Posted: December 9th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: analysts, blogging | Tags: Richard Holway | No Comments »
Richard Holway, the “wise grey owl” of the UK tech sector, has been forecasting doom and gloom for the past year, with depressing accuracy. Richard’s new venture TechMarketView, with Antony Miller, continues this trend, and he recently covered the impact on analyst firms here. Richard and I had a short email exchange over the weekend, from which Richard quotes me.
What’s also interesting is Richard’s view on the rise of influencers. He thinks that “individual ‘influencers’ will play a far more important role than big research companies. Users will prefer to gain access to ‘star’ individuals rather than anonymous big organisations.” Not surprisingly, I agree.
He also thinks that the impact of blogging, far from dying, is just beginning. I suspect he’s right about that too, as blogging moves from being ‘cool’ to being useful.
My experience is that there are still influential analysts in the big research firms such as Gartner and IDC. But there are an increasing number of niche analyst firms that are just as influential in their own space. One thinks of MacehiterWardDutton, Quo Circa, CMSWatch and Richard’s own TechMarketView.
These firms may not have the broad range of coverage that the bigger firms do, but they have a big impact on the specific areas in which they specialise.
Posted: December 9th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: blogging, influence | Tags: blogging | No Comments »
After following the influence of blogs and bloggers for over two years I’ve concluded that it’s meaningless to talk about blogger influence.
We’ve just completed a piece of research in a market where 80% of the top 50 influencers blog. But none of those bloggers, save one, blogged as their primary activity. There were developers, consultants, journalists, sales people, marketers, senior management, academics, regulators and government officials. So to say that bloggers are influential is an understatement, on the one hand, and meaningless, on the other. Blogging is just something that people do. They are no more correctly categorised as “bloggers” as “humans.”
But it does indicate the importance of blogging as a medium in that particular sector, a highly technology-orientated one. In other cases, I’ve measured communities of influencers in which there are precisely zero bloggers. That is, none of the influencers blog. There are probably blogs being written about the industry segment in question, but none of them are influential.
In the vast majority of cases, influencers that blog gain the majority of their influence from their other activities. At Influencer50, only in rare cases do we categorise influencers as bloggers, and this is only if they are influential primarily (or solely) because of their blog.
Interestingly, in these cases, bloggers’ influence is always supplemented by influential activity away from the blog – speeches, consulting, bylined articles, and so on.
As I said in the book, influencers blog, rather than bloggers influence.
Posted: December 2nd, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: blogging | Tags: blogging | 1 Comment »
There have been a couple of high profile discussions on the supposed death of blogging. The Economist* and Wired lead the debate.
I’ve followed these with interest, not because I favour one side of the argument over another, but because I think the discussion is a tad pointless. Why?
Firstly, from an influence viewpoint, blogging was never very ‘alive’ in the first place. The early bloggers themselves talked up the whole phenomenon, hyped up the degree of their own influence, and inflated the perceived popularity of blogs in general by referencing each other (thus distorting perception of uptake and influence). In fact, as influencers, bloggers are a rare crowd (in my B2B world at any rate).
Secondly, those that are claiming the death of blogging are the early adopters, and they are moving onto that post-blog phenomenon, Twitter. Twitter is blogging on speed, in both senses of the word. But Twitterers are, by and large, early adopters of any technology. They were early to blogging. Now that blogging is mature, passé say some, they’re colonising Twitter. I’m sure they’ll migrate onto something else in time too.** Meanwhile,the value of blogging is finally penetrating the mass market.
I sense a more balanced view of blogs emerging from the wild west situation of the last few years. There’s no doubt that blogging as a format for communicating views has become established as the de facto medium (just check out the BBC). The combination of personalised views written in normal-speak rather than ‘corporatese’ plus the distribution via RSS means that blogs are digestible insights into, well, whatever you’re interested in.
Blogging is not dead, but it has reached middle age. It comes to us all in the long run…
*Subscription required.
**The same is happening in MySpace: a musician friend of mind claims that “no self-respecting musician now has a MySpace page.” It’s just not cool.
Posted: November 26th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: influence | Tags: BBC, Malcolm Gladwell | No Comments »
For those of us that follow Malcolm Gladwell, he was interviewed on Radio 4 on Monday. The podcast is available here. Fascinating (as usual) summary of his new Outliers book on why people are successful.
Takeaway: spend 10,000 hours on something (anything) and you’ll be world class. Genius is not required.
Posted: November 26th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: Influencer50 | Tags: Influencer50 | No Comments »
We’re currently changing our web site, hosting platform, blog platform and other techie stuff. In the midst of this change the blog got ‘lost.’ Sorry.
There was an time that this would be really interesting for me, but nowadays it’s just a drag.
Anyway, I think the technical term is “growing pains.” That, or “incompetence on my part.”
Normal service has now resumed. Thanks for waiting.
Posted: November 4th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: influence | Tags: Dan Ariely, influence | No Comments »
A few days ago I read an interesting post by Auren Hoffman on homophily – the phenomenon of being affected by one’s friends and close associates. Intuitively this makes sense – we all make decisions influenced by those around us.
But there’s an important distinction to make between the existence of influence and its direction. What I mean is this: you might be influenced in the purchase of a new digital camera by a friend who has bought one recently. But are you more or less likely to buy the same model as your friend? You might be inclined not to buy that model, even though it might be the best model for you, precisely because your friend just bought one.
I was reminded of this case while reading Dan Ariely’s excellent Predictably Irrational. His example of ordering beer demonstrates the phenomenon at work. It turns out that when ordering out loud people in a group opt for more variety, not less. Ariely suggests that this is because people need to choose something different to show they have a mind of their own, that their order conveys individuality, or perhaps that they are trying to impress.
This might mean that people order beer they don’t actually want to drink. Irrational maybe, but experimentally validated.
The really interesting part is that when people are allowed to order in private, by writing down their order, they order what they want.
Understanding this, from an influence viewpoint, is important:
- People are influenced by others, but that influence may cause a decision contrary to the choices made by others;
- People may make better (or at least more truthful) decisions by being protected from the influence of others and making their decisions in private.
This is very pertinent today of all days, as the US goes to the polls. The well-documented Bradley effect is an example of how some people will state their voting intentions in public, but vote differently when in the privacy of the polling booth. Will people who said they’ll vote for Obama really vote for him?
We’ll see shortly in which direction the US public has truly been influenced.
Posted: October 30th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: influence | Tags: influence, Nilofer Merchant, social media | 1 Comment »
Rubicon Consulting has written a white paper based on research conducted on US-based web users. Rubicon is run by Nilofer Merchant, with whom I worked in compiling case studies for the book.
There are some important points to pull out from the study. It finds that those people that regularly post reviews and comments are not your average customer, but enthusiasts (or enthusiastic detractors). Some firms may decide that these folk exist at the extreme ends of the customer spectrum, are not typical of general customer, and can therefore be ignored.
This is a mistake: although average customers don’t post reviews they do read them. Importantly, product reviews drive product purchases, so ignoring the review posters is dangerous. As the paper concludes:
“The most frequent contributors are the influencers, and they have a strong influence on purchase decisions because they write most of the online recommendations and reviews.”
This means that firms can’t ignore frequent contributors, but they have to talk to them in a different way to ‘normal’ customers. This is music to my ears, echoing Influencer50’s own mantra of “Don’t pitch to influencers.”
Other findings I picked out include:
- Approaches that work well in one type of community may fail utterly in another. Confirmation of the ‘horses for courses’ guide to influence ecosystems.
- Confirmation of the 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers, 9% of users contribute from time to time, and 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions.
- Influence of product reviews varies by category. You’re more likely to use an online review to buy a digital camera than you are to choose a doctor. (I’m relieved to hear this!)
- Online discussion is theatre: “Web discussion is a performance in which a small group of people interact with each other, and with companies, for the benefit, education, and amusement of everyone else.” Understand this and it shapes your entire approach to online communities.
There is a ton of other information on web usage in the US, which makes interesting reading. For example, the research finds that web users are more likely to vote Democratic. That should be an interesting theory to check in the coming week…
Posted: October 24th, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: marketing | Tags: Forrester, Laura Ramos, marketing | No Comments »
Laura Ramos runs Forrester’s B2B Marketing programme. I follow her research closely as, although it’s US-centric, it produces some fascinating data on what B2B decision-makers do. Laura’s latest comments focuses on B2B Marketing Trends. Pretty much consistent with what we see in the UK - the highlights are (with my notes):
- Commoditisation leading to a lack of differentiation, which leads to marketing all sounding the same (so true);
- B2B buyers buying like consumers. Using peer reviews and social media as decision making inputs (perhaps less true in the UK?);
- Ad avoidance and sales call avoidance - using web sources to delay contact with vendors (I think there is generic ‘marketing avoidance’ going on);
- Globalisation. Uh huh.
Laura suggests that the outcome of these trends will be the death of B2B Marketing. I agree, at least insofar as B2B marketing can’t exist in the way it does. The justification that marketing “creates demand” is slammed by Laura as a cop-out. It needs to be more measurable in sales terms and more aligned with sales.
I’m looking forward to Part 2 of Laura’s comments…
Posted: October 21st, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: Influencer50, influencer marketing | Tags: influencer marketing, Influencer50, Nick Hayes | No Comments »
Nick, the president and founder of Influencer50, appeared on Webmaster radio last week, covering the basics of Influencer Marketing. It’s actually an easy listen, and you can stream the interview podcast here. Or download the mp3 here if you want to miss the commercials!
Posted: October 21st, 2008 | Author: Duncan Brown | Filed under: analyst relations, influencer relations | Tags: analyst relations, Barbara French, influencer relations, Influencer50 | 2 Comments »
A belated welcome is due to Barbara French, who joined Influencer50’s San Francisco office in August. Barbara is well-known in Analyst Relations circles through her Tekrati service and blog. She’s already contributing a ton of brain power to our US operation, and is sharing this publicly via her new blog, Sway.
Please welcome Barbara to the fold, and check out her blog for new insights into the world of influence.
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