The inconvenient truth for creative people these days is that whilst the internet may have disrupted their outdated industries, it hasn’t proven to be quite the great leveller that we all hoped it would be. The means of production has been democratised and the resultant explosion of creativity speaks to the fundamental human need for self expression. Creation and sharing have become commonplace. And with the advent of ebook stores, crowdfunding platforms and other commercial models that allow creators to skip intermediaries and go straight to the audience, there’s now a new business model for creativity.
But with these new opportunities come new challenges and the biggest is how creators connect with audiences. The old model, wherein a small number of gatekeepers controlled which cultural objects made it on to the shelves, was frustrating for those who were unable to access or impress those gatekeepers and it didn’t guarantee quality. But the gatekeepers did at least simplify the model for creators in that it narrowed down the number of people that you had to impress.
(Photo credit: The Next Web)
The new model, in which gatekeepers are side-stepped, lifts the frustration because now there isn’t some faceless person sending out rejection letters and shutting down access to the bookstore shelves for those deemed unworthy. Authors can publish themselves and take full advantage of the disintermediation provided by technology.
However, instead of having to impress one gatekeeper who will help them reach their audience, fledgeling authors now need to impress thousands of people directly. And that means reaching hundreds of thousands in order to find the few who will become readers. That’s easier said than done. Most authors I follow have relatively small communities online with a few hundred or a few thousand followers on Twitter, for example.
Time to bring in the big guns?
Social media is a giant network of networks so messages can ripple through it to reach people whom the originator doesn’t even know. For authors without lots of followers of their own, it seems to make sense to try to get more influential people to pass their message along. A tweet or two from someone with a bigger circle should do it, right?
The idea that there are key influencers who act as pseudo-gatekeepers, controlling access to audiences rather than products, is embedded in our mental model of the internet. There are many marketers whose entire pitch is that they can reach these influencers and persuade them to shine their influential light on your stuff, thus bringing you all the success in the world. Sadly for them, and for me, that model is broken.
But recent research by BuzzFeed’s Jon Steinberg and StumbleUpon’s Jack Krawczyk has found that the key influencer model doesn’t reflect reality. Writing in AdAge they said:
There is little data to support so-called influencer behavior in social marketing. Rather, the data suggest that content and ideas online spread through large numbers of people sharing with small groups. […]
Our data show that online sharing, even at viral scale, takes place through many small groups, not via the single status post or tweet of a few influencers. While influential people may be able to reach a wide audience, their impact is short-lived. Content goes viral when it spreads beyond a particular sphere of influence and spreads across the social web via ordinarily people sharing with their friends.
The evidence shows that people’s online sharing behaviour is pretty much the same online as it is offline, and “runs contrary to the marketing practice of seeking so-called influentials.” This finding isn’t an anomaly. Duncan Watts, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo!, found the same thing in the research that he has carried out over the years.
As counter-intuitive as it may be, it’s not the influencers that you need to persuade, it’s every single individual person you talk to about it. It’s your friends, your colleagues, the strangers who follow you on Twitter. Each one of them is an important part of the network and success relies on creating something that every one of them will want to talk to their friends about. This is slightly disconcerting for anyone who has bought into the influencer model because it means that you should no longer focus your attention on wooing a handful of powerful individuals but instead need to start wooing thousands.
The truth of the matter is that social media is not, and never has been, a silver bullet. Social media is merely an amplifier and, like any amplifier, it doesn’t succeed if the signal is too weak. The most important lesson we learn from this research is that the signal comes from the fans, not the author.
Say Steinberg and Krawczyk:
[S]tories go viral when lots of people engage with their normal-sized circles to share content. The evidence suggests that the best way to "go viral" is to engage millions of users with great shareable content with the repeatable knowledge that they will share at reasonable interpersonal levels. […]
In looking to get content shared, marketers and publishers should focus on content that will resonate and get people talking to their colleagues, friends and families.
As authors, we need to produce work that speaks to people and speak to people ourselves. As fans, we need to recognise that we too are instrumental in the success of the authors whose work we love, no matter how small our own personal circle of friends.
