Back in 2009, at that year's Monitoring Social Media conference, I forecast Google's entry into social analytics in Q1 2010. Whoops. Only fools do short-term forecasting. Wiser men look further out, by which time people have forgotten the prediction!
So here we are in Q2 2012 and the news from Google has dropped into my inbox. Verbatim:
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: