Tapping the Network Effect

 

Tapping the Network Effect

The dawn of the commercial Internet in the 1990s introduced some radical

business ideas, including the idea of viral growth: through the power of person

to-person e-mail—“word of mouse”—businesses could reach exponentially

more consumers than ever before, at zero incremental cost. That was a stunning

notion indeed for businesses accustomed to printing and mailing catalogs,

buying expensive airtime, and doing other traditional marketing.

Alas, the novelty faded when marketers realized it was hard to create the next

viral smash YouTube video. E-mail inbox fatigue eventually set in, discouraging

folks from forwarding to (or spamming) their friends.

The rise of social networks reignited viral growth without relying much on e-

mail. Social media provide frictionless, viral transmission of all sorts of trends,

fads, memes, offers, and gossip. Social networks thrive by making it ridiculously

easy and tempting to pass something on to your entire network. Likewise, it’s

ridiculously easy for everyone downstream to “like,” comment, retweet, and

otherwise amplify your message to their own friend networks.

But just because the platforms are designed to create virality doesn’t guarantee

they will work for you—because there’s so much competing noise. For instance,

only a small fraction of your fans or followers will ever see a given post in their

activity feed, for two reasons:

The platforms deliberately throttle back the volume of shared activity to a

level manageable for users, and

Even when a given post is delivered to the news feed, some fans will never

see it if they don’t log onto the site frequently enough.

In fact, according to Facebook, the average post from a brand fan page reaches

only about 16% of fans.

That’s one reason Facebook has been so successful with its “Sponsored Stories. 

posts to more eyeballs.

But there is another way: create great, meaningful content that people feel

impassioned about and good about sharing.

Tap into primal human emotions and passions: humor, sex, love, greed,

compassion, patriotism, sports, and adventure.

Be Remarkable

In other words, what makes for a virally successful social media campaign is

much the same as what makes for a successful brand. Frank Goedertier,

professor of Brand Management and Marketing at the Vlerick Leuven Gent

Management School in Belgium and a visiting scholar at the Kellogg School of

Management, argues that a successful brand must have eight key attributes.

These attributes are equally crucial for a winning social media campaign. Like a

successful brand, a successful social media campaign must be:

Memorable

Meaningful

Likeable

Transferable (from one social platform to another)

Protectable (by copyright and trademark)

Authentic

Simple

Adaptable (to rapid change)

3

Particularly in social media, with its distracting plethora of stimuli, with its

nearly a billion users and its bias toward fluffy diversions, focus on the first three

attributes for your campaign: memorable, meaningful, and likeable.

Think about the words of Seth Godin, marketing guru and best-selling business

book author, and his persistent call to be remarkable. Following that call is not

easy to do—but it’s the only thing to do.

“Artists never hold back,” says Godin. “They know they’ll never be on that stage

again. They say, ’This is my shot.

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for now, simply understand that to cash in on the network effect in social media,

you’ve got to follow these key rules:

Your brand must stand for something special.

Your social media campaigns must capture the imagination and passions of

your fans.

You must make sharing frictionless and fun. Issue a strong call to action,

offer rewards or incentives, and provide an encouraging feedback loop (or

“gamification” of some sort) to make participation satisfying—even a little

addictive.

Summary

The best practices we’ve discussed here will help you build your social media

program on a rock-solid foundation. Your program will be centered on a

meaningful “story” about your brand, a story that should matter personally to

your audience and inspire them to join and participate in your online community.

You will encourage member engagement through careful listening, a customer-

service orientation, smart posting practices, and careful cultivation of your most

influential fans. With those basic disciplines in place, you’re ready to drill into

the specifics of the leading platforms and find out how to turn them to your

advantage.

Social Media Market Share

As an organization, if you were to engage on just one social network, it would

have to be Facebook, which dwarfs its rivals in both membership size and the

passion of its audience (as measured by visits and time on site). But being on

Facebook alone would be a mistake. You owe it to your business to participate

on multiple networks. You should be using the strengths of the different

platforms—and the different missions and mindsets of the people on them—so

that you can achieve the following goals:

1. Your brand’s social presence is essentially wherever consumers seek it

2. You satisfy a breadth of consumer needs, including research, customer

service, amusement, and immersion in the brand experience

3. You amplify, echo, and support your key campaigns and brand messages

consistently across multiple media. 

Important to notice:

The best practices we’ve discussed here will help you build your social media

program on a rock-solid foundation.