Over the last week, about one in ten visitors to mb-blog.com have come direct from Twitter. Apparently  my recent post “Are marketers creating a social media bubble?” attracted some attention in the Twitterverse, and this led to an unprecedented surge in visits to the blog. While this level of attention is  very welcome, it will just be a temporary blip unless I can continue to provide content that interests these new visitors. And that poses a dilemma. Do I post what you want to hear or what I want to say?

Last week I published a post titled “Big is Beautiful for Social Media.” What I did not say in that post  was that the same principle - the advantage of being big - applies to viral video as well.  If you want to hit critical mass with a video (generally considered to be 1 million views or more) you need both great creative and wide dissemination.

I also posted on this topic back in 2007 (click here to read), but since then we have uncovered a lot more evidence that mass marketing is necessary for viral success.

While at the Corporate Image and Branding conference in New York City on Thursday, I was lucky enough to hear a presentation by Bernd Schmitt. The thesis of Bernd’s presentation, that successful brands think big and innovate in ways that disrupt the status quo, is hardly new, but his delivery was very engaging. In one almost throwaway line he suggested that it was “narrow thinking” that resulted in the financial bubble that catapulted us into the Great Recession. This was a great segue to my presentation because I think that very similar narrow thinking is creating a social media bubble today.

Like many of you, I get a lot of unsolicited email newsletters. I delete most of them without reading, but every now and again something catches my attention. For example, I stopped to look at a recent email titled “The Real Social Media Trends of 2010,” but within a few minutes I realized that it was just another misguided effort to promote social media as a marketing silver bullet. Don’t people realize that the real catalyst for social media success is a strong brand?

Last Monday I was at a client meeting, and as I was busily expounding that successful brands need to stand for something and that using mass media is an important means to ensuring clarity around what the brand stands for, someone in the meeting brought up the example of Hello Kitty, pointing out that the cute and iconic cat has racked up billions in sales over the last 35 years without any real marketing support at all. So does Hello Kitty prove the theory that brands benefit from clarity, or is it the exception that proves the rule?