Influencers influenced by the masses? Use Twitter? – Chicken and egg problem
Influencers will follow the nobodies
In his exposé on “How to use Twitter as a Twool” Guy Kawasaki states in the paragraph on Forget the “influentials”:
“If enough nobodies are interested in your solutions, then the influencers will have no choice but to write about your solutions.”
As the Internet has flattened and democratized information, reliance on influencers is flawed. This is due to the fact the influencers differ not from all other people concerning information or knowledge or distribution. There is simply too much of everything.
Guy Kawasaki goes even further by stating:
(a) Nobodies are the new somebodies.
(b) It’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies.
This is true as one blog post or one bookmark can drive up your website traffic enormously for one day, but not generating a steady stream of visitors having interest in your solutions or products.
Thus you need to get a good group of users, paying customers or supporters.
Guy Kawasaki Twittering Alltop
Guy Kawasaki has been successfully using Twitter to promote his Alltop aggregation websites on work, living, culture, Interests, Technology, People News, Geographies, Sports. For example this LEADSExplorer blog is listed on Alltop Marketing and Alltop Sales (scroll down to almost bottom).
He has been posting Tweets on Twitter about Alltop a zillion times.
He has herd of followers on Twitter and got heard spreading Alltop and making it known and popular.
Guy Kawasaki is not a Nobody
However there is one difference between him and nobodies:
Guy Kawasaki is one of the influencers as he has been in the industry (and Silicon Valley) since many years: evangelizing Apple Macintosh during the eighties (1984).
As he explains in his cost dissection of the building and launching his Truemors website:
“However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company.”
So if you are not an influencer and you have not been schmoozing since years in the industry, then your situation is quite different and you have a big hurdle to take: how to make yourself heard?
The Somebodies to follow the Nobodies
The point of Guy Kawasaki is:
Make noise by blogging or micro blogging (using Twitter), build a community (of nobodies) or customers, then the influencers will notice you (one day).
Of course this is the chicken and egg problem:
If you have no one to pay interest in your solutions, then you will not obtain interest from the influencers and thus not grow a large group of users or interested people.
If you have a small group of customers or users as your target market is limited, then again the chances of a getting influencers to blog about you is only possible if the small group is significantly large for the market your solutions are addressing.
Much depends on the size of your target market:
If you want to address the retail consumer or the social media user you will need a lot of noise in order to get heard as you are addressing the masses and many other are screaming and shouting.
Question: Do you see much influencers write about Netlog or Bebo (both having about 40 million users) being located in Europe, whereas most bloggers and news websites write about Facebook (having 110 million users and is located in the US)?
If you have a narrow market segment as potential users or paying customers, a lot less noise is to be distributed, but it needs to be addressed to the right target group.
This is applicable for solutions in the B2B (Business to Business) market.
Still in whatever market, the more early adopters, the more users, the more paying customers you can gather or signups the better.
Once you generate enough interest, users or paying customers, the influencers will jump on board to promote your success further.
Again: The chicken and egg problem as My name is Nobody.
What communication channel for your market?
The main question is: what is the best channel, tool or communications method to address your market in order to get the first load of users?
- Twitter? Is known to be used by people that are not the average women and men in the street.
- Blogs? Blogs are also addressing a certain type of people that are not the average people too.
- Press releases?
- A company blog?
- Advertising? On line or print?
- Advertorials?
If you address the business segment (like we do) what are these people (CEO, COO, VP Sales, VP Marketing) reading or what influences these people?
Blogs, Press Releases or references?
Probably the best is getting references: thus sell your solution to several customers and tell about them and their benefits and success.
Advice on Twitter
Still you should read how to use Twitter as a Twool as it contains good advice and suggestions on using Twitter.
Start with signing up.
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Beeing a Mac user for more than 10 years I totally agree with that