Social Proofing As Part Of Your Marketing Strategy
June 1, 2009
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It used to be that artists, writers, marketers, PR professionals, entrepreneurs – anyone with ideas – would:
- Need the blessing of gatekeepers to move up in the world,
- Rely on things such as awards or industry endorsements as credentials,
- Require media to buy into their story in order to build their reputation.
I’m not saying these things aren’t still relevant and don’t help establish credibility, they absolutely do, but savvy people and businesses across industries are leveraging the web to create influence, trust and authority on their own rendition through the concept of social proofing. And, something interesting happens to those able to acquire social proofing – they actually find it is a key to get the blessings of gatekeepers, gain awards/industry endorsements, and attract media attention.
Social proofing aka informational social influence is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in vague social situations when people are unable to determine the correct mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed and become likely to follow that behavior.
Simplified and in plain English, what this means is in unfamiliar circumstances, we look to each other for cues on what is credible and worthy of our attention.
Social proofing in action:
In April 2007, the Washington Post convinced Joshua Bell, a famous violin virtuoso, to play in the Washington DC subway during the morning rush hour. Bell took his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin and played. Almost no one noticed or stopped to listen. He collected a total of $32 for an hour of playing (excluding a $20 bill that was given by a person who recognized him).
The subway commuters are using each others’ response to the violinist in order to determine their own response to him. Without the cues that signal the violinist’s quality that accompany him when performing in a concert hall, such as expensive tickets and posters, the violinist is judged by other commuters’ reaction to him: as most commuters are primarily concerned with reaching their place of work, this forms the response the commuters signal to one another about the violinist.
(source)
Traditional applications of social proofing:
- If a man is perceived to be in a company of attractive women, or is associated with them, then his perceived social value and attractiveness will be perceived to be greater.
- If he is seen to be rejected by many women, his social value will be judged negatively. The implied cognition is then “I just saw him being rejected by many women, there is probably a good reason why they don’t like him”.
- A person who has been unemployed for a long time may have a hard time finding a new job – even if they are highly skilled and qualified. Potential employers attribute wrongly the person’s lack of employment to the person rather than the situation.
- Similarly, a person who is in high demand may continue to get many attractive job offers and can as a result extract a considerable wage premium – even if his/her objective performance has been poor. When people appear successful, potential employers and others who evaluate them tend to search more intensively for virtues or positive characteristics that are “congruent” with or explain the person’s success, and to ignore or underestimate the person’s faults.
- Some nightclub and bar owners effectively employ social proof to increase the popularity of their venues. This is usually done by deliberately reducing the rate at which people are allowed to enter, thus artificially causing the line to be longer.
- Contrary to common annoyance of canned laughter in television shows, television studios have discovered that they can increase the perceived “funniness” of a show by merely playing canned laughter at key “funny” moments. They have found that even though viewers find canned laughter highly annoying, they perceive shows that happen to use canned laughter more funny than the shows that do not use canned laughter.
(source)
Web-based social proofing
The web democratizes social proofing, allowing anyone with talent and marketing prowess the ability to build their reputation on a global scale simply by doing what they do best. Just like the concert hall and expensive tickets act as social proofing for Joshua Bell, many successful businesses and people utilize elements on their site as cues to visitors to help identify that what they are doing is worthy of attention.
Social proofing through numbers
Bloggers share their RSS reader count publicly as social proofing to show the value of their content (hundreds or thousands of others read your blog, there must be something to it).
Photographers and graphic designers use networks like Flickr to establish themselves by showing view counts of their works. Using Flickr and a creative commons license, a freelancer could take the time to make a portfolio of their web popularity including detailed metrics, showing how many times their images have been viewed on Flickr, embedded on blogs, used in SlideShare presentations, etc. A compelling PDF or portfolio website of an artist’s work combined with data attractively presented is a strong selling tool for their services.
Musicians can use music networks like MySpace, Last.FM and file sharing to track the popularity of their work and use metrics as social proofing to pitch a label. A label would be hard pressed to ignore an artist whose work has hundreds of thousands of plays/shares across platforms (it’s clear people like the art).
Social proofing through comments
Comments are less about numbers and more about quality. Highlight exceptional comments and endorsements by users or clients as social proofing, especially in cases you know they will resonate with your potential targets. The web makes getting comments simple for everyone from major brands to small startups. Simple in the ability to attain them, but the quality of comments generated is of course based upon your performance. Linked In plays into this, notice they have an entire section devoted to this for professionals called recommendations.
Social proofing through ratings
In relevant cases, a rating system – whether objective or subjective – can help establish social proofing, especially in cases where the most popular items are not obvious. Sorting by ratings is a helpful way for new customers to discover the most popular items at an online store quickly. Consider doing things like calling out the most rated items as a clear starting point.
PR as social proofing
I created a feedback room for The Future Buzz over on FriendFeed which automatically aggregates conversations from a few key places around the web about this blog. It’s just for me to keep track of what they early adopters specifically are saying about content here – but all the conversations, links, posts, articles and endorsements generated are good online PR that I could use as social proofing. A blog is the ultimate PR tool for your businesses or yourself.
SEO as social proofing
Aside from connections, companies and people that rank highly in the engines are viewed as having high degrees of social proofing because of the links and trust required by the web community to get to that spot.
Conclusion
Of course, there are even more examples of how to generate social proofing for your business, your art, or yourself on the web – it is only limited by your creativity. All people and businesses of high quality can benefit from the democratic nature of social proofing and it is a basic, if often forgotten strategy to be incorporated on everything from blogs to web applications to e-commerce sites to personal portfolios.
The first step is to define the methods to get the desired return and begin to generate data. The next step is not just to display the data, but consider how it can be used in the most compelling way to persuade others you’re the right choice and take the actions you’d like.
Don’t stop yet – there are so many different ways to continue to use your social proofing to help accomplish other goals and create compelling material surrounding your brand. Remix the data, mash it up, share it with fans, put it into blog posts, use the subjective data to create new products, take it offline to use in presentations and pitches, use it to generate PR, even use it to generate more social proofing – popular people/businesses tend to get more popular.
Related posts from The Future Buzz
The Two Kinds Of Web Popularity
The 48 Laws Of Power Applied To Blogging
Related posts from around the web
What Snapshot of SEO Drives Your Web Business? (Online Marketing Blog)
Reviving the Traditional Press Release (PR 2.0)
Social Cues & Increasing Sales (SEO Book)
Post image provided by Shutterstock, royalty-free subscription stock photography and vector art.
Craig replied | Jun 1, 2009 (18 comments)
Social proofing is a big part of life in general, especially on the web. In my personal movie blog, I am having trouble getting comments going because of lack of social proofing. Usually once there is a few, people are more likely to leave a comment. Same goes for RSS, once they see the numbers, people are more likely to subscribe which is why I currently hide it. For business I am about to begin personally pitching bloggers about our new site (let me know if it’s ok if I can send you information) and am hoping that social proofing will develop to PR from the smaller guys and eventually lead to the bigger fish. I know it usually works the other way around but when you are a smaller start-up it is difficult to develop relationships with those bigger fish. Either way, social proof has a lot to do with everything, whether about a site, or figuring out what bar is popular on a Friday night.
ukhustle replied | Jun 1, 2009 (1 comment)
Brilliant article which describes the fickle world we live in, without a doubt it seems that the more something appears popular the more popular it becomes. The violinist example is a prime example of how things within the music industry are, the top selling artists are very rarely the most musically talented.
http://www.ukhustle.com
Marketing Donut replied | Jun 2, 2009 (3 comments)
Excellent article – Really liked the violinist example with success inversly proportional to talent. It really is all about getting yourself out there but i think that if the product is of an excellent quality that will speak volumes too.
Alex – unleash reality replied | Jun 6, 2009 (3 comments)
really interesting application of social proofing to online (i’m familiar with it in the social capacity :) )
i’m kinda torn about it though – would love to hear your take on this…
on the one hand, good ‘ol economics rationality theory – the disclosure principle. you should disclose numbers (ones you referred to – feed subscribers for instance) because not disclosing them when others are leads the consumer (readers) to assume that they are low (even though they may not be – hence underplaying your site’s social proof)
on the other hand though, your site may have few subscribers because it’s new – not because it’s bad or anything else. in this case showing the number of subscribers could lead people away from it (judge blog by it’s cover :P ) so i’d prolly be inclined (as i’m doing on my site) to not show subscriber numbers until they’re at a show-offable level :)
interesting ideas all round
subscribed :) +1 to social proof. go team!
all the best
alex – unleash reality
Paul Bennett replied | Apr 3, 2010 (7 comments)
Hi Adam,
Not sure I’m 100% in agreement with the violinist example. As a regular commuter I find myself less likely to give to buskers when I’m headed for the train, as I (and hence others) are more likely to be in a hurry and therefore don’t really want to stop or pause for fear of missing a connection.
I’d find the example more compelling if it were carried out in a shopping area where people were less likely to be hurrying.
For example, I’ve seen a five person street orchestra playing Bach’s fugue in the Netherlands recently. It was a miserable winter’s day but their playing still drew quite a crowd (and more than a few coins). I was even more impressed by the fact that they were using homemade instruments and had absolutely no sheet music – quite a feat.
Overall though, I loved the summary – I was completely unaware of “social proofing” but now see it’s in effect everywhere and I’m keen to try it out in the next few months.
Paul