Social media and viral marketing are all about creating "hits" - building content that will resonate with the Linkerati audience in a way that encourages sharing, linking and participation. It's no easy task, and this past Sunday, the New York Times Magazine had a terrific article that paralleled this struggle. From the piece - Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? -
...professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know — a result that has implications not only for our understanding of best-seller lists but for business and politics as well.
Luckily, in the world of linkbait, at least at the current time, experienced marketers are actually excellent at making predictions about the success or failure of a piece. At SEOmoz, we've launch a dozen linkbait pieces a month between clients and internal projects and have 70%+ success rates (phenomenally high compared to the subject of the NY Times piece). Neil & Cameron at ACS, Michael Gray at Wolf-Howl and others in the industry experience similar probabilities of widespread adoption. This article still captured my attention, and here's why - the writer discusses an experiment:
In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.
The results of their experiments were remarkable:
In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.
If you're following this logic and translating it to the art and science of viral marketing for the web, whether that's via Digg or Flickr, Reddit or YouTube, MySpace or Netscape, the lesson is that the earliest viewers of the material have the greatest impact on how popular your content will become. Sadly, this lot isn't neccessarily predictable, though in communities like Digg and Reddit, at least at the current time, certain preferences have clearly emerged.
The answer for a marketer (whether it's a record-producing New York Hip-Hop mogul or an SEO pushing the rankings of a client through Digg) seems clear - manipulate artificially. Convince people that you've already received some popularity and people like it and your task is made infinitely easier.
So much for the quality content theory...
BTW - Don't you love the fact that the piece's title contains "Justin Timberlake," yet the story itself has no specific relation nor any mention of him? That's SEO, NY Times style :)
p.s. Had to mention this because it was such a good post - How we Took a Blog from 0 to 2000 Subscribers in Just 12 Days - I think NxE is going to become a mainstay in my sidebar; their other posts are terrific, too.
Come, come now, people. You've all been to school. Of course that's how things get popular? 'The Tipping Point', one of my favorite recent books spells out very nicely just how the process of spreading an idea and making it contagious works.
So yes, viral marketing, social media, press releases, blogging to a targeted audience: these are all processes of making an idea spread, which means making it big.
There's an old saying, "Even Jesus had to go to the city." What it meant is that whatever the power of an idea, if you don't get it to a lot of people, it's not going anywhere.
We used to use that phrase specifically for classical musicians; they had to get to NYC to have any hopes of making a career for themselves. Obvious, right? Same goes for any idea. Only now we can spread an idea, fad, etc. through the Internet without having to physically move our bodies.
The violinist mentioned above is a classic example of having something great and not addressing the right audience with it. Only one person had the knowledge necessary to appreciate the sound. The sound of the Stradivarius fell on deaf ears, as it were.
In his other book, "Blink", Malcolm Gladwell postulates that one can significantly increase one's ability to know a hit and sets out to show us how. What he is saying, when to applied to screen writers and producers, is that they don't have their finger on the pulse of their audiences, and they aren't listening to those who do. Their metrics are all wrong, which lead them to wrong conclusions about what will and won't sell.
The combination of having a finger on the pulse of the 'early adopters' and 'mavens' as descibed in The Tipping Point, having the ability to isolate and address them in social websites such as MySpace,Digg, Reddit, and finally having the ability to speak their language and to be a connector results in highly increased success rates. And there's the secret sauce.
I absolutely loved The Tipping Point. Marketing has always been about making people believe something was popular before it was actually popular. Convince somebody that they have to have something, and you're golden.
I don't know if you saw the piece in the Washington Post a week ago on Sunday Rand. They had a top concert violinist - Josh Bell, with his $3.5 million Stradavarius, play outside a metro stop in DC for 43 minutes. He made $32.17, and only one person recognised the music for what it was and stopped and listened. So taken out of the usual context, people didn't recognise the quality content.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
I did see that piece - totally loved it. The ponly problem was that every terrible street musician from now on is going to command at least 30-45 seconds of my time just to be sure they're not giving the free concert of a lifetime. :)
I hadn't seen that piece up till now. Fascinating (though not really surprising in many ways). It does demonstrate something a little different - many of those people would not expect themselves to know a great violinist and certainly not when taken out of context, I suspect it says more about the power of what you expect making you blind to reality.
Yes, the context was wrong, but why did the article illicit such a response? Seth Godin's response was insightful. We didn't give permission for something beautiful to enter our self-adsorbed worlds, and that makes us sad.
As a bait piece, it was an awesome article. Kudos to the Post journalist.
To Sheseltine: Or perhaps, the problem was not only the unusual context, but also the "wrong market". People rushing by a metro stop might not have been the classical music fans. Put Josh Bell in a crowd at a football game and there could've been some fast food thrown his way. It's just the supply and demand - in those settings/crowds there is not much demand for a classical musician, unfortunately.
Great story and I agree that it isn't too surprising...
And in many ways, hits are only relative... books have been launched and completely failed and then relaunched with a new title and cover and become successful. Obviously, in the greater scheme of things, the title and cover are truly the least important aspects as far as the story is concerned.
In many ways I'd liken this to group think influence. What is most interesting is that those influencing may not necessarily carry any authoritative and celebrity weight, just that their opinions have influenced those who followed.
Another context is that of early-adopters, which are often those who have to be on the cutting edge, being the first to own X. As these early products often carry a hefty pricetag, early adopters have often been very important for companies to gain a following from as their purchases have often helped to fund further development and production.
The biggest implication of this is that the way to try to influence hits will be through "orchestrated early adoopters." So not only will launches of sites, campaigns, or articles into the media be timed, we'll probably see more need for lining up and planting of early adopters to coincide with the launch to influence those who follow.
Even this isn't all that surprising. The Color Marketing Group is made up of key players in many industries who examine trends and help determine what the hot colors are going to be... but much of this is pre-determined and they are working a year or two out on colors. This is especially important in fashion industries because there is little need to buy new if the last years colors are still "hot." But there is always the chance of a wild card being thrown into the mix and sending everyone scrambling.... such as the original iMac colors.
Thanks for mentioning NxE, I am definitely going to add them to my daily reads, that was a really interesting article.
You might like to check out The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki - he presents some great insights into the awesome ability of groups over individuals to predict outcomes, and specifically the factors, such as independence of the group's members, on which this ability depends.
I've found that using those RSS buttons (normally from feedburner) that show how many subscribers sites have seem to get more subscribers once you show how many are already subscribing (assuming it is a relatively large number).
Ash
The old “Information Cascade” effect.
For example: You get off the airplane and everyone walks down the hallway to the left. You don’t see any signs but assume everyone else must know where they are going so you follow the crowd like another sheep.
I have read that women can be more susceptible to this phenomenon than men in some cases. Hot-or-not studies were done where men and women were asked to rate people by their photo and leave a comment. Then they manipulated the comments to see if it had an effect. Women were very heavily influences by what other women said. (Men who were only average suddenly became studs based on the manipulated comments.) On the other hand, most men never even read the comments and the hot-or-not score didn’t change at all.
* Damn I should have picked my times up before it got wet*
Interseting. I read the post on the NxE blog and he advocated for '101's and other list types post claiming their encourage bookmarking, which is a good perspective. Got me thinking though, what can we do ( after authoring the great content and building the initial platorm for garnering visitors like getting on digg etc) to allow for maximum cap. on bookmarking/digging/stumbling, does the format of the post help,or placement of intuitive digg buttons?
Can any shed some light on this for me (experiance probably)?
Best regards
Orson.
you have to develop a lot of friends in order to jump-start a story...
I wrote about "jump starting" a story in my posts
"A Comprehensive Guide to Going Viral on Digg 1& 2"
Similar to the methods employed by NxE, who leveraged stumbleupon, I emphasized leveraging the smaller sites, like reddit (and then the smaller niches within reddit) to maximize your content's total exposure--building a kind of pyramid of popularity.
Additionally, there is an EXCELLENT book written about this very topic. In particular, it examines the "stickiness" of an idea. The book outlines, in great detail, the attributes viral content must have in order to be successful. I've found that putting my ideas into the framework the book set has been an amazing crucible for choosing one over another for a linkbait campaign.
I was planning on writing a blog post about the book--perhaps maybe it is called for now that such a nice segue has been initiated by rand.
The book is entitled Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Or have a lot of time to make fake accounts on sites like Digg... =)
Ash
I have the same question as Justin Timberlake up there... (See? SEO is high profile stuff!)
"Success" can be pretty subjective, depending on what your goals are. I think if your only goal is hits... that's not doing much for anyone's bottom line, which is a huge factor in even participating in SEM.
Social Media and Viral Marketing should also be about creating brand/product awareness, which should create some sort of impact on the customer's ROI.
Or do you feel that ROI should not be considered with linkbaiting?
Since linkbaiting is about building long term value through global link popularity, it's exceptionally hard to do an ROI calculation. I'd instead try to predict the cost in time and effort to earn those links through other methods - link building campaigns, paid links, etc.
How do you define a success for a linkbait?
Best Regards,
Justin Timberlake;-)
Widespread readership and a high number of inbound links, i.e. making the top of Digg, Reddit, Netscape and earning numerous links from high quality blogs and sites.
Pretty much what Rand said.
Depends really on what you're after - just links? Then getting additional (and trustworthy) links would define success. Developing a brand too? Then making sure that the link bait had a good positive response.
Ash
Sooooo... what this is saying is....
Manipulate social media to make something look popular so it'll then be popular.
But I thought we all knew that....
I mean, why else have 25 digg IDs?
;-)
haha i thought i was the only sneeky guys with multiple accounts :-)
Wow, what are the odds, that we'd have the only 2 SEOs with multiple Digg accounts posting in the same thread... destiny must have brought you 2 together :p
Isn't it here elsewhere - that there are exactly 300 top Diggers?
So I guess there are 300 SEOs with Digg accounts and the rest are all bots
;-)
edited to say: Oatmeal's post at Top Digg users?