Reviews are often regarded as the holy grail of marketing.  It's perhaps understandable.  After all, a customer with no hidden agenda is surely going to be more credible than a company clearly trying to hawk their wares.  If you can excite your customers enough that they will gladly spread the word for you then you create an army of brand ambassadors that will largely do your marketing for you.  It's a strategy that Apple use well, having no official presence on social networks, relying instead upon their customers to do the job for them.

New research suggests that this is not always the case however.  The research team built a Facebook application designed to test two viral product messages against one another.  For the first message, users selected the people in their social network that they wanted to send referrals to and sent them a personalised message.  So it was very much in line with how word of mouth traditionally works.

The second message however was the complete opposite.  It took the form of an automated broadcast.  Whenever the user engaged with the product, this was automatically broadcast to their contacts.

The differences in the two approaches is clear.  Whilst the personalised approach will only generally go to people close to us, the automated approach is much more likely to reach our weaker connections.

Traditionally thinking has suggested that the closeness of the relationship is crucial if you want people to spread the message on.  We tend to trust those closer to us more, therefore we respond more often to them.

The research suggests otherwise however.  They found that automated broadcasts produced a 246% increase in both peer influence and social contagion.  The personalised word of mouth by contrast only generated a 98% increase.  Not to be sniffed at but nothing like as effective as the automated broadcast.

The reasoning for this increase is quite simple.  With the automated broadcast, it was as simple as more people got to see it.  "Although active-personalized viral messages are more effective in encouraging adoption per message and are correlated with more user engagement and sustained product use, passive-broadcast messaging is used more often, generating more total peer adoption in the network." the researchers said.

The long tail of social

There are two main schools when it comes to social media.  There are some that treat it very much like a broadcast medium, seeking to send one message out to as many people as possible.  If they can do it using as little effort as possible then even better.  Then there are those that wish to cultivate strong relationships with a much smaller number of people, believing that quality and deep interactions are the way to go.

This research suggests that a mixture of the two could be the answer.  The long tail effect has been known about for nearly a decade now and has been used in many industries.  In search marketing for instance it's well known that whilst you shouldn't ignore the high volume keywords you should not put all of your eggs into that basket and ignore the many less popular keywords that could collectively give you great results.

Research such as this suggests that social media is much the same.  By all means focus energy on cultivating great relationships with some key contacts, but don't ignore the long tail.  Those weak ties can often bring you benefits you could not even envisage and should not be overlooked.  If that means swallowing your pride and engaging in a bit of automated broadcasting, perhaps this research will help you sleep better at night.