Bloggers, Sneezers and Purple Cows

Rajesh points to Jim Moore's post on why bloggers will prove to be an influential lot in the time to come. Moore talks about the paradoxical strength of weak social ties. These weak social links are primarily responsible to bringing about social networking connections, and form the prime force behind Kevin Bacon's concept of Six Degrees of Separation.

Social Networking sites like Rhyze and Friendster may be exploiting this phenomenon quite literally, but one of the most interesting applications of using the strength of weak social connections in marketing has been exploited in Seth Godin's new book Purple Cow.

Godin who is a pioneer of direct marketing and an avid blogger himself, puts forward the concept of ‘sneezers’. Sneezers are early adopters who love your product and are willing to voice out their opinion about it. Good products will automatically appeal more to the sneezers and they in turn will let others know about it. One important thing to notice is that most bloggers are in natural sneezers. They are vocal about things they like and things they don't and though few in number they are able to spread their ideas and thoughts amongst like minded people.

To a company looking at effectively spending their marketing budget, this is exactly the kind of people to target. Macromedia has done this quite effectively till now, and the Macromedia Bloggers List is a very efficient way of getting the word out to the right people. Microsoft has also done the same with .NET.

But the marketing vehicle is not one of the most important lessons that Purple Cow is trying to put out. In fact the whole emphasis of the book is on having a remarkable product, which is what the Purple Cow is: A remarkable product that stands out from amongst all the black and brown ones.

After all a remarkable product hardly needs any marketing. The product itself will do the talking, and good old word of mouth will take care of the rest. After all, we are today living in an age of information overload, where the barrage of advertising and spam has left us numb. What still works are the weak social ties.

However, this power of bloggers is not for everybody to exploit their own causes. If you have an unremarkable product, then no amount of sneezers will help. In fact it would be the other way around. Mitch Kapor once was approached by an (un)named company, and the whole incident backfired on the company. One of the main reasons, well the product was not a Purple Cow...

The Purple Cow, by the way is not just a book about marketing products, you can use the concepts in the book to your career too. So even if you're not involved with marketing directly, it makes an excellent read...

Posted by Navneet at January 4, 2004 06:46 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam