

There are two questions that marketers have always asked:

• How do I get my message in front of people who might buy my stuff?
• How do I convince (or lie to) people so that they buy my stuff?

Those questions aren’t enough now.  The question that needs to be asked first is: How do I build trust? More trust means less convincing.  More trust means more word of mouth and less need for interruptive advertising. More trust means more money.

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth reported that 82% of Twitter users had used the tool successfully. The problem with reports like these is they never mention how to use Twitter successfully.   It is extremely difficult to give good general advice on how to use Twitter effectively because every business is different.  Generic advice comes off as obvious and specific advice isn’t relevant to other business models or personalities.  The best way to understand how to use social media effectively is to take a look at people doing it well and take notes.

One noteworthy person who is utilizing Twitter effectively as a marketing tool is Mari (like safari) Luangrath (@foiledcupcakes and @thatgirlmari).  Mari owns Foiled Cupcakes, a Chicago cupcake company.

How does she do it? The answer is buried within her more than 13,300 tweets:

She tweets…a lot (40 times a day sometimes). She networks. She isn’t arrogant.  She isn’t self-indulgent. She isn’t overly promotional.  She isn’t afraid to say hello. She thanks people. She is smart.  She tweets about events. She has a sense of humor. She introduces people. She is nice. She congratulates people. She asks questions. She actually reads other people’s tweets. She is creative. She responds to people. She cares about people.  She is helpful. She has interesting things to say. She uses twitter to meet real live people.

I could go on but you get the idea.  Mari’s tweet stream is chock-full of good ideas and is a great example on how to run a successful social media marketing campaign.