Page 132 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

clues in their environment to help them determine their best guess at “truth.”
They assume the actions of others reflect the correct behavior for them, too. Just
as the number of tweets on the gardening post influenced your decision of what
to read, behavior is driven by the assumption that people in the same situation
may possess more knowledge about what is correct, popular, or ideal. For
example:

“Look at all the awards and plaques on that person’s wall! She must be
really smart. I feel good about being here.”
“Everybody in this room has an Apple computer. It must be a great
computer.”
“There’s a long line of people waiting to get into that bar. We should
probably go there, too, since we don’t know the city very well.”

Social proof is so powerful that after repeated exposures, people even begin
to internalize an acceptance of the belief as truth because so many others must be
correct.

Social proof is an especially critical concept to understand in an online world
of overwhelming information density. With so much content available, we’re
starved for clues to help us know who to trust, what to believe, and what
company can help us as quickly as possible. So we tend to follow the numbers,
especially if the decision is low-risk. We normally don’t cross-reference
information or check sources. We look for the biggest number and believe in its
authority.

Social proof is also a more important factor of influence online versus offline
because our choices are public. We may not care much about something we buy
for our homes if nobody sees it, but with the whole world watching on the
Internet, we very much care about how we appear, what we choose, and what we
disclose to others.

Social proof and online ignition

In the offline world, people don’t walk around with their number of Facebook
“Likes” plastered on their foreheads, but in the world of social media, numerical
proxies for authority abound like fleas on a shaggy mutt. For example, blogs that
generate a lot of tweets and comments may get to a point where they’re popular
just because they’re popular, while worthy blogs may never get noticed unless
they receive a boost in validation through social proof. On the web, entire
business models may be built on social proof, giving them earned or unearned