Brian Solis at Future of Influence Summit: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations!

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When we started organizing Future of Influence Summit, our minds turned immediately to Brian Solis, who is himself one of the most central influencers and thought leaders in this rapidly emerging space.

So it’s awesome that Brian is speaking at the Summit, providing his insights on Influence at the Center of Marketing and Advertising.

Brian’s blog PR 2.0 is essential reading on the topic, and he also often guest blogs for TechCrunch. Just a few of his prominent posts that are particularly relevant to the future of influence include:

– Full Disclosure: Sponsored Conversations on Twitter Raise Concerns, Prompt Standards (Great post, will write more about later)

– Identifying and Connecting with Influencers

– Real-Time Conversations Gain in Influence, Hasten Social CRM

– Unveiling the New Influencers

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Hashtag for Future of Influence Summit is #foi09

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Belatedly launching the hashtag for Future of Influence Summit: #foi09

FOI is Freedom of Information as well as Future of Influence, so putting the year in will help us stand out…

I have been remiss in not using the hashtag in my Twittering yet, but now we have quite extraordinary cast of attendees as well as amazing speakers in both San Francisco and Sydney, it’s time to kick off the Twitter conversation on where influence is going.

Hope to speak soon on Twitter about the future of influence!

Here are links to a few conversation starters:

The changing nature of influentials and the role of the social graph

You (or your favorite charity) can make money from your tweets! Participate in an experiment on making money from influence

Influence research: what are the real influence networks within Twitter and social media?

Influence research: Duncan Watts and the debate on whether “influentials” really matter

Launch of the Influence Landscape framework

Selected quotations for our times

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In finding the quote from Marshall McLuhan on professionals and amateurs I used in my last post, I dug up a file I created a dozen years go with some quotes I was collecting. Here are just a few that are still worth bearing in mind today:

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”

– Winston Churchill

“It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiar in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”

– John Stuart Mills in 1848

“Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean, if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”.

– Kristian Wilson of Nintendo Inc in 1989

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”

– Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

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Marshall McLuhan’s view on the “social media expert”

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I was just asked “what is a social media expert”?

Marshall McLuhan is still the oracle. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the master.

“Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The ‘expert’ is the man who stays put.”

– Marshall McLuhan

In other words, a “social media expert” is an oxymoron – it cannot exist. The true trailblazers who forge new paths for the rest are the amateurs, the ones who are continually trying new things because they do NOT know. Anyone who truly understands social media would never pretend otherwise.

I wrote down this quote a dozen years ago because it so accurately reflected the way I felt about ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’. Amidst today’s extraordinary pace of change this outlook is in fact far more relevant than it ever has been before.

Celebrate the amateur!

The changing nature of influentials and the role of the social graph

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We weren’t the first to use the phrase ‘Future of Influence’. Most prominently Nate Elliott of Forrester wrote a report ‘The Future of Influence‘ (though you’re better off going to Future of Influence Summit than buying the report :-) ) and has done a number of presentations on the theme.

Nate summarizes the topic:

* As Users Become More Active in Recommending Products and Services, New Influence Challenges Volume of Classic Influence

* The Growth of New Influence Will Overwhelm Some Users, Reinforcing the Value of Personal Recommendations from Known Sources

* Marketers Should Focus on Classic Influentials to Drive Direct Action, Encourage Them to Make Off-line Recommendations

Nate’s presentation below describes the difference between what he calls ‘Classic Influentials‘ (who exert passive influence by responding to requests for information) and ‘New Influentials‘ (who exert influence by proactively giving advice).

The Future of Influence

View more presentations from Web2 Expo.

A key focus in this analysis is user reviews. As we get a critical mass of reviews of products and content, this becomes a better source of information to consumers. However simple recommendation behaviors, for example in Twitter, are also being aggregated to provide information that guides decisions and behaviors.

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You (or your favorite charity) can make money from your tweets! Participate in an experiment on making money from influence

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You (or your favorite charity) can benefit from your influence! To find out how, read on…

One of the key themes of Future of Influence Summit, on next week in San Francisco and Sydney, is ‘business models for influence and reputation’.

There are many angles to this particular topic, including:

* Will it be possible for individuals to effectively monetize their influence and reputation?

* What new mechanisms will allow people to make money from the influence?

* How will influence intersect with spending on advertising? (some of the leading players in this space will be speaking at the Summit)

* What are business models for the measurement of influence and reputation?

I recently wrote about Sponsored Tweets, which is one of a number of platforms for people to make money by tweeting sponsored messages and links. There has been extensive discussion on this concept, with a high level of polarization in the community as to whether or not this is a good idea (see for example the comments on Mashable, and thoughts from David Risley, White Hat Crew, and AdWeek).

In the spirit of experimentation and learning how paid influence may work, we are introducing a rewarded tweeting system for promoting Future of Influence Summit. Here is how it works:

1. People using an approved discount code get 25% off the full price of registration (US$199 in San Francisco, A$600 in Sydney). For any registrations with that code, an additional 5% of the registration fee (US$10 for US, A$30 for Australia) is paid to you (or your favourite charity).

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This is my current favorite album – listen to it here!

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Ellipse by Imogen Heap is my current new favorite album – absolutely delightful!

Very generously given away by Imogen a few days ago on her website, and also available as an embed, as below.

Have a listen!

I discovered Imogen Heap when listening to the Kate Havnevik channel on Last.FM – Kate’s music is lovely. Kate and Imogen’s music is indeed very much in the same vein.

Imogen is here providing very open access to her music, with prominent buy buttons on each of the tracks.

While you can listen to streamed music when at your computer, you won’t do that on your iPod or mobile. So you will quite possibly buy the song to pull into your iTunes and listen to as part of your personal music stream.

I’m certainly very happy to allow her to sell her music on my site, and I hope she makes lots of money from this! I think she’ll do just fine.

For more insights into how to create and tap online influence at Future of Influence Summit 2009.

A futurists’ dinner: the future of content and remote engagement

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Last night media futurist Gerd Leonhard , Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, and I caught up for dinner. Gerd is in Sydney for the first time for a couple of events, including The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content on Tuesday (see the event review), and Richard happens to be in Sydney amidst a hectic global speaking schedule.

futuristsdinner.jpg

We had a fascinating discussion, largely on the future of content, and in particular how to leverage our own content. As futurists (I will write a blog post soon on ‘why I am happy to be called a futurist’ – that’s another story) what we sell is content in a variety of formats.

The most prominent monetizable channels we have are speaking, consulting (which can take a variety of forms), and books and reports (which now also can be packaged and sold in multitude of ways). Of course we all throw out plenty of free content on the web as part of the mix.

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Insights and notes from Creating Value With Content event

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The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content event on Tuesday was a fantastic success. As so many of the attendees observed, this topic is at the heart of many businesses today. While content in the broadest sense is more and more central to the economy, there are many challenges, not least with pricing and distribution, whether the content is music, film, books, news, advertising, or simply the flow of communication that sustains human and business relationships.

Gerd Leonhard and I have been trying to do something together for a few years now, so it was great The Insight Exchange was able to take advantage of his first visit to Australia to run this event. In addition to Gerd’s far-reaching insights and global perspective the event brought together top-level views on the world of content from Agency, Brand, and Publisher perspectives.

Below are my rough notes taken during the event. In addition definitely read Gerd Leonhard’s blog post Creating value with Content: The Future of Marketing and Advertising (my Sydney presentation), and see his presentation slides here.

Creating value with Content: the Future Of Marketing & Advertising, by Gerd Leonhard Sydney 8-18-2009

View more documents from Gerd Leonhard.

We’ll shortly add links to the other presentations made at the event.

NOTES FROM CREATING VALUE WITH CONTENT

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Influence research: what are the real influence networks within Twitter and social media?

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We continue our Influence research series, paving the way for in-depth insights and breaking new ground on the topic at Future of Influence Summit 2009 in San Francisco and Sydney. See the Future of Influence Summit blog for the full series.

Earlier this year Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at HP’s Social Computing Lab did an analysis of Twitter networks, resulting in the article Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope.

They studied a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users to gain insights into how they communicated and connected. There were a variety of insights from the research, including the relationship between Twitter activity and number of followers.

hubermantwitter.gif

Source: Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope

The final conclusion of the paper was:

Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.

This is of course hardly a surprising outcome. Having hundreds or even thousands of Twitter followers does not imply a strong relationship, just as anyone with over a thousand Facebook friends will not necessarily be influenced by all of them.

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