What’s Your Mom’s Klout Score?

What’s Your Mom’s Klout Score?:

There has been a lot of talk in the social realm about the value of influence. Influence measurement company Klout has done an amazing job building a scoring system to let everyone know who the most influential online players are. My Klout score is 44. Jay Baer’s is 79. My wife… about a 2.

Content marketing is in a transition. Historically, there was a focus on Big Content written by a few people with the greatest possible influence and reach. The changes have to do with what’s going on with the web in a macro way. We have been making the argument that the concept of a website is obsolete… that we are moving toward a web of individual pages, rather than end-all/ be-all sites. In a recent post, Jay Baer takes this one giant step forward with the following:

“But when social media soared… the notion of the Page and Link being the coin of the realm started to feel as quaint as a car hop… That’s because content creation is now about small stuff, not big stuff, which makes it no longer a commercial enterprise, but a personal one.

And that huge shift away from Pages and toward smaller pieces of sharable content (“Edges”, in Facebook’s parlance) created a major problem for Google, whose empire is built on the primacy of the page and the latticework of connections between them.”

What Jay means by commercial enterprise when talking about content creation is the decline of the central authority telling one story. We’re evolving toward lots and lots of small, personal stories. Think of it as the long tail of content marketing. First, let me remind you about the long tail of search, as shown in the figure below.

The “fat head” is the journalism/ thought-leadership kind of content traditionally pushed out by marketing efforts, while the long tail consists of the thousands of smaller stories created by less traditional “authorities.” These are the kinds of unique experience stories created by your employees and constituents, which grow in value as your circle of influence expands. Imagine a shadow long tail that reflects this social media influence.

What’s great about this is that it’s the long tail content that gets shared, “liked,” and +1’ed, and collectively drives a lot more qualified traffic than the more commercial content. These shares are people talking to their friends. While authorities and celebrities are inspirational, most people believe, trust, and are more likely to take action based on what their own friends think and say.

I always like to ask, “What’s your mom’s Klout score?” I’m going to bet your mom isn’t that globally influential (unless you are Rand Fishkin). But to the 150 people on her Facebook friends list, your mom is probably highly influential. Multiply your mom by hundreds or thousands and you start to see the long tail’s role in content marketing.

Armed with this knowledge, you have to change your content marketing strategy: Start thinking about capitalizing on the long tail and ways to engage your employees and customers in large-scale storytelling. Great idea, but how do you do that?

1. Most importantly, offer the market a great product. Nothing gets great word of mouth like an awesome customer experience. This is mandatory.
2. Recruit your customers to share their story. Email them after a great experience and ask them to tell their story (here’s a hint: this is even easier if you let them share a picture).
3. Share their story on your own blog. Notice I say blog because Facebook campaigns are here today and gone tomorrow but a blog can be permanent.
4. Last but not least, make it easy for them to share their own story with their social networks. When their story hits your blog, give them an email back to let them know and help them easily share the post.

Here’s an example of how it worked for Western River Expeditions: The company created a sweepstakes to motivate satisfied customers to share their trip photos and stories of their adventure. After submitting a photo, Western notified entrants by email that their photos were posted and provided links to help them share them with friends on Facebook and solicit contest votes.

With simple ideas like this, you can now start to leverage the long tail of influence.

What are your thoughts about the value of influence and how it’s changing content marketing? Please share your comments below.