Influencer marketing in a nutshell

I sometimes get asked what Influencer Marketing is, in 30 seconds or less. Try this for starters.

In fact, replace "analyst" with "influencer" and you're very close. If you also replace "customer" with "influencer" you're there.

(Credit where it's due - the whole, original, post is here)

Measuring the influence of social media users

You may have detected from this blog that I’m less than convinced by the hype over Web 2.o and it’s impact on influence. Certainly, from our research work for clients, blogs rarely feature as a key influencer.

Part of my problem is that the degree of influence is asserted, measured by the number of links or some other dubious metric. So I’m intrigued by an emerging method of determining the influence of blogs and other social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn. Hat tip to James Governor who linked to David Brain’s sixtysecondview blog. David runs Edelman PR in the UK, but otherwise seems a good chap…

David’s idea is to measure not only the links that one gets on a blog, but also the links on LinkedIn, friends in FaceBook, Twitter friends, Flickr photo uploads, Diggs and other social media activities. The concept is premised on the trend for people to have more than one social tool in use. Sheesh – I can barely keep up with blogging.

I can’t help thinking that for all its diligence in tracking the various media it’s still measuring links, and links don’t necessarily imply influence. My beef with the links=influence assertion is that it’s easy to fake links, and that links are only a measure of one dimension of influence – connectedness. There are other dimensions, such as expertise, that are much harder to measure. And what about the value of particular connections? Connections are not equal – I know who matters more to me in my LinkedIn network.

But David’s composite score does help because it evens out some of the biases that would be present in just one social tool. By measuring half a dozen or so, an average score emerges.

What I find worrying is that in order to demonstrate and exert influence through social media one has to use multiple formats. I could spend all my time doing just that, but I have a proper job as well. Those that have time to keep up with the social media demands of influence run the risk of ignoring the other dimensions of influence. Plus the most important risk of all, which is forgetting who, why and how they are trying to influence in the first place.

Today’s state-of-the-art influence modus operanda is one-to-one communication, by meeting people face-to-face, telephone conversations and email. In that order. Social media is a distant fourth at the moment.

A long tail of authority?

James at Redmonk posts on Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s point is, in a nutshell, that user-generated content is inferior to that of professionals. So we take risks by using social media sources as reference points – Wikipedia and its (allegedly) dodgy content is the oft-cited example.

James contrasts Keen’s theory with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and suggests that a “long tail of authority” will emerge as the credibility of professional authorities diminishes.

Hmmm. A “long tail of authority” sounds like an oxymoron to me. We use third parties to replace experience we ourselves don’t have. For trivial needs (which toothpaste to buy) we defer to just about anyone (spouse, sales assistant, person also browsing for toothpaste, etc). But for more important decisions we tend to use more verifiable sources. It’s not just authority that’s important – accountability is also vital is such decisions. Which is why we pay professionals, and why professional need indemnity cover.

By definition (I think), authority in any market is concentrated in the “short head.” It’s a scarce resource. Social media helps to distribute authority but doesn’t help create it.

As always, the truth is in the middle somewhere. There’s no doubt that social media has enabled some new authorities to emerge (James is a good example, top rated analyst blog). But there’s also a huge amount of dross being generated. Telling the two apart can be difficult for the uninitiated.

(As an aside, the analyst industry is professional nowadays but wasn’t always so. In my early years at Ovum (mid 90s) we often referred to ourselves as enthusiastic amateurs writing on subjects we (at first) knew little about. Specialisation and professionalism have changed this – I wonder if we’re heading towards full circle…)