Five key trends in how influence is transforming society

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I just got off an interview on the future of influence on 2SM radio which lasted almost 15 minutes – close to a record for my interviews on live AM radio, which tends to do 3-5 minute segments. The talk show host was clearly fascinated by the issues of how influence is shifting away from people like him, and towards the unwashed masses.

In the interview, done in the lead-up to Future of Influence Summit which is on next week in Sydney and San Francisco, I discussed the social transformation wrought by the changing influence landscape, and pointed to key five trends driving this change:

1. Influence is democratized

It used to be that people were influential by virtue of their position, such as CEO, journalist, or politician. In a world of blogging, Twitter, and social media anyone can become highly influential, shaping how we think, behave, and spend. Companies can ignore no-one. As many more become heard, a truer democracy will emerge.

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What are the business models for influence and reputation – today and in the future?

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One of the most exciting topics of Future of Influence Summit next week is exploring the business models for influence and reputation.

This is an issue which is better addressed in San Francisco/ Silicon Valley than anywhere else, and we have an extraordinary panel lined up to address the topic of Business Models for Influence and Reputation at 2:20 – 3:10pm Pacific Time.

Some of the questions I see include:

* Will there be new mechanisms for individuals to monetize their influence?

* What products or services will advertisers and marketers spend money on in seeking to tap influence?

* Will advertising spending be driven primarily by influence?

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

* Who will take the bulk of the value? Will it be the influencers themselves, or intermediaries in the emerging ecosystem?

Let’s take a very quick glance at the people speaking on the panel and what they’re doing – absolutely a star-laden cast.

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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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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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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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CMSWire review of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 – A Practical Guide

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CMSWire has just published a nice review of my Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report.

Here is an excerpt from the review:

Ross Dawson has written a report on Enterprise 2.0 that should be a valuable tool for any organization implementing or thinking about implementing Web 2.0 tools in their enterprise.

Called Implementing Enterprise 2.0: A practical guide to creating business value inside organizations with web technologies, Dawson take a close look at the implications and considerations of incorporating web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, social networks, bookmarks and microblogging and RSS in the enterprise.

At roughly 190 pages, it doesn’t take long to read this report and earmark some sound advice for your E2.0 strategy. The book includes chapters on developing an Enterprise 2.0 strategy, governance and policies, how different tools can create business value and practical and organizational implications. A number of sidebars provide real-world case studies and advice from those who have made the leap to Enterprise 2.0.

It concludes with a list of potential vendor solutions for the various web 2.0 technologies mentioned above.

The report provides a number of frameworks and checklists that can help you determine how best to go about implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions in your organization.

The front page of our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website now includes excerpts and links to reviews of the report – always handy before deciding to buy it! :-)

Tara Hunt doing opening keynote at Future of Influence Summit SF

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Awesome! Tara Hunt, renowned author of The Whuffie Factor, will be doing the opening keynote at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco.

Below is the video where I first saw Tara in action, speaking at the Web 2.0 Conference in April 2009 about The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities.

The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.

For those not in the know, “whuffie” is the measure of reputation used in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Since we don’t have any other good words for describing collectively assessed reputation, whuffie has gained traction as a description of this phenomenon.

Taken from the book description:

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Twitter follower numbers as a proxy of influence

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How many Twitter followers do you have?

One of the reasons Twitter is important is that it is introducing the concept of assessing people’s degree of influence. A person’s number of Twitter followers is increasingly being taken as a proxy for their influence. If the only thing you know about someone is that they have 5,000 Twitter followers (or 50), you can make some preliminary assumptions about their influence.

Of course Twitter follower numbers is a hopelessly flawed measure for many, many reasons, and pretty much everyone knows that. However it’s often all you have.

Relatively few people have blogs, and in the broader population not many people know about blog ranking engines such as Technorati and Wikio. Everyone understands that numbers of Facebook and LinkedIn friends don’t indicate much other than how inclined people are to connect online.

Today Twitter follower numbers is becoming even less accurate as an influence measure due to extensive gaming.

Systems such as Twitter Grader and Twinfluence take into account other factors such as who your followers are and how they behave, follower/ following ratios, retweets, conversational activity, and so on to give a more accurate view of influence.

However not everyone is on Twitter and has much time to spend on it. That doesn’t mean they are not influential – just that they are not bringing to bear their influence through the channel of Twitter.

It is inevitable that broader measures of influence will be developed. Of course these can only be valid within a specific context, so the best measures of influence will provide a single slice view.

The fact remains that Twitter follower numbers has provided us with our very first proxy for influence, however crude, however flawed. We now as a society have seen our first measure of influence. This will accelerate the creation and uptake of more sophisticated measures in the very near future.

We will explore the idea of measures of influence – and the business models that surround them – at Future of Influence Summit 2009.