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The motivations of influencers and amplifiers: how content becomes prominent

Ross Dawson, June 23, 2009 7:03 PM US PT

Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion, which drew on research on how just a handful of influencers drive the content aggregation sites such as Digg, and a little later analyzed how influencers and amplifiers had helped one of my blog posts hit the front page Delicious.

These topics will be covered in detail at Future of Influence Summit 2009 - details coming soon.

In January the grand-daddy of the tech news aggregators, Techmeme, started accepting suggestions for stories, by people sending links on Twitter along with "tip @techmeme". The most prominent Techmeme story suggestor has been @atul.

Atul is interviewed in Success Secrets of a Top Techmeme Tipper. The entire interview is worth reading; I have picked out some of his comments on his motivations.

Why do you tip Techmeme? Tipping to techmeme is an avocation i.e. a hobby. But I have discovered it is great to build a personal brand and network with folks online. Techmeme is a excellent resource for consuming technology news for people in Silicon Valley and beyond. You can think of tipping to the Techmeme site as a modest contribution to bringing some of the news quicker to the attention of Techmeme and its readers.

How has this tipping altered your Twitter habits? A little bit. I was using Twitter mostly to share technology news so tipping to techmeme has not significantly altered my Twitter habits. It has made me a better curator of links. If I come across some interesting on the technology front, I do assess if it is worth tweeting about and/or tipping to techmeme.

Is is worth you time tipping Techmeme? It has been worth my time tipping to Techmeme. It has enabled me to reach out and connect with folks on Twitter and other social networks in a much more credible way. Given the current restriction of submitting no more than 2 tweets/hour to Techmeme, I actually spend no more than 30-45 minutes per day cumulatively sending tips over to techmeme. It is time well spent in sharing new about technology to folks who follow Techmeme.

People like Atul play an important role in the influence economy. They are rewarded in a variety of ways for their efforts in being first to highlight interesting articles. I suspect they will be rewarded in more ways in the future, as the influence landscape develops into a true marketplace.

For the most current insights and trends in the living networks, follow @rossdawson on Twitter!

2 Comments

Ben Bickford said:

Thanks Ross. I enjoyed reading your article on influencers and amplifiers and the evolving future marketplace where you allude to the mysterious rewards in future for their interactions, relationships and meaningful contributions.

I am fascinated to see the value of connections, collaboration and content becoming much more transparent and more readily exchanged as information currency, valued through more visible, measurable and hopefully trusted relationships via distributed networks.

Networks that are more interconnected and free flowing than ever before in our evolving digital and socially connected world.

Like you, I suspect the influence velocity and amplification energy will become faster, more palpable and even more valuable as highly measurable eddies in our fast flowing digital bit streams, or like topographical bumps, troughs and swirls on that global influence landscape you describe, both online and offline.

A terrain where consistency, connections and context all add to the collective value of the influencers, the content, the content consumers and the landscape itself - our living and ever more integrated digital ecosystem.

Cheers ... Ben (@bionic)

June 24, 2009 8:03 AM

mutuelle said:

thank you for this article

August 7, 2009 1:30 PM

Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-up Repyoot.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.