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RSSSome digital digerati (like Guy Kawasaki) suggest that in today's world of blogging and tweeting, mass reach is the name of the game. Kawasaki's argument is that the Internet and social media have eliminated or substantially reduced any semblance of information dissemination hierarchy. As such, if you extend your reach as far as possible through as many network nodes as possible, you will reach more prospective customers and thereby optimize your results. In this view, focusing on reaching "influentials" who might effectively distribute your message to an audience of more likely buyers is a waste of time. Just blog away and let anyone and everyone carry the message.
On the other side of the issue are people like Ed Keller of Keller Fay, who literally wrote the book on the influentials. Keller's research into both online and offline WOM suggests that online WOM is still only a small fraction of offline WOM volume in most categories, and that nothing is more effective at driving behavior than the objective recommendation of a known, credible source. This would suggest that pursuing the sheer volume of reviews and opinions flying around the Websphere may be a potentially distracting pursuit to marketers seeking highly effective leverage of their limited resources.
I see some parallels in marketing history here to how first network television, and then direct mail, each boomed on the strength of message-delivery efficiency, and then busted under the declining marginal returns as clutter and CPMs rose and response rates declined. Each respectively then fractured further (network TV to cable TV; direct mail into database marketing) in search of targeting efficiencies. The idea of targeting "influentials" was born out of a desire to focus the increasingly constrained marketing team resources on the points of greatest leverage in the market.
Granted, there are substantial differences in the evolution of Web communications, not the least of which is the no/low cost of pushing out messages. But it strikes me that the real cost of communicating with a flat world is the time and energy it takes to respond to all the feedback you get, much of which is irrelevant (owing to the reverse-application of the flat-world theory back on you). This is just one of the dimensions of measuring WOM effectively.
So I suspect that the futurists forecasting the death of the influential-centric strategy are just that, futurists (and, somewhat paradoxically, influentials themselves). If you're selling Coke or Crest or something else that practically anyone in the world (including emerging economies) would buy, maybe the flat-world model works. But until we have appropriate technology for effectively and efficiently sifting/sorting and managing the feedback from the flat world, most marketers would probably be better off concentrating their efforts on reaching the right "nodes of influence" within the Websphere.
Presumably that's what you and I are both doing right this very moment.
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In a side note requested by both the Department of Redundancy Department and by the Department for Homeland Semantics, let's not call anyone "digital digerati". All digerati are digital. Would you refer to their offline counterparts as "analog analrati"? Let's hope not.
http://richreader.blogspot.com/
All - Does anyone have a link to Guy's argument? It would be interesting to know how he defines "Influencer". Given Ed's analysis, that should have been the first question that I asked.
Final quick point - in reference to Michael Durwin's post it is really hard to find Influencers so you let them find you by putting out a quality story (meets all three criteria: interesting, relevant and authentic) and then creating a dialogue with those who show up and/or want to engage.
New academic research supports the power of influencers, too. For example, a recent study by Don Lehmann of Columbia concludes that “Contrary to recent arguments, social hubs [defined as people with an exceptionally large number of social ties, i.e., influentials] adopt sooner than other people . . . because they are exposed earlier to an innovation due to their multiple social links.” Further, Lehmann's research says, “Adoption by hubs speeds up the growth process and directly influences eventual market size.” Professor Barak Libai of Tel Aviv University finds that influencers not only adopt new products earlier, but that because of this acceleration in the adoption process a firm can increase its profitability by between 6% and 14% by targeting influencers over the alternative of targeting random customers. And it can increase profitability by 11% - 44% by targeting infuencers via word of mouth versus the alternative of no word of mouth seeding at all.
Finally, I encourage readers to look at the WOMMA Influencer Handbook (womma.org/influencer), particularly the discussion of types of influencers and the need to define terms clearly. As I read Guy’s post I suspect he is referring to media or cultural elites when he talks about influentials, whereas we are talking about consumers who are socially connected when we talk about them -- in the Influentials, and in our current research.
To be continued . . .
Indeed, the contemporary idea of "influence" is as Kawasaki suggests, a simple repurposing of our old ideas from the television era: channels = networks persuasion = advocacy influencers = high rating spots
Above all, influence is something we push out into the population as opposed to something the population chooses to adopt/accept/embrace
So while it would be nice if things were as simple as "influencer" as default setting, that just doesn't seem to be correct.
More here on pulling together the work done in this area with real data
http://herd.typepad.com//herd_the_hiddent_truth_abo/2008/11/free-gift-influence-and-how-things-really-spread.html
The reality is that people onine tend to start off as voiceless consumers but in short order evolve into influencers themselves, glomming on to ever more and more influential names as justification for their own credibility.
How can you reach the influentials (big and small) on a mass scale?
Tools that help marketers do that will be next in Social Media.
For all of our friends who might stop by and read this let me share just one story before I go. Last weekend I was having dinner with a guy who controls about 10 figures of annual global market spend. He commented to me that they are still involved with broadcast because at a certain and very large level of SOV the marginal value of each additional dollar spent increases. It's kind of a Laffer curve for marketing spend argument and that this person made it and was confident he had the data to back it up has kept me up for a couple of nights this week and gives support to Guy's argument.