Influencers and Social Media

I just stumbled upon this Edelman white paper on social media which touches some aspects from my last post. The paper essentially breaks down 5 questions:

• How to appropriately gauge influence?
• What are the different types of influencers (starters, spreaders, adapters, commentators, readers)?
• Who do you market to - influencers or the readily influenced?
• What’s the breakout of social media audiences (publishers, commenters, consumers)?
• How do you communicate (controlled, open, conversational, collaborative)?

Recently I’ve been discussing communication in terms of passive broadcast and organic distribution, but the paper slices communication into subcategories of passive and participatory.

Edelman notes, communication is moving to the right hand side of the communication quadrant.

Edelman’s conclusion is that change is constant and new “centres of authority” are continually emerging. These new loci are in turn changing how we communicate, identify with and influence each other.

As someone actively engaged in building content creation tools here are my takeaways:

Media content is a communication tool and software developers must identify and enable collaboration via the new loci emerging on the web. To do otherwise is to risk becoming irrelevant within a very short time frame (you can be a dominant force, miss one wave and be forgotten by the time the next wave arrives). Desktop apps are particularly vulnerable if they don’t embrace collaboration with the cloud inside and outside of their stacks.

Content creation apps need to think very carefully about their role in the user’s narrative. This needs to go beyond the user of the desktop app and extend to the content consumer. Everyone who has a brain will be focusing on enabling sharing / collaboration, but the ability to truly add to the narrative will be prized.

It’s not enough to just get content to destination sites. Apps and services must facilitate continued participation / collaboration between content creators, content and consumers. Seamless integration and interoperability will be heavily emphasized. Apps need to be aware of the additional conversation in the cloud (tags, metadata, etc.) and incorporate them.

It must be easy and fast! There’s so much information available from so many different sources that simplicity of content creation and deployment are essential. Another reason I’m so geeked about apps like Jing.

It must be free. Content creation and delivery is dominated by free apps and free hosting — software developers must find business models that fit around this (so far ads and tiered services rule the day).

If you aren’t open and transparent you’re not in the conversation. Again the risk of becoming completely irrelevant overnight is extremely high. It’s not just analysts and journalists that need openness and transparency, but consumers. People crave inclusion — we must build communities / processes that allow consumers to invest in our organization and the tools / services we provide. If we do this there’s an opportunity to create truly passionate users and leverage some of that social surplus everyone’s been talking about lately.

Blended marketing strategies are a must. Finding folks skilled at grass roots marketing and evangelism is critical. Once you’ve found them, everyone in your organization needs to learn from them and get involved in the conversation as both listeners and participants.