Too many colleagues, organizations, and companies are keeping their circles of influencers small, believing it is better to invest limited time and resources on the most influential, the most popular, and the most celebrated. Happens in DC all the time. I’m rocking the latest dinner party, parlaying attendees with my wit and banter, when someone snazzier and trendier enters. Immediately I’ve lost my audience’s attention. The idea easily transfers to Twitter.

Other users focus exclusively on networking within their own space, effectively limiting scope and reach by preaching to the choir. If you’ve invested in running with the A-list, fine; however, that’s an old model reminiscent of old PR, of the golf club, the lodge, and the private club.

The Internet created something that not enough social media consultants and coaches support and advise: the ability to expand circles of influencers, to engage with anyone and everyone. Only recently has the Internet become ubiquitous and global in a real way. Previously, the digital divide was a barrier to not just many Americans but quite a few developing nations becoming part of the global conversation.

The value of the Internet is proportional to the number of connected users. It’s also living proof of Rule 34. No matter how obscure, vertical, or arcane your material may be, there’s an audience for it. Someone will show it love and attention. Online social networks have made all of this even easier to the point where it is becoming less of a potential and more of a promise, an eventuality. In short, there is real value associated with connecting to as many followers and collecting as many “Likes” as is humanly possible. For real effect.

There’s also a psychological benefit of large numbers. I have won contracts and business on the power of five-digit followers on Twitter, which is modest compared to most of my peers. However, for someone who only has a couple-hundred followers, 38,000 is a lot and suggests mastery. To be honest, I wonder how long it will take these “less is more” social media consultants to realize that it’s not good business to dismiss what the client wants out of hand.

Go beyond the top 100 A-listers

A wider and more open-minded audience has more positive effects than we can realize. Quantity and quality can exist together in this town, but if you’re just going to pick one, go with quantity. For some reason, many of my social media and digital PR folks disagree. Abraham Harrison is almost five years old, just a few months younger than Twitter itself, and my experience is that it’s not as simple as all that. While it is possibly essential to have the attention of the top-100 A-list influencers in your space, it is also essential to attract everyone else as well — and I’ll do my best to tell you why.

The network effect is a lot like chaos theory, but instead of butterfly wings, they’re Twitterbird wings. Every cannon-bomb splash that a Twitter account makes in a tweet in a small network might as well not exist. If a tweet falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does a it make a ripple?

Well, when you reach the whales of Twitter, the celebrities and politicians who have followers in the millions, every single decibel is amplified, considered, scrutinized. It’s the playground from which TMZ and even the nightly news chooses its evening victims. These large networks attract both eyeballs and robots. The spiders from Klout and from Google and Bing as well as from the Twitter top lists are constantly spending their limited resources paying attention, retweeting, auto-tweeting, and indexing the biggest prey on the prairie. And the only people and brands who can do this effortlessly are the folks and companies who already bring worldwide fame and fortune to the party.

In a perfect world, you’d target these folks by the millions, increasing your amplitude and maintaining your authenticity because of your popular connections. Because the world is far from perfect, be open-minded about any and all Twitter connections. It’s impossible to gauge all that they bring to the table at face level. But it’s possible to assume that they came to you because they share a scope of interest. It’s possible to assume that their followers share that scope of interest.

When you initiate a theory of anyone and everyone, you really must embrace the chaos. In social media on social networks, you cannot choose your fan — at least you shouldn’t. I am sure the makers of My Little Pony never thought that they would garner a galloping herd of adult men, Bronies, who are superfans of the child’s show. Who could have guessed.

You might engage in a strict narrow cast of your net, pre-filtering your target demographic; however, you really need to let go and let God. Your product, service, book, tool, experience, and catalog may find deep appeal among an entirely new fan base that you never considered or imagine before. How deep are you willing to go?

You very well may have a primary, secondary, and tertiary target market — well done. However, this is the Internet, this is the long-tail! Don’t forget Rule 34. Engage in the thousands and even the millions, if possible, and allow your quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and denary markets define themselves.

It works, it really does. Give it a go, give it a test, and let me know.

Via Biznology.

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Well, as regular readers of this blog know, I am a Cluetrainian. This means I put more trust in the value and impact of the online influencer long tail than I do in the impact of the couple of dozen top influencers that most social media consultants and digital PR teams recommend. This is the Internet, an efficient platform allowing easy access to what’s called the network effect: The value of your social network is dependent on the number of others using it.

While it may well be important to have the top 100  influencers on any particular topic following you on Twitter or Facebook, it is not essential. You can make up for it by attracting, retaining, and activating everyone else. In short, anyone who shares her time, talent, and experience online is an important online influencer and potential brand ambassador for my clients.

How do you get lots and lots of people to follow your brand? Don’t know where to start? First, make sure you share your Twitter and Facebook information everywhere your brand exists in the real world or in cyberia. You could spend months and months developing these lists and groups of followers, encouraging folks to retweet your content and so forth.

Of course, you can always buy loads and loads of Twitter followers, popping you from your current 2,500 to 25,000 within a month. Yes, I said it. You can buy tens and hundreds of thousands of followers both on Twitter and on Facebook. But, I will tell you now that the followers are generally spammy, poorly targeted, and they often bail the moment they decide you’re unworthy.

I know for a fact that there’s a guy in Brazil who will hook you up with thousands of Brazilian tweeters almost immediately for a fee. There are dozens of folks who do it and you just need to do a little searching on Google to find them all. That’s somewhere to start. Once you’ve bought your online friends — lots and lots of them — you have to deliver the je ne sais quois to keep them.

Mind you, just because you’re cheating with the acquisition doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods. There’s still a lot of hard work. If you suck, are salesy, don’t tweet or post very often, or are selfish, all of these thousands of purchased followers will start unfollowing you almost immediately.

You had them until you lost them.

It is sort of like being the opening act to U2: You might have 30,000 folks who didn’t come to see you who are there to see Bono, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever buy your album. There’s every reason they should, but you really could make a mess of it — if they don’t, it is your fault as they were your customers to lose. Same thing with buying followers and likes. If the targeting is completely off, if you suck as a host, or if you’re boring or rude, they’re gone — at least the real ones are.

It’s essential to discover everyone and keep up with engagement

Stated simply, the state of the art in social media is still based on old models of public relations where each particular PR agent has a Rolodex and that card represents years and years of personal relationships. Very precious and personal connections, formed and tempered over time, built on trust.

And this very same framework has been mapped directly into social media where many agencies and companies spend all of their time taking their current 25 mainstream media contacts and 25 social media contacts to dinners at Morton’s. There’s not enough budget or time to prospect much further or deeper than that.

Which is a sincere pity.

How can one take an old PR model that only concerns itself with an easy-to-manage elite core of gate-keeping journalists, publishers, and broadcasters and map that onto a new media model? A model that could potentially include anyone and everyone who should decide to commit to starting blogging. Producing content for online consumption, resulting in becoming an online influencer. It’s the circle of success.

In this theory of everyone, in this theory of long-tail digital PR outreach and engagement, it is essential to find viable ways of 1) discovering everyone — because there are potentially a lot of people that show up in your net when you’re being inclusive and indiscriminate, and 2) keeping up — because the amount of engagement explodes when you go from a few thousand to tens-of-thousands, be it curating comments, unfollowing and blocking spammers, checking your direct message inbox for relevant and timely requests or queries, and judiciously checking for retweets, @replies, and mentions and engaging them appropriately and in a timely manner.

Finally, don’t forget to thank everyone online who helps you no matter how “small,” because if you choose to use a theory of everyone in your social media strategy, you can’t be polite, kind, generous, and patient only to the celebrities, you need to be kind and responsive to everyone, all the time.

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