The issue of defining influence has been the hottest of hot potatoes over the last few months in the social media world. The debates have most obviously raged over the value of services like Klout (which, btw, risks getting investigated by the FTC), but, you’ll be breathing a sigh of relief to read, this post is not about Klout.
This post is about a new report by Geoff Livingston and Henry T Dunbar on The Effectiveness of Celebrity Spokespeople in Social Fundraisers, just announced by Zoetica Media and PayPal Nonprofit, who sponsored the research, which was conducted on case studies of nonprofits in the Paypal network.
Of course, one would assume that celebrities with bazillions of followers on social media sites would have more influence over the purchasing (or donating) power of their followers than people with normal numbers of followers. Apparently, celebrity tweet brokering is big business.
Now there have been plenty of unscientific experiments debunking the power of a celebrity tweet, as well as this famous slightly more learned example by Nieman Journalism Labs.
But you might be surprised to learn that there is a ton of actual research on the topic of online influence – such as (hat tip to Lisa Thorell for digging these up):
- This Stanford paper on Modeling Information Diffusion in Implicit Networks in which a data set of 500 million tweets and 170 million news media articles was tested to determine that, among other things,”users with the most followers are not the most influential in propagating hashtags”. Propagating hashtags? Surely that’s easier to influence people to do than buying a book or donating to a cause… celebrities can’t even do that?
Or how about…
- This 2007 paper, Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation by Duncan Watts, who, according to Wikipedia, is a “Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research where he directs the Human Social Dynamics Group”. Whoa. Here below are the crib notes for those of us (like me, I confess) who no longer know how to read stuff like this…
This new report just adds more research to the pile. Listen to this:
“Nonprofits have turned to their celebrity partners with fans and followers in the millions to raise money. The numbers can be astounding, both positively and negatively. Save the Children just ran a celebrity campaign on social media with the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber that raised $1000,000 in the first day. However, deeper analysis showed the fundraiser achieved $0.0001 per celebrity follower.”
The lesson from the report (which echoes the research conclusions mentioned earlier) is that “lesser-known, but better-engaged, personalities produced stronger results for nonprofits.” I’ll lift some examples from Geoff Livingston’s post introducing the report:
- “A campaign on Facebook’s Causes to raise money for a new children’s hospital. In it, a 9-year-old cancer patient with virtually no online presence generated more donations than any other individual, including television star Ashton Kutcher.
- A DonorsChoose.org fundraising competition among bloggers —- including TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and All Things D’s Kara Swisher —- was dominated by a blogger offering to parade around in a tomato suit.
- The launch competition of Kevin Bacon’s Six Degrees social giving website: Despite recruiting more than 60 celebrities to create “charity badges” on the site —- including Nicole Kidman and Ashley Judd -— the top fundraiser was a woman who blogs about scrapbooking and has an autistic son.”
Anyway. I’ll let you read the report and dig into the details:
Effectiveness of Celebrity Spokespeople in Social Fundraisers
So. Pretty interesting, right? And not surprising… Why?
The conclusion is what a lot of us already know based on our real-world knowledge as practitioners of social media for business – that the people with the most online influence are those who have built their followings by being truly and honestly engaged with them, who are very active in social media, and who have a personal reason to care about your cause or brand or product. You might even be dismissing some of them as slacktivists. (Lesson: Don’t!!)
So the next time someone in your PR department is pushing that celebrity campaign – throw some good old (and new) research at them and help them find the right person for the job – who may not be obvious at first.
And honestly, not everyone likes celebrities anyway.
image: feastoffun
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Maddie Grant is the author of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World and Open Community. She helps associations and nonprofits build community on the social web through her SocialFish consulting practice and is lead editor for SocialFishing, a top-ranked social media blog for the association industry.
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