Malcom Gladwell, Mavens, Connectors, and Digg
April 12th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Advertising, Books, Link Development, Social Networks, ToolsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
So I’m finishing up Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point before my trip to Pubcon next week where’s he’s the keynote speaker. Now if you are serious about real marketing (not the push button kind) this book is required reading, you really get an understanding about how viral marketing works. Which leads me to one of the biggest viral marketing tools that should be on everyone’s mind Digg.
Two of the kinds of people Gladwell mentions are Mavens, and Connectors. While my explanations are nowhere near as good as Gladwell’s I’ll give it a shot. Connectors are people who know lot’s of people. My ex-brother-in-law is a connector. We went on vacation once to Hershey Park and he ran into someone he knew from New York. We went to vacation in Virginia and again he ran into someone he knew. All of us have at least one or two connectors in our lives, we call them up when we need “a guy” and he knows somebody. Mavens are sort of the opposite, mavens know lot’s of stuff. It’s not just lot’s of stuff it’s in depth passionate knowledge of stuff. The thing that makes them great is they are “infectious” with their knowledge they want share it with you and make sure you use it (sometimes to the point of being rather annoying about it). Now when a maven passes something along through a connector we reach that magic moment when something takes on a life of it’s own and goes viral.
This connector maven relationship is one of the things that made Digg so successful. Mavens come in share links about web pages they are passionate about. Digg takes on the role of connector and alerts other mavens to the idea, and things move at internet speed. Because mavens have a voracious knowledge for things they are passionate about there is no such thing as information overload. Regular folks would have gotten tired of CSS, Ajax and Web 2.0 articles a long time ago, but true digg mavens remain unsatiated.
How can you use this to your advantage, by giving them what they want. Build you dating site with cool css tabs and write a tutorial on how you did it. Make your real estate site all web 2.0-ish. Appeal to everyone’s desire to be the next ‘kareoke William Hung‘. You may think it’s dumb, but really does it matter?
Heck if it really does matter to you 6 months later when everyone’s forgotten about ‘your next big thing’, 301 all of the incoming links to your herbal phentermine site (oops did I just say that …).
Sphere It
April 13th, 2006 at 9:31 am
I live not far away from Boston, I would have you up for a milkshake and to help me setup my reef aquarium but I will be out of town, have fun and report all in your blog.
April 13th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Have you read Blink, yet? I don’t think it is as good as Tipping Point, but it is still definitely worth the read. I will also be at WMW-PubCon… definitely excited to see Gladwell.
April 13th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
nope was thinking of picking up a copy at pubcon and getting it signed
April 15th, 2006 at 11:03 am
Doin’ the same…and planning to finish up. It is definitely required reading…and I have been pleasantly surprised after being a little bit disappointed with Blink myself (though I had pretty high expectations from how often Gladwell is referred too)
April 26th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
[...] I had never really bought into the power of Digg, until I got dugg. It drove thousands of visitors to my blog in a matter of hours, and I didn’t even make it to the front page. While Digg tends to favor geeky, tech, or science related news, you don’t need to have a masters from MIT to write for the Digg crowd. The Wolf Howl blog has two very interesting posts on Digg - one about the Digg userbase representing the perfect storm of mavens and connectors, and another with some tips on how to write to help get your non-tech blog dugg. Another tip for Digg - there is a feature that let’s you “blog this story” onto your blog. Doing so places a link to your blog in the right hand column of the Digg story. Doing this alone will help to bring hundreds of visitors to your blog. As long as you are providing valuable content, some of those visitors will grab your feed, bookmark your blog, or make a mental note to return. Incremental steps like this over a period of time equate to thousands of visitors daily. [...]