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Why AMPLIFIERS Share
Encouraging consumers to share brand stories is nothing new to marketing. Back in the 1970s and 80s, Fabergé Organics Shampoo had a series of commercials in which women—including actress Heather Locklear—beamed that they “told two friends who told two friends and so on and so on.”6 More recently, the “Ask Me” television and online campaign from Tempur-Pedic (@TempurPedic) encouraged customers to share their unfiltered feedback with family and friends on Facebook.7
Each of these brands sought to tap the power of their AMPLIFIER audience to generate far more buzz and product awareness than a single television commercial could generate on its own. This is called word-of-mouth marketing, and it has been the subject of study as far back as 1966 when Ernest Dichter published “How Word-of-Mouth Marketing Works” in Harvard Business Review.8 In his survey of 255 U.S. consumers, Dichter identified what he called “active word of mouth recommendations.” Of these, Dichter determined that:
Product Involvement drove 33 percent of recommendations (i.e., a great product experience)
Self-Involvement drove 24 percent of recommendations (i.e., the desire for attention or inside information)
Message Involvement drove 23 percent of recommendations (i.e., for humor or informationd)
Other Involvement drove the final 20 percent of recommendations (i.e., to reach out and help or show friendship)
More recently in 2012, Brian Brett (@brianbrett1), managing director of customer research for The New York Times, spearheaded research into the topic of why people share information online.9 His team found that among medium-to-heavy sharers, 94 percent carefully consider how information they share will be useful to the recipient(s). Furthermore:
84 percent share to show support for causes they care about
78 percent share in order to stay connected with people
73 percent share as it connects them to people with shared interests
69 percent share because it helps them feel more involved in the world
68 percent share to give people a better sense of who they are
49 percent share to inform others of products they care about and influence their opinions and/or actions
Notice how the sharing of product experiences has evolved from 1966 to today. Nearly half of the sharers (49 percent) surveyed still share to promote or inform others about products, but they are almost 60 percent more likely to share content when it helps them stay connected with people or meet others with common interests. As you consider how to inspire your own AMPLIFIER audience, keep in mind that AMPLIFIERS share when it is of some personal benefit to them.
Another obvious difference between Dichter’s and The New York Times’s research is the technology available to sharers of the day. When Dichter did his research in 1966, consumers only had a few ways to share content with others—the most important being their voices (a.k.a., big mouths). Today, however, the same social media and mobile technologies that companies use for their marketing also provide consumers with the ability to distribute their every opinion, thought, and observation about your brand—instantaneously and globally. For AMPLIFIERS, those technologies include:
Blogs (including Tumblr)
Foursquare
Instagram and Vine
Instant messaging
Mobile apps
Quora
SMS and Snapchat
StumbleUpon
Telephone
Websites
Yelp
Amplifiers share when it is of some personal benefit to them.
We focus much of our attention on the social media channels in the list above—Facebook and Twitter foremost among them—because of the public nature of likes, comments, shares, and retweets on each platform. Do not forget, however, that email is a critical channel for AMPLIFIERS. In fact, according to a number of recent studies, email remains the top channel through which people share content online.10 It’s just that much of that sharing is done on a private, one-to-one basis under cover of private email inboxes.
From Illustration to Amplification
Len Peralta (@LenPeralta) calls himself a freelance artist, but I know him for what he really is—an immensely talented and creative entrepreneur. With a self-proclaimed goal to make art affordable to everyone, he has set up numerous storefronts on the web. MonsterByMail.com offers buyer original, hand-drawn cartoon monsters for $50. FlipFace.me turns your boring social media avatar into a unique caricature for only $15.
But Len’s most ambitious project to date, the Geek A Week Trading Card Series (@GeekAWeek) owes much of it success to his AMPLIFIERS. Launched as a labor of love in 2010, Len set out to interview one influential person from the realm of pop culture, meme culture, or general geeky fandom each week for a year—all the while turning those interviews into podcasts and immortalizing them in a hand-drawn trading card. Early cards featured “Internet rock star” Jonathan Coulton (@JonathanCoulton), nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot (@MCFrontalot), and film director Kevin Smith (@ThatKevinSmith).