The Power of Social Influence

The Power of Social Influence

I’m taking some time this Thanksgiving weekend to catch up on some reading that I’ve been lagging on for a while.

There is a really interesting story in “Return on Influence” by Mark W. Schaefer that I thought would be worth sharing.

One well known, influential blogger named Robert Scoble blogged about a user generated Q&A site similar to Wikipedia in that the content is entirely user generated, known as Quora.

The popularity of the site was growing fairly steadily for its first year of existence and then suddenly between Dec 26, 2010 and Jan 30, 2011 it experienced a 400 percent traffic increase with skyrocketing account registrations and servers being pushed to capacity.

The blog post that sparked this growth was titled “Is Quora the Biggest Blogging Innovation in 10 Years?”.Then at the peak of the sites popularity, Scoble changed his mind and blogged again with “Why I Was Wrong about Quora as a Blogging Service…”

This subsequent blog post caused Quora traffic to plummet by more than 50 percent, almost down to levels prior to the original post that sent the website traffic sparking.

This story makes me think more seriously about the power of influence. Many of the businesses that myWSI Digital Marketing franchise services are related to home improvement in one fashion or another. We service many landscaping and lawn care businesses and also companies that sell landscaping supplies. We also have a number of clients who sell windows and doors, carpeting and flooring, window fashions, home and kitchen remodeling etc.

Often our clients say they don’t understand why they should be thinking about or bother spending their time with social media. I think this example of Scoble and Quora is an excellent representation of why every business should be involved with social media or at the very least paying attention to it.

Word of mouth is everywhere. Home improvement companies will all say it is the best form of marketing. Did you ever think of how influential your own customers might be? Imagine if just one highly influential person blogged or tweeted about how awesome you are. What if lots of influential people did that? Do you think that could have a positive impact on your revenue?

Now imagine if someone with the same influential power is upset for some reason about your business or the service you provided and blogged or tweeted that. What impact might that have on your revenue?

The bottom line is that there are lots of influential people that are probably talking about your business in one way or another in their social channels. You have the option of ignoring the conversations, participating in the conversations or starting the conversations. Which option do you think might have the best impact on your bottom line?

This blog post was originally posted on Your WSI Advantage.