Marketing guru Seth Godin said that "small is the new big" a few years ago before Facebook and Twitter became tools for marketers. Godin says that SMEs are more deemed to be successful than big companies. A "small" could gradually become scalable than a "big" which carries a few liabilities already. This couldn't be more true in the world of social marketing.
As brands embrace social business strategies, some are still occupied with the notion that for a product to fly, an endorser or influencer must pave the way to make it trend in social networks. However, there is a meager of data to prove that influencer marketing has direct impact on Social ROI. Marketers each has their own way of utilizing their strategies to come up with a social marketing campaign fit for a brand. A smart marketer doesn't need to get an influencer to promote a brand, all he needs is to share content through a large number of people to share within small circles, and this happens in social bookmarking sites.
A recent article from Adage by Buzzfeed founder Jon Steinberg and StumbleUpon's Jack Krawczyk, says that when users visit their sites the intention to share is apparent. They browse Buzzfeed to check out great content then share with their friends and relatives. The sharing behavior is no different from real-world sharing which we often associate with word-of-mouth marketing. Their data shows that for content to reach a viral scale, it should take place within many small groups and not via a single post or tweet of an influencer. The essence of viralty is when content spreads beyond a specific circle of influence, and when ordinary people begin sharing that content it paves the way for viralty.
Here's an excerpt from the report:
"At BuzzFeed, we looked at the 50 stories that had received the most Facebook traffic since mid-2007. A handful of these posts had millions of Facebook referrers, and even the smallest had nearly 100,000 Facebook views. But the median ratio of Facebook views to shares was merely 9-to-1. This means that for every Facebook share, only nine people visited the story. Even the largest stories on Facebook are the product of lots of intimate sharing - not one person sharing and hundreds of thousands of people clicking."
Every brand doesn't need to have a celebrity to endorse it, so why bother getting an influencer to pull the linchpin for a viral campaign? The Old Spice ads in 2010 were a huge hit and it didnt even feature a celebrity. It actually made the Old Spice guy a celebrity. Why is it a hit? Because Old Spice wasn't shoving it on people's throats. They simply shared the vid on relevant social channels like YouTube and Twitter for people to share it. Pinterest was just another photo-sharing site before it became a hit. It started small but grew big because it knows how to drive people to their site through a common interest.
People are using social platforms because there's always something new to share with their friends. There are things to be shared online in order to engage in offline conversations. Customer-centric marketing doesn't need influencers to convey a brand's message, the message is already present in people's interests.