Who are these people?
If you look at the numbers, you soon realize that a huge portion of the population apparently:
- Has read two books in the last year, Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code
- Uses only two websites, Google and Facebook
- Visits only a few blog posts a day, and every single one of them is on the home page of Digg
- Watches only two or three TV shows, including the Super Bowl
- Eats only at McDonalds
- Watches only incredibly snarky or juvenile videos on YouTube
Mass phenomena are tricky things. It’s true, the typical American reads exactly one book a year. How are you going to predict which of the 75,000 books published are going to be that book? You can’t.
Many bloggers seem to be on a perpetual hunt for the front page of Digg. Sure, it brings you hordes of eyeballs, but then they turn around and leave. What’s the point of that, really?
I think that are plenty of tips you can follow to optimize your offering for this fickle mass group. But it’s still a crap shoot. Doesn’t it make more sense to incrementally earn the attention of a smaller, less glitzy but far more valuable group of people who actually engage with you? And the best part is, your odds of success are a lot better.