For example…

In Zarrella’s samples, the circles represent the individual mentions of a piece of content by a single Twitter account. The larger the circle, the more followers that account has.  As you can see, although several popular accounts were instrumental in circulating this particular story, no single account was directly responsible for the story’s ultimate social success. you could remove any mention of the story (except for its initial creation) and it would still be considered popular.

Zarrella includes several similar visual examples in his summary, including many intriguing variations, but none of them relies exclusively upon one central popularity push.

So, what does this mean for your marketing strategy?

Buckshot and the Kitchen Sink

40 years ago, we only had three TV stations.  In those days, getting on TV was an automatic win because ABC, NBC and CBS owned the audience’s attention.  Odds were, 33% of the TV-owning country (give or take) was bound to see your story.

Today, we have hundreds of TV channels competing simultaneously with radio, print and Internet media, often via the same devices (TVs, computers, phones).  Getting your story on TV today guarantees you absolutely nothing in terms of audience awareness or recognition.  And while some media outlets are certainly more popular (and powerful) than others, there’s no more automatic win.

In the past, you could aim for a specific target.  Today, you need buckshot to increase your chances of a direct hit.

In the past, you could craft a single, elegant method of winning over your audience.  Today, you need to throw everything at the audience including the kitchen sink, in the hope that something connects.

In the past, you knew who the influencers were.  Today, every mention counts.

Where will your next popularity push come from?

Want more mentions for your brand? Follow us on Twitter or Facebook!

Image by Diego Lorenzo F. Jose on Flickr, who includes this description:

Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks?

My dad just turned 60 and is newly retired. I got him an Ipod Touch to play with

Diego’s father isn’t alone in his newfound tech habits.

A new study from The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that older Americans (age 50+) are adopting social media in growing numbers.  Among the report’s findings:

• Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.
• One in five (20%) online adults ages 50-64 say they use social networking sites on a typical day, up from 10% one year ago.
• One in ten internet users aged 50+ now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others.

Increased social media use among a wider demographic is obviously a good thing.  But it also creates additional questions for any company that uses these tools to communicate with its customers.

For example:

• Are you actively engaging customers of all ages on your social networks?
• Does your messaging change depending on your intended demographic?
• Is your website — or your Facebook fan page — intuitive for all ages?
• Does your social media strategy include a mature perspective?

And while these may seem like new challenges, this isn’t a new conversation.

Ten years ago, the exact same spike in general web adoption among seniors and baby boomers had marketers scrambling to connect with this “new, non-traditional” audience.  And sites like ThirdAge have been providing baby boomers with topical insights for over a decade.

Thus far, social media has been considered a youth movement.  With this growing number of mature voices and viewpoints, the gender gap is being closed — and this is a welcome opportunity for brands to reconnect with an audience they may not have expected to be paying such close attention.

Want to hear more?   Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!

The last month of US box office has been dominated by Inception, the latest thriller from director Christopher Nolan.  Despite Nolan’s pedigree (Memento, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), Inception is still a huge box office surprise for one big reason: late summer is normally a cinematic dead zone.

With heat waves, family vacations and a general pre-autumn malaise ruling the day, this is the notorious timeframe when Hollywood dumps the films it doesn’t expect to be winners.  And yet, here we have a complicated movie without blockbuster stars, and it’s earned over $200 million.

Why?

Because people can’t stop talking about it.

Have you seen the multiple theories about its meaning on Slate?  Or New York Magazine?  Or Salon?  Or the blog posts and infographics created by the film’s rabid fans?  Or how it’s still (as I type this) a top-10 trending topic on Twitter a full five weekends after its release?

Inception succeeds because it’s a movie people can:

• Relate to
• Form opinions about
• Deconstruct
• Debate
• Satirize
• Be inspired by

Inception is a product that fuels its own hype.

Does your product do that?

As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously said, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.”  And while that’s an oversimplified (and somewhat cynical) statement, it’s not entirely untrue.

The more people are willing to talk about you on their own, the less you have to convince them that you’re conversation-worthy.  When people are voluntarily talking about your product, it allows you to invest more time and resources on creating those products that delight your customers, rather than creating noteworthy (but temporary) illusions of interest.

Ultimately, a great ad campaign can make a good product sound interesting, but a great product starts conversations all by itself.

You should start a conversation with us on Twitter or Facebook!

So where’s the overlap between your goals (profit) and your customers’ goals (solving their problems)?

One Tip: Find a Common Enemy

Ecover (our client) creates ecological cleaning products.  As such, they’re naturally passionate about the environment.  They stress the need for sustainability in everything they do, from their product ingredients to their factories to their supply chain.

Ecover also knows that their core customers are informed and passionate (and, at times, frustrated) about environmental issues.  And that’s one reason they’ve asked us at Creative Concepts to help them build their Ecover Facebook page and Ecover Twitter account as forums for broader ecological discussions that go beyond the limits of buying and selling.

Obviously, Ecover wants to sell their household cleaning products.  That’s how they stay in business.  But if they didn’t occasionally shift their focus to the big picture (i.e., the real world), they wouldn’t be true to their ethics as a company.  And by giving their customers a platform to discuss the issues they feel strongly about, Ecover provides a secondary service to their audience: a community that’s actively engaged in improving the world we live in.

In Ecover’s case, finding a “common enemy” with their customers is easy: pollution, erosion, waste, ecological misinformation… the list goes on.  Each of those issues makes it harder for Ecover to do its job (cleaning without further burdening the environment), and each of those issues also makes it harder for Ecover’s customers to live a happy, healthy life.

Thus, spreading the word about global ecological problems — and, ideally, sharing practical solutions — is in everyone’s best interests.

So… where do you and your customers have a common enemy?  (Hint: It’s not your competition; it’s what you and your competition each exist to prevent.)

We may not have common enemies, but we can still be friends on Twitter or Facebook!

Today, Domino’s Pizza is celebrating.  Its second quarter profits were up 55% and the public is embracing their (heavily-promoted) new pizza.

So what happened?

Domino’s didn’t panic.

Yes, the situation looked grim in April of 2009.  But Domino’s calmly realized one key truth about humans:

People Forget.

Elsewhere, BP executives are breathing a sigh of relief.  After their oil spill dominated US headlines for three months, the spill seems to be over, and the news cycle has predictably cycled onward to newer topics.  (This, after BP was simultaneously implicated in helping free the Lockerbie bomber in exchange for oil pipeline rights in Libya.)

And how have these global PR calamities affected BP’s stock price?  We’ll know more in the near future, but judging by the way BP’s first-quarter profits doubled, we doubt any of their year-end bonuses are in peril.

So, if Domino’s couldn’t be toppled by blatant employee malfeasance, and BP couldn’t be dented by massive ecological and political disaster, what kind of negative PR could possibly ruin a company?

What about a bad joke?

I’m Only Laughing Because It Hurts

In 1991, Gerald Ratner told the same joke he’d told dozens of times before.  But this time, the punchline punched back.

This time, the media construed Ratner’s quip about “crap,” which was directed at the low-end merchandise sold by his family business, Ratners Jewellers, to imply that he was laughing at the outrageous prices his customers were willing to pay.  When Ratner tried to clarify and apologize, the media literally handed him enough rope to hang himself (or at least a toy gun and a front page photo), and his career was over.

The lesson?

Bad PR happens to every company.  But how a company reacts to that PR determines whether or not the incident causes a scratch or sinks the ship.

Domino’s apologized and fired the offenders.  BP burnished their image and weathered the storm.  And Ratners fumbled.

So when we see each new story about an unthinkable PR disaster — like Air Canada ruining a dying boy’s charity fundraiser — we should certainly be outraged at the parties who deserve our scorn.

But, as marketers, we should also be aware of a sobering (and sometimes sad) fact:

Eventually, people forget.

(Unless you make it worse.)

But don’t forget about us! We’re also on Twitter and Facebook!

Everybody there is talking to somebody else — some in groups, some in pairs.

All except one guy.

A guy in a suit.

A guy who’s moving from group to group and arbitrarily shouting unwanted information at people, and then moving on.

He doesn’t care if you have questions.

He doesn’t even care if you respond.

He just wants to make sure that you heard what he had to say, because the only thing he’s capable of talking about is himself.

Does That Sound Like Your Brand’s Social Media Strategy?

According to marketing firm 360i’s recent report on Twitter usage, odds are, it probably is.

From the MediaPost summary of the report:

The six-month study from 360i reveals that 43% of consumer tweets are conversational — replies to other people tweeting. Yet only 12% of marketers’ tweets demonstrate active dialogue with consumers.

This means that while “normal people” spend almost half their time actively conversing with their fellow Twitter users, companies are only conversing in 1 out of every 10 tweets they send.

Which, obviously, begs the question…

What Is Your Company Talking About?

Do you use Twitter as a megaphone to broadcast company-wide news?

Do you use Twitter for sales, showering your followers with coupon codes?

Do you use Twitter for lead generation, littering your tweetstream with linkbait in the hopes that unsuspecting readers will click through to your sales page and be mysteriously compelled to give you money?

If so, you’re at the wrong party.

Remember to Put the “Social” in Social Media

If you only had one minute to chat with a complete stranger, would you rather tell her something about yourself or learn something about her instead?

Why can’t it be both?

On Twitter, people value (short) conversations.  The nature of the service lends itself to bite-sized interactions and splintered attention, which actually increases the need for meaningful connections in shorter amounts of time.

Yes, people like to listen. But they also like to talk.

The key is to make time for both.

Is your social media strategy a two-way street?

We drive on a few two-way streets: Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!

This online database of social media policies includes the communications guidelines and handbooks used by dozens of companies, from About.com to Yahoo (sorry, no “Z” companies listed yet). Maybe you’d like to know how Coca-Cola advises its employees (PDF) to conduct themselves online, or how the Mayo Clinic moderates comments?

And if your company frequently represents the messages of others, there’s a solution for that, too.

For example, we here at Creative Concepts have our own internal social media policy (downloadable here), which separates our actions as individuals from our actions on behalf of our clients.

Why?

Because our creative team holds a variety of opinions, ideas and beliefs, and we believe that we should be free to express ourselves as ourselves. But when we’re speaking on behalf of our clients, we ensure that there’s a proper separation of our personalities & philosophies and theirs.

We’re not alone. In the Coca-Cola example above, their policy clarifies the difference between speaking “on behalf of the company” and speaking “about” the company. They also designate which groups of employees are expected to respond to certain conversations (such as negative commentary about the company), and how. (Because no one wants to be the next “Nestle vs. Greenpeace” case study of a conversation gone wrong.)

The lesson? Social media is embraceable by companies of all sizes. But strategy and planning isn’t just for your outward-facing messages; it’s also a necessity for helping your employees know what’s expected of them.

Want to learn more? Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!

But there’s one commonality that’s always worth discussing: charity.

Most companies have at least one charitable cause that they feel passionate about, usually for personal reasons. And whenever your company invests their time and effort in a cause other than direct profit, that’s a potential feel-good story that your employees and your customers can get behind.

For example, consider our clients here at Creative Concepts:

Ouidad and her family have been personally affected by breast cancer. In response, Ouidad founded her own charity to help raise funds for cancer research.

Bigelow Tea is a family business that invests heavily in the communities surrounding their facilities, especially in their home state of Connecticut.

Why do we mention our clients’ non-profit endeavors?

Because they’re the kinds of stories that remind customers how the products they purchase are, ultimately, created by human beings.  These are the conversations that help the people on both sides of the storefront find a common ground, and remove the barriers that make us think of all businesses as impersonal moneymaking machines.

Ultimately, social media and business are about people.

Your company is people.

Don’t forget to remind your customers — and yourselves.

Want to connect with us more personally? Follow us on Twitter or Facebook!

As I continue to convince the C-Suite at client companies to trust in social media, I find that it’s an easier sell when the company is struggling to fight a negative image online.

This makes sense. Like people, brands are always concerned about fixing problems after those problems occur, not beforehand. (The school of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is also why preventative health care and preventative car maintenance often seem like luxuries, rather than logical necessities.)

Consider the case of Old Spice, which has received scads of glowing social media coverage over their customized YouTube outreach campaign.

Yes, the Old Spice ads are funny. And yes, Isaiah Mustafah (the new face of Old Spice) deserves all the accolades currently coming his way.

But we wouldn’t be talking about Old Spice at all if they didn’t have an image problem in the first place.

Old Spice has been perpetually seen as “your father’s deodorant” (or “your grandfather’s deodorant,” or however far back you’d like to go). It’s never been considered contemporary, and that anachronism was part of its charm. But it’s hard to sell “traditional” to a plugged-in, post-modern audience. So Old Spice revitalized their image.

Will seeing Old Spice as crisp, clean, adventurous and unstoppably witty help sell more sticks of deodorant? If so, then all this rebranding — and their investment in social media — will have paid off. And it’s hard to argue against the idea, since simply running in place is almost never a brand’s wisest option.

But this also raises a question of intention.

Because if the social media campaigns that garner the most attention are those that update outmoded brand images, repair PR problems and revitalize aging assets, maybe companies should be striving to generate their own “bad image” crises.

Because then they’re guaranteed to garner attention for engineering their own “new and improved” turnaround.

To garner our attention, follow us on Twitter!

You can’t force people to care about you.

Plenty of services will sell you Facebook friends and Twitter followers, which is the modern equivalent of buying a list of email addresses: it’s spammy.  We’d never advise that our clients do that because it’s invasive (and, often, it’s a waste of money).

There’s also the tactic of “batch following” other users — or, in layman’s terms, manually choosing to “follow” (or “subscribe to the updates of”) dozens or hundreds of Twitter users at a time, in the blind hope that those people will choose to follow you back in return.

The problem is, very few people do.  It takes such little effort to follow someone on Twitter that doing so is no longer seen as an expression of interest in that person, but a self-interested request for attention on the part of the follower.  (In other words: “Hey, I see you.  Now look at me.”)

This is explains some of the lopsided “follower ratios” you’ll see on some brands’ Twitter accounts.  In many cases, a company has chosen to follow thousands of users, but only a few dozen users have found that brand worth following in return.

Keep that up and you’ll start thinking your brand really is boring, when your problem is actually in the execution.

Don’t Beg.  Be Interesting.

At Creative Concepts, we encourage our clients to build their online following organically, by reaching out to:

• Existing customers
• Potential customers
• Industry peers
• Industry journalists (bloggers, podcasters, newspapers, magazines, etc.)
• Anyone with a problem that our client can solve

For example, in the dead of winter (or, worse, in the dog days of all this summer air conditioning), Twitter is alive with the sound of head colds.  Users can’t help but complain about stuffy noses, dripping sinuses and general misery.  They’re also frequently in search of a remedy — and that’s been a great opportunity for (our client) Bigelow Tea to suggest lemon or mint teas that might help ease someone’s sore throat.

We find proactive engagement to be a far more valuable way to grow our clients’ web communities.  Not everyone responds, but those who do are more likely to continue that active engagement, and to spread the word among their own audiences.

And since social media empowers your brand to find its own audience, wouldn’t you rather have an audience that actually pays attention to what you’re saying?

Do you want to pay even more attention to us? Follow us on Twitter!