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Authority vs. Influence

Authority vs. Influence

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Spurred on by a post from Mack Collier, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell posted an interesting vlog post yesterday on the idea of authority.  I believe this concept of obsessively counting Twitter followers is the idea that touches off this debate.  For example, if you have 25.000, does that mean you are an authority?  I think Mack, Jackie, Ben and many other are all agreed that the answer is no.  Alone, Twitter followers doesn’t even necessarily mean you have great influence, it is only a  base brute measure of “reach” (you could also add in reach of the RTs for total reach) in the same way that media has measured reach for years.

There are some other interesting nuggets in the Ben/Jackie interplay in that video that piqued my interest.

Does a book indicate authority?: When Perez Hilton comes up, they reconsider whether or not he may be an “Authority” when the fact that he has a new book up gets mentioned.  Initially I chuckled at the idea of having a book giving you street cred in the church’s eyes, but then I reconsidered.  Writing a book usually indicates that the author has done a huge amount of research into a particular topic and (often) has some personal experience or connection to the topic that gives them further credibility.

Are authority and influence the same thing?: Jackie asks this as “Are the things that you say retweeted?” Ben by positing that “You are an authority if you have people who take your word and take action”.  I think both of these are less about authority and more about influence.   From the wikipedia entry on this authority: “What distinguishes authority, from coercion, force and power on the one hand and leadership, persuasion and influence on the other hand, is legitimacy.”  I do think that its possible for an authority to not have a large group of people listening to them.  Similarly many people can take action on what Britney Spears telegraphs, but I’m not sure this makes her an authority at anything other than influence.

Have online celebrities convinced themselves they are real celebrities? Ben and Jackie included some fun Twitterati mentions of folks that I really enjoy who really are caught up in their follower count.  Stay tuned for G4’s “Twitterati: Where are they now” series in 2014.

Thanks to Ben & Jackie for the inspiration this morning!

Online Resolutions, 2009 ed.

Online Resolutions, 2009 ed.

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I am rounding out a truly amazing 2 weeks off.  And yes, I may have done a few hours of work during that time, but physically and psychologically, I have truly been present with family and friends in a new way.   With the reality that work is gearing back up, my mind is now on how best to spend my 2009 online time – to squeeze the most value, quality and fun out of every moment of the day.  Here is my very unscientific list of changes for 2009:

1) CHECK RSS TWICE A DAY.  Not 100x/ day, not 0x/ day.   I have a tendency to either get totally engrossed in other work and forget about the outside world, or to obsessively look for each incoming update.   Moderation in all things.

2) TWEET MEANINGFULLY.  This is hard.  While I believe slice-of-life entries are a great enhancement to your Twitter profile, it is important to keep the “signal to noise ratio” (in the words of Jeremy Epstein) high.  These last two weeks off have been primarily noise – beautiful noise, but noise nonetheless – but 2009 is going to be all about signal!

3) ENJOY CONNECTIONS; NOT COMMERCE.  Pre-Christmas browsing started me down the road to acquisition obsession.  Every luxury e-tailer having unheard of sales was more fuel on the fire.  It’s over. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twit2Fit, and SWOM provide shared value for me and my network and are about connections, not commercialism.

4) NO CASUAL GAMES.  These are the online equivalent of the junk food french fries that I vowed to kick in 2008 (and 2007, 2006, etc).  My current poison, having graduated from Bejeweled, is a little something that I like to call Big Money. (Warning: Click link at your own time-sucking risk).  Similar to Wesleyan Tetris that came within a hair of preventing me from completing my Junior year independent study in college, I need to go cold turkey.

5) MAKE BLOGGING A ROUTINE PRIORITY.  I am fairly regimented and take great joy in going to the the gym.  Because of that, I make time for it.  I plan to do the same for blogging in 2009.

6) REFOCUS. I also plan to return to the core purpose of this blog – highlighting the great work of specific brands in connecting with their customers.  This is the true meaning of “Marketing Environmentalism” and will be particularly important in these tough economic times.

My biggest offline resolution of 2009 is to have more fun.  I believe that trying to cut some of my “junk” online time – focusing on strengthening my knowlege, skills, and interpersonal connections – will help create the time to do what’s important offline: going to the playground with my son, to a restaurant with my husband, or outside to enjoy friends and DC.

Corporate Blogs: Sucking or Progressing?

Corporate Blogs: Sucking or Progressing?

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Sparked by a recent Forrester report that corporate blogs are one of the least trusted forms of media, much has been written on the topic of corp comms in the last few days.  Here’s the chart that launched this dicussion

As this discussion is going on, Rome is burning (economically speaking).  This offers corporate blogs an amazing opportunity to use their platforms for good, not evil, and some art stepping up to the plate in a significant way.

I detailed some examples in a post yesterday to the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog.  Meanwhile, my Ogilvy colleague and blogger extraordinaire was also fanning the flames over at the Influential Marketing Blog.

What do you think?  Is the Forrester-reported suckage real?  Or does the transparent social media treatment of recent unfortunate events change your mind about their value the way it has mine?

Emails & Reviews for Christmas ’08

Emails & Reviews for Christmas ’08

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My Inbox is under siege!

Retailers, desperate to make hay with what is left of the holiday shopping season, have attempted to take our relationships from a really casual “hey, see you around!” level to trying to get me in the sack (without buying me a drink) seemingly overnight.  Frequency of emails has increased, drain-circling discounts have been framed as everything from private promos to secret sales, then there’s the “exclusive product” strategy such as the Hard Rock Cafe’s email about their new goth punk Barbie (To all those who have been searching for something to get that angry teenager on your list: you’re welcome).

While I have spent gobs of money online, none as been the result of any one of these emails.  The ONLY thing these emails have inspired me to do, actually, is go to the trouble of unsubscribing.  When you email me once a month, i delete; once a day, I unsubscribe.  Has the desperation of the recession officially forced retail email to jump the shark?

When I have been shopping for gifts, I have relied heavily on ratings and reviews.  When asked to purchase a gift in a category on which I’m a novice, I hesitated to buy a toy that was new to the market explicitly because that meant it had no ratings.   Conversely, on Sephora.com I was shocked to see not just the ratings and reviews, but contextual data.  In addition to comments and ratings, the site captures the age range, skin type, and eye color of the rater.  Once I saw a particularly divisive set of ratings (1 star vs. 5 stars), I was able to find the most relevant opinions and weigh those more seriously.

So, in the course of 3ish years, ratings have gone from an interesting oddity to an absolute e-commerce decision necessity.  And email has gone from a great way to get reminders from my favorite stores to unsubscribe breakups.  Maybe this is the silver lining of the recession?!

My Christmas wish is that email marketing clutter will lose its efficiency and be rethought in the marketing mix and retailers that empower recommendations and connections between customers will be rewarded with solid Q4 revenue.  Or at least that’s my marketing Christmas wish.  Like a good beauty queen, I’m still planning to ask Santa for World Peace.

The Netflix Prize & Modeling Influence

The Netflix Prize & Modeling Influence

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Last week, the NY Times published a great article about the leaders in the almost 2-year-in contest to create a computer algorithm that improves upon the ability of Netflix’ Cinematch engine to make accurate recommendations of what you’ll like by 10%.   Competition is hot because the prize is a whopping $1million, but the progress of all of the teams seem to be stalled based on an inability to predict how you’ll like a small handful of polarizing indie movies – most notably Napoleon Dynamite.

So, what makes indies so hard to predict?   Influence!   While recommendation engines are built on the assumption that your taste stays the same, our “tastes” are constantly morphing based on the opinions and information we hear from those around us.

“…the reality is that our cultural tastes evolve, and they change in part because we interact with others. You hear your friends gushing about “Mad Men,” so eventually — even though you have never had any particular interest in early-’60s America — you give it a try. Or you go into the video store and run into a particularly charismatic clerk who persuades you that you really, really have to give “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” a chance.”

Not only do your friends’ recommendations encourage trial or purchase, they also change the way you judge or take in the information.  If I already know that someone I respect really loves a film (restaurant, book, whatever), I am walking in with a very positive inclination to also enjoy the experience.  M.I.T professor Pattie Maes, who pioneered one of the first recommendation engines in the early ’90s, believes that these sources of influence are the flaw in the Netflix contest (based solely on movie rating information).  She believes “culture isn’t experienced in solitude. We also consume shows and movies and music as a way of participating in society. That social need can override the question of whether or not we’ll like the movie.”

Our desire for conversational capital and the social connection it can create is indeed capable of overriding, or at least prejudicing, our individual tastes.  Maybe instead of longing for the demogrphic information of the recommenders in the Netflix contest, the golden ticket would indeed be a social graph showing the way various recommenders are connected and the order they have seen the various films.