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May 20, 2010
Spreadability
For today's marketer, the real enemy is obscurity.
How do you build attention for your product, company or brand and rise above the marketplace noise?
One way is to make sure your web content is completely spreadable. Adding links for people to share your content on social networks and social media sites is pretty much mandatory. Remove all barriers so that customer evangelists can share your content and messages freely. Nothing new about this except that I found find this archaic message at the start of a B2B company's product video on their website.
Social networks are word of mouth jet streams. Your web content should be designed to ride them.
Other blogs that reference Spreadability:
Hey Jackie,
That message is a great example of the strange logics of marketing in an age where the social connections of users is more prevalent than ever. It's not particularly a surprise that word of mouth is the way content has spread for generations, but it's something marketers could always ignore, in order to preserve the illusion that we controlled the message completely and that the world worked in a way that media companies and brands produced content and "the masses" consumed them passively. Our language--including "consumer"--perpetuates that myth.
The Web has been a reminder that, in order for a reputation to built, messages must spread. Yet, as I conduct workshops with a variety of big B2B and B2C companies, I find time and time again that the language and mentality of "stickiness" holds such prevalence for Web teams, social media, etc., that brands are invested in putting content in one place and then trying to convince people to come there. As you point out, this runs counter to the way people actually talk about issues, and--by privileging the platforms and forms of distribution that are easiest to control and measure--brands are missing significant opportunities to really connect with the way their audiences are discussing issues and the company itself.
I really appreciated this post. As I work on our "spreadable media" book project with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, we're looking to build on our arguments about spreadability over the past several years and to articulate not just why concepts like "stickiness" and "viral" have skewed the way media companies and marketers develop and distribute content but also the deeper issues companies must consider if they truly want to create content that's spreadable.
In any case, look forward to crossing paths on these discussions again in the coming months.
We definitely try to do our best to make things spread on TeachStreet.com -- the mandatory share buttons on our classes / articles, etc. I wonder are there any industry suggestions (outside of share buttons) that would help drive virality?
Hmmm, well I found a web site which required express written permission if you wanted to link to them!
Good post! One of the best spreadability tools is great content that is free which builds trust with your target. The other part, for me at least, is that your content needs to be very specific so you can get 'traction' with your targets consumers.
cheers.
Michael
@Jodi are you serious? That is crazy to me! Too bad you can't send me the link.
I wonder what your thoughts are about sharing blog comments via disqus or another like kind comment syndicate?
For instance, I could see the value of such a vehicle on this blog as it would further amplify the chance for other value add conversation to happen.
Thanks for the post - some great advice.
M
Mike,
I am not that familiar with Disqus and how comments are shared. I will research how it works. Thanks!
