Well, as regular readers of this blog know, I am a Cluetrainian. This means I put more trust in the value and impact of the online influencer long tail than I do in the impact of the couple of dozen top influencers that most social media consultants and digital PR teams recommend. This is the Internet, an efficient platform allowing easy access to what's called the network effect: The value of your social network is dependent on the number of others using it.
While it may well be important to have the top 100 influencers on any particular topic following you on Twitter or Facebook, it is not essential. You can make up for it by attracting, retaining, and activating everyone else. In short, anyone who shares her time, talent, and experience online is an important online influencer and potential brand ambassador for my clients.
How do you get lots and lots of people to follow your brand? Don't know where to start? First, make sure you share your Twitter and Facebook information everywhere your brand exists in the real world or in cyberia. You could spend months and months developing these lists and groups of followers, encouraging folks to retweet your content and so forth.
Of course, you can always buy loads and loads of Twitter followers, popping you from your current 2,500 to 25,000 within a month. Yes, I said it. You can buy tens and hundreds of thousands of followers both on Twitter and on Facebook. But, I will tell you now that the followers are generally spammy, poorly targeted, and they often bail the moment they decide you're unworthy.
I know for a fact that there's a guy in Brazil who will hook you up with thousands of Brazilian tweeters almost immediately for a fee. There are dozens of folks who do it and you just need to do a little searching on Google to find them all. That's somewhere to start. Once you've bought your online friends -- lots and lots of them -- you have to deliver the je ne sais quois to keep them.
Mind you, just because you're cheating with the acquisition doesn't mean you're out of the woods. There's still a lot of hard work. If you suck, are salesy, don't tweet or post very often, or are selfish, all of these thousands of purchased followers will start unfollowing you almost immediately.
You had them until you lost them.
It is sort of like being the opening act to U2: You might have 30,000 folks who didn't come to see you who are there to see Bono, so there's no guarantee that they'll ever buy your album. There's every reason they should, but you really could make a mess of it -- if they don't, it is your fault as they were your customers to lose. Same thing with buying followers and likes. If the targeting is completely off, if you suck as a host, or if you're boring or rude, they're gone -- at least the real ones are.
It's essential to discover everyone and keep up with engagement
And this very same framework has been mapped directly into social media where many agencies and companies spend all of their time taking their current 25 mainstream media contacts and 25 social media contacts to dinners at Morton's. There's not enough budget or time to prospect much further or deeper than that.
Which is a sincere pity.
How can one take an old PR model that only concerns itself with an easy-to-manage elite core of gate-keeping journalists, publishers, and broadcasters and map that onto a new media model? A model that could potentially include anyone and everyone who should decide to commit to starting blogging. Producing content for online consumption, resulting in becoming an online influencer. It's the circle of success.
In this theory of everyone, in this theory of long-tail digital PR outreach and engagement, it is essential to find viable ways of 1) discovering everyone -- because there are potentially a lot of people that show up in your net when you're being inclusive and indiscriminate, and 2) keeping up -- because the amount of engagement explodes when you go from a few thousand to tens-of-thousands, be it curating comments, unfollowing and blocking spammers, checking your direct message inbox for relevant and timely requests or queries, and judiciously checking for retweets, @replies, and mentions and engaging them appropriately and in a timely manner.
Finally, don't forget to thank everyone online who helps you no matter how "small," because if you choose to use a theory of everyone in your social media strategy, you can't be polite, kind, generous, and patient only to the celebrities, you need to be kind and responsive to everyone, all the time.