In the world of business the success of your idea depends hugely on word of mouth and feedback, especially with the Internet. The same is true of music, with new bands scrabbling to get any bandwidth with already saturated music lovers. In such a situation we often rely on music taste makers that we know and trust to point us towards new music we might like. This was a subject that Malcolm Gladwell discussed in his excellent book 'The Tipping Point', where he described such people or groups as 'super influencers' who have an effect on many people's opinions and can even make or break new products.

Well it seems not everyone believes Gladwell's view of how information is dispersed. In a recent article Fast Company talks with Duncan Watts, a Network Theorist, on his own views of how information travels. He feels that information sharing in tightly grouped areas such as music depends much more on who gets the first attention, rather than who is referenced by the most connected people. This was found in an experiment where he set up new songs on a music sharing site, and then asked different groups to rate the music - but some of the groups had a social aspect, and others didn't. What transpired was that the top rated list of songs was totally different for each group, there was no shared 'best song'. The result for the 'social' world seemed to be driven more by who got the first votes, not who was actually best.

This result has some intuitive merit. In today's social information networks, information that is tagged most rises to the top of display lists such as 'Recent Top 10' or similar. Other people then see these lists and give their own opinions on this music, perhaps biased by its position in the list, instead of going round all available music and seeing what they like. In this case the influencer is the social group en masse, rather than a single super influencer. Either way it seems that getting out there first with your product into a new area is critical, although as Watts says - “In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible&rdquo - so make sure your product is worthy of any attention is receives and you can't go far wrong. Or if it's not great, then make sure you can get feedback from this failed attempt to make sure the next one is worthy.

[From Boing Boing]

Labels: Distribution Models, Long Tail, marketing, Network Theory, Power of the Network, social networks, viral marketing

For some reason that escapes me now I started to spend a few hours playing around with Squidoo to create my own 'lens' on Smorkin' Labbits, those cute little collectible rabbits that smoke. Squidoo was created by Seth Godin, amongst others, to enable experts (and fans) with minimal internet experience to create, manage and write their own spiel about the subjects they love. It's sort of a crowd-sourced About.com, with the added fun of having to identify spam type posts.

The overall experience of creating my lens was straight-forward and powerful, although I found that one limitation of Squidoo is that it doesn't like you uploading pictures to make lists - something that I really wanted to do to list out the colourful little toys. The solution: create a false Flickr account, upload my pictures there, then hand transfer every image URL since the 'Plaxo' image grabbing code seems not to be working right now. Ug. What's interesting now is whether or not I make any money off this activity, as Squidoo borrows another crowd sourced site idea (ePinions') to share any affiliate revenues they make with us, the creators. Somehow I think the percentage payback on a $5 plastic toy ain't so great, but guess that's why all the camera focussed lenses are already highly developed.

Labels: Crowd Sourced, Long Tail, marketing

The UK's premier yearly book awards, the Man Booker prize, has just been won by the rank outsider Anne Enright, for her book 'The Gathering'. The Booker prize has a habit of being un-predictable, and it certainly isn't a popularity contest, but winning the prize is a boon to any novelist's sales. To help the rest of us who haven't won, the BBC offers a handy list of ten ways to make a book popular, ranging from word of mouth, TV shows like Richard & Judy or Oprah and three for two marketing offers.

Labels: Business Ideas, Distribution Models, marketing, psychology

Threshers, a large UK high street based supplier of alcohol, are bracing themselves for unexpected waves of customers after discount voucher was spread rapidly round the web. The 40% voucher was intended for trade partners of Threshers only, but the web mob got hold of the offer and told their friends - now the voucher has been downloaded almost a million times.

Threshers have no idea how much this will cost them - but hopefully for their sakes the 40% discount still gave them a slight profit. In the meantime, it's a great cautionary example to the rest of the world to never expect any good offer released on the web to stay within the intended group - so be prepared for a) the hoardes of people who may take up the offer, and b) the media backlash if you handle it badly. For an example of how bad it can turn, remember that Starbucks got sued for one of their online vouchers being refused. Never good press.

Labels: marketing, viral marketing