Tag: influence

Connecting some dots around social, earned and satisfaction

Working through the connections between these things…

…Oliver Blanchard says:

If you treat earned media like paid media long enough, you will teach it to act like paid media.

…This is connected with the idea we explored that editors should be in charge of paid digital media (or at least have control of their own budgets) m- treating paid like earned could be a lot more useful than the other way around.

…It’s another angle on what John Willshire discusses in his series of presentations on the idea of “fracking the social web“. The race for Likes and shares and and views leaves depleted culture and relationships in its wake.

…Andy Whitlock says in this deck that creating noise (chasing attention) isn’t always the best approach. Platforms and products are ways of creating long term value, long term relationships, he says.

…This connects with why at Brilliant Noise we’ve talked more about earning advocacy than earning media, or even earning attention. The media’s not the point, the customer is… and they couldn’t give a fig for brands, most of the time.

Which also reminds me of an interesting Twitter conversation yesterday between Mat Morrison, Jon and Professor Byron about brands and satisfaction:

 

Hat tip to Anne McCrossan for pointing me to the Oliver Blanchard article.

Influence, shminfluence: You get the networks you deserve

network

“It’s all about the networks.”

We say it, I say it, a lot. But I’m not sure that we’re really appreciating what that means.

In a way, Gladwell did us a disservice with the Tipping Point. It over-simplified networks, when the most important thing you need to understand about networks, especially human, social networks, is just how very, very complex they are.

And of course, the Tipping Point, or perhaps more the endless retelling of the Tipping Point by marketers, gave us, or bolstered further, the cult of the influentials.

Find them, these gatekeepers to the herd, the idea went, persuade them of the merits of your cause, or pay them to pretend, and the masses will adjust their perceptions accordingly and success will be yours.

I think you may be better off thinking about models, strategies, tactics for success communicating, influencing people in networks by looking at evolutionary models, complexity theory, than hunting the ever-elusive influencer.

And they did exist. And you find them. What are you going to do? Buy them?

As for the people you sometimes see in Twitter and elsewhere proclaiming themselves to be influencers by dint of a spammy follower count. It’s like in the blogging days of yore, when someone pronounced to be, or alluded affinity with, the A-listers, I lost interest in them.

If you say you’re cool you not. Sort of thing.

My thoughts keep returning to a quote I heard via Brian Morrisey: “You get the network you deserve.”

For more coherence on this subject, check out this collection of thoughts and links on networks and influence at Data Mining.