The fallacy of the influentials

Life's complicated, so we better get used to it. That's my remote contribution to the Monitoring Social Media conference, Boston 2010. In other words, your marketing and PR campaign does not pivot around finding and persuading 10, 20 or 50 so-called influentials.

We should de-emphasise the application of social Web analytics (aka social media analytics, listening platforms, social monitoring) to finding the influentials. Rather, we should employ these amazing tools and services to actively listen, to learn from the conversation and to facilitate the workflow aspects of joining in the conversation.

Life is complicated. Influence is complex. And it appears that we're influenced more by our respective 150 nearest and dearest family and friends more often than the other 6 billion combined! I discuss the evidence for this assertion in my video here:

References

• David Armano at TEDxPennQuarter 2010, 8 minutes 10 seconds in
• Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, Razorfish, 2009
• Consumers Pushing Companies into Social Media, Invoke Solutions, August 2010
• Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Tweets, Harris Interactive, 3rd June 2010, Table 5
• Paul Adams, Google, Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network, slides 131-140