We say to our young people [Free the Children volunteers and members] all the time that, “You vote every single day with your wallets, not your ballots,”
and they get that. I don’t think a lot of brands get it.
We have the largest Facebook cause in the world now. The reason being that we recognize the power of young people to have genuine conversations with each other.
This sort of indirect metric of influence works in others areas as well. For example, in the venture philanthropy space we’ve worked with many large funds, especially in health care, that similarly measure the impact of their investments in terms of ultimate cures. If you’re seeking to cure a particular type of cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or multiple sclerosis, it’s exceptionally hard to find intermediate points of influence for your investment. Either you create a therapy that works or you don’t. There is no return on investment for research that does not create long-term tangible results.
However, the ability to measure intermediate results is a critical part of the way for-profit businesses determine the effectiveness of their influence through marketing. This ability to measure and use the resulting “Internet of influence”
has only surfaced in the last twenty-five years with the rise of the web and social apps, despite the Internet having existed for more than forty-five years.
Measurement of influence has become one of the principle drivers in the shift from affluence to influence, as it provides mechanisms for precisely identifying how influential all points on that spectrum really are.
linchpin of the revolution in the way we measure influence. PageRank measures the influence of any given site or page and brings the “best” results to the top of the search results page. It was a unique approach that was impossible to accomplish until the web came into existence.
By connecting the dots (the hyperlinks between sites and pages) from the influencers who wrote content that best described their ideas and opinions, and businesses, goods or services, to the people searching for them, Google inadvertently flipped the affluence pyramid upside down by exposing previously unseen realms of influence. This flip empowered those who were either naturally gifted or who had learned the skill of creating content that could reach into people’s heads and touch their innermost desires and cravings and jump in front of their more affluent competitors who are used to the high cost, low return of traditional paid advertising.
In fact, in the early days of Google, the company did not even allow paid advertising on its site, a nod to the recognition that affluence was no longer as powerful as it had been and that it could corrupt Google’s core mission of organizing the world’s information. Clearly, Google has since changed its stance on paid ads, which now account for 97 percent of its nearly $40 billion of annual revenue.
However, even Google’s paid advertising model, AdWords, explicitly recognizes influential ads. The “best” ads (those that are clicked most often) cost less than those not clicked as frequently. To be number one on a list of competing AdWords costs less on a per-click basis than those appearing beneath your ad, which may come as a surprise to some. The reason is that the more effective your ad—the more often it gets clicked on—the more relevant you are to the reader. Google acknowledges that by increasing your ranking independently of what you are willing to pay as an advertiser. Unlike earlier paid advertising models from Overture.com and Yahoo, as well as most other competitive bidding models, which ranked the order of ads purely based on who was willing to pay the most to be on top, AdWords explicitly rewards those who understand that the ads which influence people to take the next action are the ones that benefit both advertiser and searcher.
Google is a prime example of the way the spectrum from paid to earned media is not a zero-sum game, where the two extremes are in competition. In traditional media, advertising and editorial ran side by side and reinforced each other, and the same is true of search results in Google. The difference, and it’s a big one, is that anyone can write, record, speak, or perform whatever they want to be indexed by Google, earning their right to be found based on the value of
the content rather than the size of the budget.6
Google’s success in this area is in large part due to the fact that you, as a marketer, can easily measure the influence of paid advertising by tracking the path a customer takes from an online ad, which you place with Google, right through to the sale of a product. It’s why Amazon spends more than $55 million per year on Google’s AdWords.7 It’s also why State Farm plunks down $43 each time you click on a State Farm ad, which shows up because you searched for the term “self-employed health insurance.” By the way, that $43 dollar price point is not set by Google, but instead established by a bidding mechanism that pits advertisers against one another to determine the price based on demand for the term. The bidding model has turned paid media on its head, since it’s not the media owner who sets the value of advertising but the advertisers.
While traditional media, such as TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers will still claim that ratings, based on the number of viewers or subscribers, is a proxy for market demand and reach, it is far more primitive than the direct series of links between an online ad and a sale. All of this has put enormous pressure on large companies such as Procter & Gamble to become more precise in the way they track value and return on their traditional investment of advertising dollars.
To be clear, it’s not that companies don’t already do that by tracking advertising with sophisticated marketing mix models that look at every nuance of their many marketing campaigns and how they relate to product sales. The difference between these empirical measurement methods of the past—however sophisticated the science involved—and the behavioral influence models we are moving to is like the difference between bowling with earplugs in and the lights off and reviewing your performance later on infrared video versus turning the lights on to see and hear the immediate result of your actions.
You are probably realizing by now that the power switch we mentioned at the outset of this chapter is not just a switch from paid to earned or from off-line to online advertising. Instead, it is a switch from the darkness that used to cloak influence to the full light of day, which exposes the workings of influence.
An example of this sort of transparency is a relatively new start-up Upworthy, a site self described as “viral with a purpose.” Upworthy, launched in March 2012, shows just how fast a company can go from zero unique visitors to, as of this writing, a peak of nearly eighty-eight million monthly unique visitors in November 2013.8 The site’s purpose is curating and promoting material oriented toward social good.
The growth of Upworthy is not accidental. Its three cofounders are Eli Pariser of MoveOn (a progressive social movement site), Peter Koechley (former
managing editor of the long-lived satirical news site, The Onion), and Chris Hughes (one of the cofounders of Facebook and, perhaps most famously, the coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the first true social media–powered campaign of its kind). Simply put, these fellows know the power of online crowds well, and they know how to influence them to click, watch, and share. They know who they’re looking for, how to find them, how to motivate them, and how to get them to vote on videos
—a surprisingly difficult task given how infrequently voting happens. They know that the power of social media as a way to tap social proof and liking has a significant impact on building an “Upworthy” site.
Upworthy drives traffic by posting attention-catching headlines such as
“You’ll never believe how (fill in any topic)” or “This woman did (something) and you won’t believe what happened next” with curated content—images and videos they did not create, and are simply referencing or highlighting. It’s a relatively simple concept that wouldn’t seem to be all that powerful, and yet the growth and impact are undeniable.
While the long-term success of Upworthy has yet to be determined, its rise from an idea to one of the forty most visited sites on the web in less than two years demonstrates the founders’ deep understanding of human behavior. As a result, Upworthy has become, as of this book’s writing, the fastest-growing media site ever on the web.