Popularity vs. Influence: The Factors for Brand Marketers Online

The internet today has been defined by the explosion of social media, and especially through self-publishing platforms such as Blogger and Twitter.  Though the term blogging means different things to different people, at the end of the day what Social Media has become is around self-publishing, which blogging is a significant part of.  Social Media and all the different forms of self-publishing, from status sharing to link sharing to writing about your favorite recipes on your blog, has become the defining path for the web.

Even more importantly for brand marketers today it is critical for them to continue to invest in building relationships with their most fanatic supporters and also category leaders in their markets.   For marketers, in the realm of social media, they need to have relationships, but these relationships have to be defined based on two primary dimensions, popularity and influence.

Popularity and influence have long been used to determine whether a certain blog or social media site is successful. Although they mean differently, these two factors aren’t always regarded as such. Most people still commit the mistake that popularity is similar to influence. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between them and Popularity vs. Influence in Blogging and Social Media: What’s The Difference will tell you why.

What is Popularity and Influence?

Popularity in blogging means that a lot of people like you and your blog; many different people visit your blog and a huge amount of traffic is directed to your website. Then, you are a popular social media user if your page receives various comments and visits. Popularity and influence are different since the latter is the ability to affect the way people think and act. You are considered as an influential blogger if you can influence most people’s views on certain issues. Popularity and influence are both essential factors in the success of various online activities such as blogging and social media.

Popularity vs. Influence in Blogging and Social Media: What’s The Difference?

The difference between these two concepts should be well established since they are fundamental factors of a successful social media or blog. Popularity and influence may seem alike in a number of ways. However, they offer different ideas when used in blogging and social media.

Being popular doesn't necessarily mean influential.

This is one big difference between popularity and influence. You can say that a blog is popular; however, you can’t be entirely sure that the same blog is influential. For example, there are two hypothetical blogs; the first one received 2 million views in a month while the second one got 100,000 visits. You can easily say that the former blog is more popular because of the large difference in the number of views. Nut can you say that the first blog is still more influential? No, you can’t because popularity doesn’t equate to influence. And who knows? The first blog might just be written by a popular person who doesn’t know anything about what he’s talking about. Or, search engines could also cause the high number of traffic for the first blog. This means that the visitors are just passersby who don’t read blogs at all. On the other hand, the second blog can still be the more influential one. Therefore, popularity and influence represent two different concepts.

One difference between popularity and influence is that influence can’t be measured with numbers. 

Sure, popularity can be easily described by the number of visits that a certain blog gets. However, the same doesn’t hold true for influence. Influence could only be measured using the qualitative method. Consider the above example again; the first blog may have more traffic and visitors for its website. Thus, it’s a relatively popular blog. However, its influence can only be measured if the writer affected the reader in some way. For example, the writer tried to persuade the reader to use a certain product. If that reader and other people follow, then the blog may be considered influential.

Tips for Nurturing a Brand Community

The idea of a brand community existed even before the internet was invented but it has only gained importance and prominence with the continuing development of the internet most specifically the growth of social media sites like blogs, social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, and online forums and chat rooms. Today, building and managing brand communities has become a very important segment in the marketing industry.  In this age where millions of people are logging in online every single day to meet and converse with other people who share their ideas, the products they use, the hobbies they like, etc., communities grow out of these meetings and conversations. This is where you as a business owner comes in and try to take advantage of these communities not only for the benefit of your business but for the community as well.

Here are some tips on how you can build, maintain, and effectively nurture a brand community:

1. Pay utmost attention to the needs and wants of your customers. A lot of companies and businesses make the mistake of focusing their attention on how they can get more people to join their communities instead of focusing on providing for the needs and wants of those who already joined. Give to your existing customers what they need and they'll do the recruiting for your brand community.
2. Allow peer to peer communication. A brand community isn't just about you conversing with your customers. Most importantly, it should be about the customers conversing with the other customers. Relationships should exist between customers and between you and the customers. The keyword here is open interaction. A customer should be able to interact with another customer as much as he can interact with the brand.
3. A brand community can be built on any type of business, no matter how small the business. Don't think that brand communities are only for huge and major companies. Do you own a small town diner? No problem. An effective brand community can still be built around it. Who knows, because of your brand community, your small diner could grow into a network of diners. Never underestimate the power of these communities.
4. Make it easy for people to create content about your brand and make it even easier for them to share such content. Take advantage of the popularity of social media sites like blogs, social bookmarking sites and online forums. And don't forget to create platforms in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter where your community can connect and converse with each other.
5. Nurture open exchanges and conversations. Don't try to over-moderate your community. The main purpose of people in joining communities is to communicate and interact. So the act of overly moderating a community is contrary to what brand communities are about. Moderate only when it's necessary.
6. Participate in the community. Don't just be a bystander looking into the conversations. Be active and show your customers that you care about what they think and what they're saying about your brand.

Always keep in mind these tips when building and nurturing your brand community.

Nikon's Brand Amabassor: Ashton Kutcher

This is an interesting relationship between the premier camera company Nikon and Hollywood's A-list actor and producer, Ashton Kutcher.  Kutcher has signed on to promote the Nikon COOLPIX brand cameras and is lending his photogenic qualities to Nikon to help them reach a new younger and hipper audience.

Nikon shares the pro-am segment and of course the professional segment of the market, which lends itself to the higher income male 45+ demo.   The fastest growing market, especially in digital photography is the active mobile woman and the younger out of college segment.

Ashton Kutcher is going to help promote the manufacturer's new COOLPIX Style series cameras. The campaign will debut nationally on March 25th with a television commercial, which precedes the print advertisements and an interactive online component.  The interactive component is really trying to tap into the rich influencer position that Ashton has and his ability to create a scalable conversation with his fans and followers.

Though Kutcher is being paid as a celebrity spokesperson, there are plenty of signs in these vertical categories of brands building influencer relationships with small and mid-sized blogs and websites.   You don't need to be a Hollywood celebrity to make an impact, and the brand marketers of today realize that they can tap into their rich fan bases and category influencer's to promote and build their brand message.   Though Kutcher can reach millions, there are plenty of others that though effective conversational marketing strategies by brands that can move the needle and drive true ROI.

Whitepaper: What Happens When Facebook Trumps Your Brand Site?

Below is an interesting article that ran in AdAge last fall about a recent market trend where consumers are moving more and more towards social media and open platforms to discuss their affiliations and/or opinions around brands and products they utilize or have an affinity towards.   The article highlights the fact that traffic has shifted from the product and corporate marketing sites and moved onto the branded channels within sites like Facebook and MySpace.  A lot of this dynamic is a function of the increased investments by consumer marketers, especially the HBA and CPG brands, to accelerate their efforts, and thus marketing budgets, into the social media world.   Additionally, it is clear that the mass consumer truly perceives the social platforms as a casual and low risk way to interact in a friendly environment around their daily lives, without major disruption and/or risk.   What this translates to is users being more likely to engage around a brand of interest within their social environments, where there is not only a lower barrier to engage, but there is potentially socially redeeming value out of the interaction on these sites versus the corporate and marketing sites of yesteryear.  

The significant thing to note out of the study and data is the vast majority of the brands and products are mass market consumer packaged goods.   These are informal branded relationships and have more of a uncomplicated one-dimensional value between the brand and the consumer.   At the end of the day the value is actually spread to both parties, but on a totally different plane, where the consumer value is really socially oriented in building and developing their personal relationships, where the marketers actual value is around market knowledge, research, data, and creating more efficient ways to reach their audiences via paid media.  There are many benefits for the mass marketers to continue to 'go where the consumers are' and allow their customers to not only self-select, but to also engage in a perishable conversation around their brand affinity.   that being said, the article doesn't touch on the fact that the dark side to this story is when consumers leverage this same ecosystem to highlight their dissatisfaction with the brand or products, and though there are many players such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com that are building rapid CS/CRM systems to support this shift, the risk is real.   Look at the recent Facebook fan page for Target and you can better understand and appreciate the crowd bulling that can happen when the message gets out of control in an environment like this. 

At the end of the day it is reasonable for brands such as Starbucks and McDonalds to build a strong social relationship with the mass consumer on these large social platforms.   These brands would love to be involved in the day (trusted) interaction with their friends and family, and want to be a part of the discussion, even if it is just a superficial relationship at best.   A brand marketer such as P&G with Pringles or Kraft with Jell-O or Oreos doesn't have depth to their relationship with their customers and is really looking for broad, but shallow associations.   The value of one person that buys chips or snack food is arguably as valuable as another person that buys snack foods, with very marginal differences in overall lifetime importance of each and every customer for these market segments.

What is missing is for all the other thousands of large brand marketers that are not on the top 10 list.   Though brands such as Nikon, Nike, Apple, Home Depot, Avon, Army, Visa, Rolex, BMW, Pottery Barn, etc... have a presence on Facebook, the value of their social media outlet existence, is limiting at best.   The idea of a one-to-one relationship in a high value, durable product group, or higher engagement/risk categories, is not only wildly cost prohibitive, but perhaps 100% impracticable to scale in a way that is sustainable.    

What this article has proven is brands have figured out that it isn't about getting consumers to come to you and building up a relationship by pulling them in, it is about pushing out into the market where the right consumers are engaged already and building a relationship where they already are engaged, loyal and trusting.   It is the same paradigms we saw when the Vertical Media Network businesses were starting to form at Adify in early 2009, but in this world the market economics have already been proven to be dramatically more favorable for all parties involved.     

This article has also reinforced the fact that we are not, based on the broadly accepted definition in the market, a social media solution.   Yes, we are enabling direct relationships between category influentials and the associated brands (this is small scale at best), but at our core we are not in existence to continue the development of the social relationships people have with their friends and partners.  We are not in existence to enable the daily lives and journal the thoughts and ideas people share within their social circle (note the recent important study out of HP Labs that says most social media is 100% perishable within hours of publishing).   We are building a long term framework that will string together the evergreen social trust relationships that exist between the influentials and their audiences, but we are much more trust brokers or enablers of a different type of social relationship that is founded on the content, opinions and ideas of the influentials.  

I would argue that the more we focus on social media as a definition of what we are, the more we are going to end up limiting what we are and what we solve.    I am not suggesting we need to change our go to market strategy or what we are saying in the market (I do think using Brand Safe Social Media is a good way to be tapped into the buzz around the space), I just suggest we need to remember that our primary mission isn't to encourage and empower the social relationships between friends and neighbors.  Our primary mission is to establish a fair and trusted relationship between brand marketers and online category influentials in order to enable the sharing of trust between the brand and the influentials audience.   This is really important as we are working internally, looking at the market, understanding how it is operating, and where we are going to add the most value that has the highest returns. 

Maybe this is overly simplistic in how we would differentiate ourselves, but being a vertical trust broker is much more descriptive of what we are doing than a social media platform.

Just a few thoughts I thought I would share.

Face Book Trumps Brands AdAge 08242010

Google Celebrates 1-Year Anniversary

Google is always up on the latest with anniversaries and celebrations via their logo design.   They recently updated their logo to celebrate Thanksgiving and Veterans Day just this month, and have been pushing a new logo (somewhere in the world) about 3-4 times per week .  Beyond the traditional holidays and celebrations, they have celebrated everything from Halloween to Robert Louis Stevenson's 160th Birthday to John Lennon's 70th Birthday.

You can see the history of these great logos at the Google Doodles Site and these logos go back to their first custom logo which celebrated Burning Man on August, 30th, 1998 - this version of the logo was pretty simple and the actual custom burning man looked like they had not yet hired graphic designers at Google.

Well, they have done it again.  Google is celebrating a great event in our history and highlighting the one year anniversary of that fateful night (or early morning) or November 26th, 2009 that changed the future for all golf and sporting fans worldwide.

Very True...

Five Years from Today? 11/01/2014

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando recently. His talk was interesting as he focused on where we go from here and what we are going to be living in 2014. He had some really interesting points, including the idea that the web will be dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Mr. Schmidt did highlight the need to move the web to an even more 'Real Time' basis, and agreed that figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age."

Read Write Web has extracted 6-minutes of the most interesting portions of the talk which you can watch below:



The most interesting concepts boil down to a few that are pretty relevant even today...

* Moving away from focus on US and Western Europe, and look at Pan Asia
* Teens today are going to set what Web 5.0 will look like, and it isn't destination driven.
* Moore's Law continues to hold true, which means the power of even the home PC is going to be a super computer of today.
* Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
* Video, video, video
* The web will move towards actual 'Real Time'
* It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

These all support the concepts around Brand Communities, you don't want to build your site and hope people come, they are not going to work that way. You need to build a community or relationship and leverage the assets and collective value of that relationship to create exponential value for the community and for your own business.

You can watch the whole 45-minute video here, there are many interesting insights that are presented throughout. Some of the concepts include a general statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use. Additionally, it is clear Google is investing in platform and systems to offer value add as the user base gets more advanced and has higher demands.



Of course Mr. Schmidt is a brilliant mind and amazing business man, but the future is hard to predict and though Google has a perspective, it isn't unprecedented that large players have miscalculated the future, regardless of the amount of talking and propoganda they introduced into the market.