Double jeopardy in social media.
One of the classic tenets of FMCG or packaged goods marketing is the concept of double jeopardy. Coined by William N. McPhee in 1963 it essentially states that small brands are penalised twice. Once in terms of lower penetration and secondly by lower loyalty. Therefore over time, big brands will tend to get bigger and dominate their respective categories
This effect has been observed across a number of different categories from politics to media selection. Recently I’ve been thinking about its application to social media. In particular, I think there is a very similar phenomenon that occurs around influence. It feels to me that influence is the social media equivalent of market share, that having large numbers of followers and friends is the equivalent of having a large market share. And that having large influence creates an unfair advantage both in terms of access and in terms of loyalty that increases over time.
For all the talk of the openness and democratic, all-access nature of the internet – almost every web 2.0/social media property is based upon popularity as an organising principle. We sort and filter almost all our information based on popularity algorithms like Pagerank and stats like “most popular, hottest, diggs, etc.” What this leads to is a situation where more popular brands and individuals are more likely to attract the attention of new friends and followers and therefore their influence will grow more quickly than less popular brands and individuals – e.g. they will gain more influence/market share.
This greater influence translates directly into greater loyalty because the more people think a person or brand is important to friend or follow, the more you will also feel it’s necessary to friend or follow that person or brand. I think we see this very clearly in fact that the top bloggers tend to be the top twitterer, plurkers etc.
What this means, I think, is that brands (and people) who delay getting involved with and participating in social media too long may find that there’s a deficit of influence between them and their competitors that will be very difficult to overcome.
I think it’s quite interesting that even on an Internet that was created specifically to encourage the free flow of information; barriers have evolved that are every bit as limiting as the ones we face in the physical world.