Marketers Beware: Study Says Your Mom is More Influential than Robert Scoble

Well, she is when it comes to you. Scoble’s still pretty darn influential, to be sure. But a recent study by Canadian research firm Pollara demonstrates that when it comes to key purchasing decisions, people trust friends and family more than they trust famous bloggers:

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

This seems to back up the model advocated by Duncan Watts:

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

It may be that we need to shift away from the “influencer-focused” model when it comes to online social marketing. It may be more productive to assist passionate users — be they bloggers with a PageRank of 8 or your grandpa — to connect with the people that trust them in a way that is relevant to the core value of the product.

In short, you need to engage with your user community and provide them with tools they find useful. This can be as simple as blogging about an issue of core interest to your community and making it easy for them to share your content with their friend when they see fit. It may be more complex — an organization targeting busy commuters could build an interactive map of public transit options in major metropolitan areas.

It might be that — as the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives recently decided — you’ll need to build a full-featured social network for your users to help them support one another.

But if engaging with the most widely read bloggers is your only strategy for using leveraging the social Web as a marketing tool, you may want to rethink things a bit.

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