Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In his new book “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in the Age of Distraction,” Derek Thompson busts some big myths about how popular stuff gets popular. Myths like: “Content is king,” i.e., good stuff rises to the top because it’s good.“

Distribution is more important” than content, Thompson said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “You can say that a song is the best song in the world, you can say that an idea is the best for people’s welfare, or a movie is the best documentary of its kind. But without a distribution strategy to reach people, nobody hears it.”

Thompson, a senior editor at the Atlantic, challenged the idea — popularized by other pop-sociology writers like Malcolm Gladwell — that ideas can go viral, spreading and reproducing in a biological way. Instead, he said, everything from memes to tech companies can “piggyback” on existing social networks....

More brands and people continue filling the channels with their blogs, infographics, white papers, etc. As a result, we’re experiencing a deluge of content, most of it suffering from over-messaged, self-important corporate sales talk, or worse, shoddy workmanship.

There’s no better example of this issue than our own marketing space where the effort to produce consistent content creates an ever increasing level of drivel. In fact, there’s so much “me, too” content, getting beyond a headline skim requires some real shake-up in the social media marketplace or a dramatic post. When readers find themselves inundated with ever increasing quantities of the same, creators find themselves producing content with diminishing value.

The situation devolves to the point where content becomes spam. We all know what happens to spam. It doesn’t get read, it’s unsubscribed from, deleted, and relegated to the annals of digital indexing somewhere deep in Google....

Social media is a fantastic tool for generating leads and can be a great complement to a strong email marketing presence. Strategist Annetta Powell recently wrote an article on Business2community.com identifying best practices for generating leads through social media.

Powell wrote, “In social media marketing, businesses try to send messages about their products to people and encourage them to share it with other people in their social circle. This way the message of the company is sent to a larger network of people on its own without the company having to do anything.”

“The driving force behind a social media marketing campaign is one customer’s recommendation to the other through word-of-mouth,” continued Powell, “This is the reason why the traffic coming to your website due to social media marketing is called earned traffic rather being called paid traffic.” Powell separated social media into three different categories, each of which have different lead generating strategies....