More marketing points.

“It’s not the quantity or the quality that determines influence, it’s the context.” In other words, it matters a lot less how many people look at your stuff or how hood it is as compared to the situation in which it’s made and distributed.

Let’s take a look.

I have a certain number of people who pay attention to me across the dozen or so Social Networks I belong to. This number is much small than an Internet celebrity like iJustine and much, much smaller than say…Lady Gaga.

Does that mean that if I switched out my readers for either of there fans it would automatically increase my clout?

Not likely and a little bit of applied intuition will tell you why.

Do people who happen to be interested in a Pop Star like Gaga also share a passion for esoteric ramblings about information culture? Maybe but not a whole lot of them. At best, a few people might be confused enough by a post title to click through, but they would pretty quickly realize that something had gone horribly wrong.

You could play this mixing and matching between one person’s fans and anothers all day and it would be rare indeed when you would come out with a combination that would actually help you reach a wider audience.

It’s not enough to have a lot of people puttering around your network, it’s not even enough to give them some kind of objectively “good” content to look at, the secret is to have the right people and show them the right content when they are ready to consume it.