Social influence is among the current topics of conversation and again, bloggers are treading similar waters and their combined thoughts creating something that is greater than the some of its parts.
What is influence?
Talk in the past has revolved around what an influencer actually is. Do the A-List bloggers have more influence? Are they still relevant? From my perspective anyone can be an influencer, it all comes down to the scope of your own individual influence.
There are no hard and fast rules, although measuring social influence may give us guidelines. What may influence one person may not influence another so, to use advertising as an example, you either have multiple methods (TV, radio, magazines) or go for the most bang for your buck based on market research. It comes down to working out the best way to influence any given demographic and, conversely, realising how your target demographic is actually influenced.
The web has changed the nature of influence with the introduction of obscure, viral campaigns which get people talking and trying to figure out what it’s all about before the big reveal; the problem is that this type of influence only affects a portion of the population – those who are already clued up, web savvy and most likely to jump in with both feet.
The question being asked now is: how do we go beyond those who “get it” and start to teach those who don’t or those who have not even been exposed to the thing to “get”? We’re talking about niche products and services going mainstream and new ideas becoming a part of the global consciousness.
Shey Smith calls for us all to become social media interpreters rather than evangelists. Instead of harping on about how great services are we really need to begin breaking them down and really explaining the benefits that they can provide, using simple language to explain how and, more importantly, why things work to those who may not readily understand.
Mark Dykeman of the Broadcasting Brain followed up on my post “Life by social media rules” and went on to discuss the nature of role models and the part they play. Role models are perfect examples of influencers in action; kids will always emulate their favourite sports star, dress like a pop star and buy products advertised by film stars – it’s all part of the learning experience and the road to becoming your own person. The twist with mark’s post, however, is that he argues the existence of different types of role model based on the method of exposure and sphere of influence.
The Role Model 3.0 – as he calls it – is a result of the boom in social media (blogs included). They are the big voices, the people we all follow on Twitter, the ones with the creative personalities and the big ideas. The idea, however, should only be the beginning.
Value
The real value is in the discussion, one post, thought or service may be the catalyst but it’s what comes after that counts. The old saying goes that two heads are better than one but what about ten heads, a thousand, a million? The more people that can be engaged the better and if those people are from different walks of life, cultures, mindsets etc. then better still. The geek echo chamber will normally just go round in circles but when you get someone in from the outside with a totally different view it stirs things up and can get people thinking in ways that hadn’t previously considered.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention and throughout history some of the finest ideas have come from challenges both for survival and to the intellect. We too need to be challenged to take the conversation further, be forced to come up with new ideas and re-address those we already subscribe to. What better way than by forcing ourselves to explain what we do and why we do it to those who don’t know.
Just think about when you tell a child something and they just say “why?” – that’s the position we’re in now with those who don’t use social media and the answer “because” won’t cut it.
Following on from what I said previously about pushing ourselves in to new areas and connecting with people, why not bring those people back with us so that they can do things that they didn’t consider? In this way we can all be role models.
What will you do?
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A while back I asked why Digg did not have a category for social media. It seemed ironic that the most popular social bookmarking site did not cater for its own ilk.
While I received a couple of positive comments on the blog it was a completely different matter on Digg itself; I was essentially lambasted for even making such a suggestion – a typical example of the negative posting and burying that people have been critical of recently.
It appears that a shift away from Digg is occurring in certain circles and, as this new blog has more of a focus on social media I felt it was time to make a move myself.
Where to go?
It is very much flavour of the month to create just another Digg clone so finding other alternatives seemed a challenge.
One site I have been using for a while is Sphinn which is solely devoted to the sharing and rating of social media based content. Users have been complaining of spam recently but the quality content far outweighs the dross.
There has been quite a buzz forming around Mixx with reports emerging that the site has a good atmosphere without any of the snobbery that occurs on Digg. It also comes highly recommended by bloggers like Sarah, Matthew and Corvida. I signed up.
I has also become disillusioned with the Sphere “related content” system. I don’t know if its a question of the depth of its indexed content but it is very rare that I have found anything useful through it. This was highlighted yesterday when looking for specific content but getting back results purely because they had a word buried somewhere within the post – there seems to be context checking.
I had stopped using it (perhaps due to the issue that Scoble was discussing) but I am now making a conscious effort to make better use if FriendFeed as a way to find, share and comment on new content.
Changes
All of this means that there have been a few changes to the post footer on the blog. I had to recently removed the link to Twit This as the site appears to be down. Now, gone are Digg and Sphere, in their place are Mixx and Sphinn and the order has been adjusted.
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Any service needs a business model in order to survive, a social media site is no exception. Twitter has come in for some flack about not appearing to have one in the past so it was interesting to see the mistaken story that Twitter had been testing adverts during some performance issues last night.
A recent opinion piece on The Industry Standard website included twitter in their 10 net services that would probably fail, their thoughts:
“There’s no compelling reason for most people to use it, and many existing services — ranging from AIM to FriendFeed to social networks — have overlapping functionality. And how is it supposed to make money?“
Twitter is growing quickly and has become ingrained in to many of our lifestyles so it is hard to imagine that a service this popular could fail, but this is still early days as it has yet to go properly mainstream. Does it need to?
The key to Twitter is its simplicity – it is one of the easiest ways to facilitate conversation but if it is going to survive then it must be sustainable – how else can this be achieved if not via advertising?
The poll on the TechCrunch story asking if we support ads on Twitter currently has the No’s in the lead but I think it is both inevitable that ads will appear at some point – they must, however, be implemented correctly. Personally I voted Yes, I would support ads (under my proviso). We are so used to advertising in our daily lives that we have become accustomed to filtering it out.
In a way we are already being subjected to advertising on Twitter, albeit not in the traditional form. If you use a third party client or web service to post then this will be indicated by a link at the end of the individual tweet – isn’t that advertising? As others have commented, any time we post a link to our content on Twitter we are advertising our wares. Users are creating profile background images which again advertise their sites etc. around the Twitter UI so are not traditional ads only a logical next step.
Your Take
Rather than ask again if you support ads on Twitter I would like to ask if you think something like Twitter needs a conventional business model. How else could such services raise the capital required to sustain themselves if they are going to remain free to the end user?
Rather than the lazysphere “me too” type posts that clog up our feed readers, sometimes different people hit a similar theme completely independently even if – on the face of it – they are not related.
A couple of weeks ago I was struck by a post by Mark Dykeman in which he stated that:
“The value of social media is in its ability to quickly convey messages that are:
- important
- useful
- interesting
- entertaining
to people, in groups or individually, with the added bonus of correction, elaboration, clarification, and other feedback from those who received the message so that the overall communication brings benefit to the largest number of people.“
My initial reaction was that we should be using these ideas away from our computers and in our normal lives.
Chris Brogan posted a few days later saying that we should employ the same tactics we use in social media situations when interacting with anyone offline; just transpose the way in which you communicate to an offline alternative. Gary Vaynerchuk then recorded a video advising us to look at the potential in secondary markets for our brands.
The connection between these three independent thoughts made me realise that we can devote a great amount of time to developing an online social media strategy but forget about the real bricks and mortar world around us. All of our interactions should be as constructive as those we perform online.
Hiding behind technology
Mobile phones and computers can sometimes be detrimental to the way we interact; we’ve all avoided physically speaking to someone in a difficult situation by pinging them an email or text message and the more we do it the harder it becomes to then deal with such situations as we have been hiding behing the technology at our disposal. Instead we should be realising that proper communication is key and Mark’s buller points are a good place to begin.
I’m not suggesting that every conversation we have will be akin to a PowerPoint presentation as normal discussions only tend to include a subset of the points above but we should ensure that our interactions have some quality to them instead of being unhelpful or dismissive.
To echo Gary’s ideas in this context we need to get ourselves out there, push ourselves in to new situations, take advantage of what is on offer and let others benefit from what we ourselves have to offer. It is all too easy to get stuck in a groove and not branch out in to areas that, maybe we had not considered we could.
Challenge
So, reader I challenge you (and myself) – build a life strategy and not just a social media strategy. What do you think?
As a extension of the fractured commenting discussion a separate issue has emerged: is our blog content becoming a commodity? There have a been a few good posts on this around the blogosphere presenting both sides of the argument.
As far as I see it content has always been a commodity just like any other it’s just that the web is always changing and the same rules that applied 3 years, even 1 year, ago don’t apply any more. Social media is taking over the world – it is no longer just about isolated islands of content.
Blogging has an air of vanity about it for many – we want to be heard and appreciated that’s why a lot of bloggers obsess over their stats. Getting your content read by people is a challenge and a thrill – it is also quite addictive. Monetisation of blogs is a relatively recent phenomenon and a number of people are now making quite a good living from being professional bloggers; are they under threat? No, I don’t think so.
Exposure
Why do we join social media sites? Why do we add our blogs to aggregators? Exposure. We want as many people as possible to be aware of who we are and what we do – build a big enough audience and rewards or opportunities are bound to follow. I don’t blog for money but the previous blog got me noticed and I had the chance to get paid for writing an article for a major UK magazine. Unless you are specifically setting out to make money directly from your website then the benefits are secondary or maybe even tertiary.
It’s all about exposure creating opportunity.
Brand
Steven Hodson (as quoted by Sarah Perez) is concerned that brands are being diluted due to content – and subsequently the discussion around it - being diluted across the web. I don’t agree. Different people use different services and, whilst there are a number who also spread themselves across a whole range, frequently do not venture beyond its boundaries. Having content re-posted across these boundaries is not diluting the brand but creating a greater brand awareness in places that otherwise it may not have existed. These people new to your content are then more likely to come back to the source, subscribe to your feed and become a direct customer rather than an indirect one – this is certainly the way I operate when I come across a blog on a social site I have not seen before.
Look at Scott Sigler for example. Who, you might ask? Scott was the first person to serialise a novel via a podcast – giving it away for free. A novel is a significant undertaking and many traditional authors would be horrified at the thought of giving one away, wasting all that time and effort. Scott is now podcasting his fifth full length novel and has broadcast a number of shorter works but the way in which it is done means his fans (lovingly referred to as junkies) keep coming back. Regular interaction with them means a rapport has developed and Scott has been able to prove that building this rapport leads to listeners becoming paying customers – he now has a book deal with Crown Publishing
Stealing our content?
It has been argued that social sites are stealing our content for their own ends – maybe so, but if that content is good enough the reader will want more and go looking for the source. Times are changing and we must continue to adapt by promoting ourselves and pushing our content out there rather than rely on word to spread perhaps in ways we don’t want. If you’re giving it away then it can’t be stolen but you can then reap the additional benefits.
There are a lot of opinions and I am sure that no single one is the right one but each opinion is correct for that individual and their own circumstances. What’s yours?
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