Renowned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki seeks to alter our marketing perspective and one of his bold initiatives is not to suck up to famous bloggers.
Forget A-list bloggers. Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful. Focus on big numbers—any Technorati 1,000,000 blogger can be a channel to reach people. If enough people like your product, the A-list bloggers will have to write about you.
In case you’re interested, this is an offshoot of the theory by Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research that influential personalities have no effect on viral and word-of-mouth marketing campaigns.
It [achieving marketing success through influentials] just doesn’t work. A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.
I’m pretty sure Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell is cooking up a rebuttal against this great argument. Heads up!
Originally posted on January 29, 2008 @ 12:20 pm