Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Here’s an accompanying video of Duncan Watt’s ‘Is the Tipping point toast?’ article where he argues that targeting the so called influencers is a total waste of time and instead marketers should target everyday people who are more receptive to new ideas. You should read the full article at Fast Company, it’s well worth your time!

I found the above video as well as 2 other perspectives on how ideas spread through networks via @ariegoldshlager and also wrote about this a few days ago that to spread ideas go to the edge where people are more receptive to new things.

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So where do you place an idea so it spreads through networks?

There’s some network research from MIT that trumps the notion of the influencer: the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people.

The truth is we don’t really know specifically from where an idea/trend will spread from, we only know that the weakest links (the people we never think of) have higher spreading power than the strongest links and these people are found at the edges of a network.

So what’s a marketer/innovator to do?

Influencers don’t care about you

There are some theories but the one most everyone focuses on is reaching the influencers made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book the Tipping Point. Well good luck with that because most everyone including your competitors is doing the same thing, the race is on to reach the so called influencers and they can barely keep up with all the ideas they’re being asked to spread.

Imagine being the care taker for the President of the United States and you get all sorts of letters from people who want to say something to the President and your job is to filter out the one’s that are most relevant for him to read and take action on. Well that’s exactly the battle you have to fight when targeting the influencers, everybody knows them so why would your idea come first?

People will ONLY ‘spread an idea’ if they think it’s worth remarking about, not because you paid them for their attention.

The fringe is much more friendly

New ideas and trends come from the fringe, from the edge and not from the mainstream, and spread from the edge to the center and then the process repeats itself. You stand a better chance of catching that ‘fire starter idea’ by going out to the fringe (where nothing is settled) instead of looking for ideas where everyone is looking (the mainstream) and then focus on making your idea take form with people at the edge.

In conclusion here are a few things to remember to help your ideas spread:

1. Go outside the mainstream where things are changing and look for ideas there.
2. Do algorithmic innovation: generate a lot of ideas, figure out ways to try them out cheaply and quickly, and then scale-up the ones that seem most promising.
3. Your idea needs to be buzzworthy. Ask yourself: Would anyone tell a friend about this?
4. Feed it to the fringe.
5. Make the influencers come to you.

What do you think, what’s your experience with making ideas spread?

Collapse theory graphic by BlackCoffee

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Stories are powerful! When they’re embedded into your product or service even more so and it’s hard not to pay attention. I’m sure you read the NY Times story that featured out of work architect John Morefield a few days ago and I’m sure you remember it perfectly. Why do I know that? Because it has a very powerful story behind it and a concrete brand name: Architecture 5 cents.

Check out the video below and tell me it doesn’t make for a great topic of conversation right now.

Architecture 5¢ from John Morefield on Vimeo.

See what I mean? A great story makes for a great topic of conversation, think about your own story and how you came about doing whatever it is you’re doing and communicate it in a creative way. Find ways to integrate it into your product so that it’s symbolic (and no I don’t mean putting a ‘our story’ text on it) and makes people talk about it.

Everyone has a story, what’s yours?

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What’s happening this year in Marketing? According ClickDocuments it’s the rise of content marketing. Sure this is obvious, more people are connected and with tools such as Posterous that let’s you publish through your email more people will be ‘adding’ to the stream of thoughts that is becoming the internet. It’s never been easier to be a content creator!

Last week we wrote about how there’s a perceived race to see who publishes the most, out-publish yourself before others do. This notion of constant publishing is driven by the a few things:

a. Search engine optimization. The more content you produce = better search results.

b. The internet is a social space without borders. Make your content spread through social channels.

Yet publishing content just because everyone else is doing it is a sad excuse for reaching more people and not to make their world a lot more interesting.

Our argument is that instead of creating content just as part of your ‘strategy’, your goal should be to publish ideas for people to use. Measure how people use your idea and if they shared it, not just if they click on them!

Last week I came across this quote on Twitter and it’s at the heart of our argument: Influence is when everybody is stealing your ideas

Some call this ‘marketing with meaning’ others call it ‘influential marketing’, whatever you want to call it just help people do something.

>>> Here’s a BIG idea again: It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

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Google’s traffic generating machine is being threatened by social networks. You already knew that right?

As you can see in the graph below the Huffington Post gets the the majority of it’s combined traffic from social networks and not from Google, now you might not be the Huff but this is clearly going to happen to you too if it isn’t already. The combination of social network usage and competitive nature of SEO where the top ranking websites are going to stay there is leading us to a fragmentation of traffic sources.

If you been following us then you know that ‘content sharing’ should be part of your marketing strategy and when before you focused on getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Bing and inbound links from other blogs or websites, NOW you want to focus on getting traffic from social networks by first triggering and then helping people share your content from your website to social networks.

Are seeing more traffic come from social networks?

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