Online media and independents drive business software buying

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SAP4SME, a diversified social media initiative from SAP to reach the SME market, is generating a variety of interesting content.

At 2pm US Eastern time today SAP is running a webinar: “The Stimulus Package: What Does it Mean for Your Business?” which examines how small to medium enterprise can best tap the US federal stimulus package (see also my earlier note on this).

On the SAP4SME LinkedIn group site there is a survey asking:

“Who do you trust most when making a business software purchasing decision?”

The results are very interesting, with 400-odd respondents, though it may not be a fully representative sample.

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The stand-out most influential sources are the online technology media such as ZDNet, and independent bloggers and analysts, considerably ahead of the major analyst firms.

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Chris Anderson on the social filtering of news and media

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Chris Anderson, currently most well-known for his provocative book Free, today put forward his views in yet another interview, this time with a cranky reporter from Spiegel, published under the catchy title of ‘Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job’.

I’m most interested in what he says about how he gets his news, which is precisely the How Influence Drives Content and Publishing theme of the upcoming Future of Influence Summit. It is good to hear this said in someone else’s words, from an information consumers’ perspective. Here is an excerpt from the interview…

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“Influence is the future of media”

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After three extremely successful years running the Future of Media Summit, held simultaneously in San Francisco Bay Area and Sydney, it is time to move on. This year the event, run by The Insight Exchange, will be titled Future of Influence Summit. This is because:

INFLUENCE IS THE FUTURE OF MEDIA

We have already begun to discover this through the now-dominant concept of “social media”. In the Future of Media Strategic Framework that was launched for our Future of Media Summit 2006 we described the (symbiotic) relationship between Mainstream Media and Social Media.

Social media is all about human relationships, about how we shape our view of the world based on our peer communication. The extraordinary breadth of information and opinion that we are exposed to today, combined with the ability to converse, means our own opinions are often driven more by peers than traditional sources.

In fact this shift to the social means that media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting.

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Influence in launching start-ups – who do you go to?

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One of the most important applications of influence is in launching start-ups. This is often a make or break situation – you have a great opportunity to get attention (and on the back of that revenue) when you launch a new company. If it doesn’t work and you don’t get much attention at that point, it doesn’t mean you never get another chance, but it’s going to be a lot harder when you’re yesterday’s news.

The New York Times has a long feature today about PR in Silicon Valley, which has brought an extended response from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, bringing into focus the question of who the REAL influencers are when it comes to getting word out on start-ups.

The New York Times piece, describing the formation of the PR strategy for word-focused start-up Wordnik, says:

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Who will provide the credibility ratings for the journalists of the planet?

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Citizen journalist site Allvoices.com has just moved out of beta. CNet provides a story of the site, its founder Amra Tareen, and Allvoices’ features including a map of the world showing where the latest stories are emerging. A Reuters story, Allvoices happy to pay popular posters, focuses on how the site pays contributors and its ‘crediibility’ algorithm.

Contributors are free to post almost anything and their credibility is rated by readers and an in-house algorithm which measures postings against traditional media and other sources.

But throwing the site open to the public has its pitfalls.

One recent post with a high credibility rating said the Ark of The Covenant was about to be unveiled. Other stories cite no sources at all.

Mr Sundelof said he had not looked at the Ark posting, but the in-house computer evaluation depended on feedback from many users and there had not been enough feedback on that piece.

Allvoices did not practice gatekeeping.

“We haven’t worked out how to deal with these kinds of situations,” he said. “Basically, we can only determine credibility based on the input we have.”

In a world awash with information, having credibility or reputation ratings for information sources is becoming increasingly important. While most people have focused on the media channel as the brand, this is going to shift to the individual journalist. You may trust the New York Times, but after you’ve read it for a while, you’ll place more credibility on what some journalists for the paper write than you do for others.

Allvoices is one of the early players in this space. There will be many more.

How reputation measures will evolve, particularly those for content, will be one of the important themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009.

The border between blogging and Twittering

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Shall I tweet it? Shall I blog it?

If you’re both a blogger and Twitterer, when you get an interesting thought you want to share, you have choices.

Do you tweet it? If it’s interesting enough to let people know, then sure – very easily done.

Or do you blog it? If it’s compelling enough, competing with lots of other stuff, and it’s time-sensitive, then yes. I have a list of over 60 blog posts I’d like to write, so something has to be compelling to get in front of that queue.

This decision changes over time. I’ve blogged for seven years, and was slow to get on Twitter because I thought I had plenty on my plate with blogging. Now more and more idea sharing happens over Twitter. Of course, there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters and sometimes you have to flow beyond that. Comments and blog posts can do that – they’re part of the content creation landscape.

I will explore this issue more later. I’m working on a blog/ Twitter framework that will show how they relate to each other.

It certainly seems to be an interesting topic to explore: what is the border between blogging and Twittering?

Twitterboard and the rise of distributed conversations

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Twitterboard – a very interesting way of aggregating Twitter conversations on a website – launched in alpha yesterday.

I’ve installed it on this blog to give it a try. You should see a tab on the left hand side of the page. When you click it this will bring up the Twitter thread. I’ll give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Twitterboard describes itself:

Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

The way it works is that tweets on the site are appended with posted.at/ and inreply.to/ short URLs which take people to the conversation. This means that people who see parts of the conversation on Twitter can go to the site to see a single threaded discussion.

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The motivations of influencers and amplifiers: how content becomes prominent

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Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion, which drew on research on how just a handful of influencers drive the content aggregation sites such as Digg, and a little later analyzed how influencers and amplifiers had helped one of my blog posts hit the front page Delicious.

These topics will be covered in detail at Future of Influence Summit 2009 – details coming soon.

In January the grand-daddy of the tech news aggregators, Techmeme, started accepting suggestions for stories, by people sending links on Twitter along with “tip @techmeme”. The most prominent Techmeme story suggestor has been @atul.

Atul is interviewed in Success Secrets of a Top Techmeme Tipper. The entire interview is worth reading; I have picked out some of his comments on his motivations.

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Notes from The Power of Influence

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The Power of Influence lunch was run earlier today. This was in fact the inaugural event of The Insight Exchange. The quality of the event and the feedback augur well for The Insight Exchange future’s, and particularly for the value it will create for participants. It was a highly interactive event, with deep content and great discussion.

Below are the notes I took during the event.

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I initially presented the Influence Landscape framework we launched yesterday, after which the three panelists spoke and the event then progressed to a highly interactive discussion among all participants, from which I have taken a few notes as well.

BRIAN GIESEN – OGILVY PR

75% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertising.

In the US 81% look to word of mouth (WOM) for decisions.

Trust in media Editorial is 56%.

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Launch of the Influence Landscape framework (Beta)

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Today we launch our Influence Landscape framework! Click on the image to download the pdf.

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This continues our tradition of creating frameworks to elucidate where things are going, including extremely popular visuals such as Future of Media Strategic Framework, Future of the Media Lifecycle, Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework and many more.

The Influence Landscape framework is launched in a Beta version that will be refined and developed over time, as influence is now one of our major research and content directions.

Tomorrow 19 May The Insight Exchange runs The Power of Influence luncheon in Sydney, which will cover how to create value in the emerging influence landscape. We are also preparing our landmark Future of Influence Summit (evolving out of the Future of Media Summit), due 1 September – details very soon!

A few quick comments on the framework:

DRIVING FORCES:

A wide array of forces are shifting value and attention to the influence landscape and from traditional media, advertising, and marketing.

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