Yesterday, Warren Buffett started hanging out at Answer Guy Central.
Strange (and unlikely) as that sounds, I’m only partially kidding. Yesterday, as you can see from the graph at the top of this post, a heretofore-all-but-ignored story I wrote almost a year ago about Warren Buffett’s browser preference suddenly started drawing traffic.
130 views hardly qualifies as “a lot of traffic” in many senses, of course, but when something written a year ago that had previously been read all of 230 times suddenly spikes so highly, something‘s happened. And that something is Influency*, through long-tail marketing.
Coincidentally, we received about fifty times our normal referral traffic from Facebook yesterday. Coincidental with that, Wired has just published the results of a survey showing that businesses don’t understand social media. Like, at all.
Coincidences, my eye.
We’ve been very carefully, very methodically building Influency over the last several years. I’ve told you many times about long-tail marketing and the absolute fact that without properly-executing search engine optimization your business is doomed to failure. And because we aren’t a media company in the same sense as a Time Warner or AOL, we don’t need huge numbers for all our content to get great results, in context.
Think about it: something I wrote a year ago drew as many people to Answer Guy Central yesterday as it had in its life. Turns out that Long Tail Marketing really does work while you sleep.
The context is that we get our business and marketing content viewed by enough people to maintain and grow our business. We make the same happen for our clients. Google doesn’t really want you to know how to make that happen, of course, but we do. And Influency is achievable; you just need to know how, and work at it, or hire someone who does.
Of course, The Wired study tells a lot about how Influency can get screwed up. Remember Virgin America Customer Service? Virgin America actually has a social networking and social media director, and they still didn’t have the common sense to reach out—or even respond—when a customer service nightmare occurred. Yikes.
If you want to chat about how your business can improve its social media presence and where that fits into the Influency equation, click the “contact” button. Now, get back to work.
