August 2009 Archives

Throughout all our events, including among others Future of Media Summit, Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, and now Future of Influence Summit, our intention has been to have top-level participants who are themselves creating the future, and generating useful insights from interaction with their peers.

This is not supposed to be about the audience coming to hear wisdom from those on the platform. The person sitting next to you should often have as much to offer as the invited speakers.

As such, we always include "audience roundtables" and other approaches that help participants to have conversations, building their own insights from the ideas proposed by the speakers and panellists. At Future of Influence Summit, we will step up a few notches the video interaction between the audiences at the San Francisco and Sydney events to again create something unique in terms of participation.

As importantly, we have a quite extraordinary audience line-up in both locations. Without checking with everyone we can't generate a list of star audience members, but be assured it matches the calibre of the invited speakers. At a highly participatory event like this, the quality of the audience is what makes it exceptional. Based on who we have coming, we can expect it to be spectacular.

I hope you can be part of the Future of Influence Summit experience!

Once Future of Influence Summit finishes in San Francisco on August 31 at 6pm, we will go to the nearby 111 Minna bar for drinks and the After Party. The conversation on where influence is going will continue with a little lubrication :-)

See here for location and full info on 111 Minna

If you’re in San Francisco you really should go to the Future of Influence Summit itself - that's where the REAL fun will be had :-) - but if for some reason you cannot make it in the day, be sure to come to the After Party!

There will be some other things on at 111 Minna - say you’re there for Future of Influence when you arrive and look for the Future of Influence Summit logo as above.

I just got off an interview on the future of influence on 2SM radio which lasted almost 15 minutes - close to a record for my interviews on live AM radio, which tends to do 3-5 minute segments. The talk show host was clearly fascinated by the issues of how influence is shifting away from people like him, and towards the unwashed masses.

In the interview, done in the lead-up to Future of Influence Summit which is on next week in Sydney and San Francisco, I discussed the social transformation wrought by the changing influence landscape, and pointed to key five trends driving this change:

1. Influence is democratized
It used to be that people were influential by virtue of their position, such as CEO, journalist, or politician. In a world of blogging, Twitter, and social media anyone can become highly influential, shaping how we think, behave, and spend. Companies can ignore no-one. As many more become heard, a truer democracy will emerge.

One of the most exciting topics of Future of Influence Summit next week is exploring the business models for influence and reputation.

This is an issue which is better addressed in San Francisco/ Silicon Valley than anywhere else, and we have an extraordinary panel lined up to address the topic of Business Models for Influence and Reputation at 2:20 – 3:10pm Pacific Time.

Some of the questions I see include:
* Will there be new mechanisms for individuals to monetize their influence?
* What products or services will advertisers and marketers spend money on in seeking to tap influence?
* Will advertising spending be driven primarily by influence?
* What are models for monetizing the measurement of influence and reputation?
* Who will take the bulk of the value? Will it be the influencers themselves, or intermediaries in the emerging ecosystem?

Let’s take a very quick glance at the people speaking on the panel and what they’re doing – absolutely a star-laden cast.

When we started organizing Future of Influence Summit, our minds turned immediately to Brian Solis, who is himself one of the most central influencers and thought leaders in this rapidly emerging space.

So it’s awesome that Brian is speaking at the Summit, providing his insights on Influence at the Center of Marketing and Advertising.

Brian’s blog PR 2.0 is essential reading on the topic, and he also often guest blogs for TechCrunch. Just a few of his prominent posts that are particularly relevant to the future of influence include:

- Full Disclosure: Sponsored Conversations on Twitter Raise Concerns, Prompt Standards (Great post, will write more about later)
- Identifying and Connecting with Influencers
- Real-Time Conversations Gain in Influence, Hasten Social CRM
- Unveiling the New Influencers

Belatedly launching the hashtag for Future of Influence Summit: #foi09

FOI is Freedom of Information as well as Future of Influence, so putting the year in will help us stand out...

I have been remiss in not using the hashtag in my Twittering yet, but now we have quite extraordinary cast of attendees as well as amazing speakers in both San Francisco and Sydney, it's time to kick off the Twitter conversation on where influence is going.

Hope to speak soon on Twitter about the future of influence!

Here are links to a few conversation starters:
The changing nature of influentials and the role of the social graph

Launch of the Influence Landscape framework

In finding the quote from Marshall McLuhan on professionals and amateurs I used in my last post, I dug up a file I created a dozen years go with some quotes I was collecting. Here are just a few that are still worth bearing in mind today:

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”
- Winston Churchill

“It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiar in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
- John Stuart Mills in 1848

“Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean, if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”.
- Kristian Wilson of Nintendo Inc in 1989

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

I was just asked "what is a social media expert"?

Marshall McLuhan is still the oracle. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the master.

"Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put."
- Marshall McLuhan

In other words, a "social media expert" is an oxymoron - it cannot exist. The true trailblazers who forge new paths for the rest are the amateurs, the ones who are continually trying new things because they do NOT know. Anyone who truly understands social media would never pretend otherwise.

I wrote down this quote a dozen years ago because it so accurately reflected the way I felt about 'professionals' and 'amateurs'. Amidst today's extraordinary pace of change this outlook is in fact far more relevant than it ever has been before.

Celebrate the amateur!

We weren't the first to use the phrase 'Future of Influence'. Most prominently Nate Elliott of Forrester wrote a report 'The Future of Influence' (though you're better off going to Future of Influence Summit than buying the report :-) ) and has done a number of presentations on the theme.

Nate summarizes the topic:
* As Users Become More Active in Recommending Products and Services, New Influence Challenges Volume of Classic Influence
* The Growth of New Influence Will Overwhelm Some Users, Reinforcing the Value of Personal Recommendations from Known Sources
* Marketers Should Focus on Classic Influentials to Drive Direct Action, Encourage Them to Make Off-line Recommendations

Nate's presentation below describes the difference between what he calls 'Classic Influentials' (who exert passive influence by responding to requests for information) and 'New Influentials' (who exert influence by proactively giving advice).

A key focus in this analysis is user reviews. As we get a critical mass of reviews of products and content, this becomes a better source of information to consumers. However simple recommendation behaviors, for example in Twitter, are also being aggregated to provide information that guides decisions and behaviors.

You (or your favorite charity) can benefit from your influence! To find out how, read on…

One of the key themes of Future of Influence Summit, on next week in San Francisco and Sydney, is ‘business models for influence and reputation’.

There are many angles to this particular topic, including:
* Will it be possible for individuals to effectively monetize their influence and reputation?
* What new mechanisms will allow people to make money from the influence?
* How will influence intersect with spending on advertising? (some of the leading players in this space will be speaking at the Summit)
* What are business models for the measurement of influence and reputation?

I recently wrote about Sponsored Tweets, which is one of a number of platforms for people to make money by tweeting sponsored messages and links. There has been extensive discussion on this concept, with a high level of polarization in the community as to whether or not this is a good idea (see for example the comments on Mashable, and thoughts from David Risley, White Hat Crew, and AdWeek).

In the spirit of experimentation and learning how paid influence may work, we are introducing a rewarded tweeting system for promoting Future of Influence Summit. Here is how it works:

1. People using an approved discount code get 25% off the full price of registration (US$199 in San Francisco, A$600 in Sydney). For any registrations with that code, an additional 5% of the registration fee (US$10 for US, A$30 for Australia) is paid to you (or your favourite charity).

Ellipse by Imogen Heap is my current new favorite album - absolutely delightful!

Very generously given away by Imogen a few days ago on her website, and also available as an embed, as below.

Have a listen!

I discovered Imogen Heap when listening to the Kate Havnevik channel on Last.FM - Kate's music is lovely. Kate and Imogen's music is indeed very much in the same vein.

Imogen is here providing very open access to her music, with prominent buy buttons on each of the tracks.

While you can listen to streamed music when at your computer, you won't do that on your iPod or mobile. So you will quite possibly buy the song to pull into your iTunes and listen to as part of your personal music stream.

I'm certainly very happy to allow her to sell her music on my site, and I hope she makes lots of money from this! I think she'll do just fine.

For more insights into how to create and tap online influence at Future of Influence Summit 2009.

Last night media futurist Gerd Leonhard , Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, and I caught up for dinner. Gerd is in Sydney for the first time for a couple of events, including The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content on Tuesday (see the event review), and Richard happens to be in Sydney amidst a hectic global speaking schedule.

We had a fascinating discussion, largely on the future of content, and in particular how to leverage our own content. As futurists (I will write a blog post soon on ‘why I am happy to be called a futurist’ – that’s another story) what we sell is content in a variety of formats.

The most prominent monetizable channels we have are speaking, consulting (which can take a variety of forms), and books and reports (which now also can be packaged and sold in multitude of ways). Of course we all throw out plenty of free content on the web as part of the mix.

The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content event on Tuesday was a fantastic success. As so many of the attendees observed, this topic is at the heart of many businesses today. While content in the broadest sense is more and more central to the economy, there are many challenges, not least with pricing and distribution, whether the content is music, film, books, news, advertising, or simply the flow of communication that sustains human and business relationships.

Gerd Leonhard and I have been trying to do something together for a few years now, so it was great The Insight Exchange was able to take advantage of his first visit to Australia to run this event. In addition to Gerd’s far-reaching insights and global perspective the event brought together top-level views on the world of content from Agency, Brand, and Publisher perspectives.

Below are my rough notes taken during the event. In addition definitely read Gerd Leonhard’s blog post Creating value with Content: The Future of Marketing and Advertising (my Sydney presentation), and see his presentation slides here.

We’ll shortly add links to the other presentations made at the event.

NOTES FROM CREATING VALUE WITH CONTENT

We continue our Influence research series, paving the way for in-depth insights and breaking new ground on the topic at Future of Influence Summit 2009 in San Francisco and Sydney. See the Future of Influence Summit blog for the full series.

Earlier this year Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at HP’s Social Computing Lab did an analysis of Twitter networks, resulting in the article Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope.

They studied a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users to gain insights into how they communicated and connected. There were a variety of insights from the research, including the relationship between Twitter activity and number of followers.

Source: Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope

The final conclusion of the paper was:

Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.

This is of course hardly a surprising outcome. Having hundreds or even thousands of Twitter followers does not imply a strong relationship, just as anyone with over a thousand Facebook friends will not necessarily be influenced by all of them.

CMSWire has just published a nice review of my Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report.

Here is an excerpt from the review:

Ross Dawson has written a report on Enterprise 2.0 that should be a valuable tool for any organization implementing or thinking about implementing Web 2.0 tools in their enterprise.

Called Implementing Enterprise 2.0: A practical guide to creating business value inside organizations with web technologies, Dawson take a close look at the implications and considerations of incorporating web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, social networks, bookmarks and microblogging and RSS in the enterprise.

At roughly 190 pages, it doesn't take long to read this report and earmark some sound advice for your E2.0 strategy. The book includes chapters on developing an Enterprise 2.0 strategy, governance and policies, how different tools can create business value and practical and organizational implications. A number of sidebars provide real-world case studies and advice from those who have made the leap to Enterprise 2.0.

It concludes with a list of potential vendor solutions for the various web 2.0 technologies mentioned above.

The report provides a number of frameworks and checklists that can help you determine how best to go about implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions in your organization.

The front page of our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website now includes excerpts and links to reviews of the report - always handy before deciding to buy it! :-)

Leading up to the Future of Influence Summit held on August 31/ September 1, we will release a ranked list of the Top 50 Most Influential Media Industry Journalists in the world.

The list will analyzed and created using the platform of influence ratings startup Repyoot. However we need to provide a list of candidates to be analyzed for the ratings to be generated.

We have created an open spreadsheet with a list of over 100 prominent journalists covering the media industry in the English language.

Please add to the spreadsheet anyone that you think should be included for consideration in the most influential media journalists list. We will continue to add names ourselves until we submit those names for analysis by Repyoot this weekend.

One of the reasons we are creating this list is to make concrete the idea that “influence is the future of media”. While it is true that technologies of participation are making all of us influencers, mainstream media still affords a different scale of influence and impact. Journalists can now communicate not only through established media, but also through new channels such as Twitter and personal blogs. Together these provide multiple facets to how they exert influence.

There has been a lot of talk lately that the VC model is broken - here is a small selection of what has been being said recently on the topic:

Forbes: Venture Capital's Coming Collapse
EarlyStageVC: Traditional Venture Capital Sure Seems Broken - It's About Time
VentureBeat: The VC model is broken
Fred Wilson: Is The "Traditional Venture Capital Model" Broken?
Mathew Ingram on GigaOm: Is the VC Model Broken? Far From it
New York Times/ Bits: Do Web Entrepreneurs Still Need Venture Capitalists?
HuffingtonPost: The Death of Venture Capital as We Know It

There are manifold reasons for the VC sector's challenges, not least the vastly lower capital requirements of the typical web start-up of today.

One of the poster-children of the new wave of seed capital has been Y Combinator, which provides very small amounts of capital to kick-start new ventures.

We continue our Influence research series, paving the way for in-depth insights and breaking new ground on the topic at Future of Influence Summit 2009 in San Francisco and Sydney.

Duncan Watts is one of a handful of scientists instrumental in developing the study of networks as a key scientific discipline. He tells his story in his book Six Degrees, which begins by recounting how he found a subject for his Ph.D in mathematics in biological phenomena, which turned out to be based on networks, and to apply to subjects as diverse as society, technology, biology, infrastructure and beyond.

Duncan co-wrote a paper in 2006 titled Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation. This used mathematical modelling to examine the dynamics of how influence could disseminate.

The paper’s abstract summarizes their findings:

While online technologies have transformed the media along many dimensions, one of the most important ways of understanding this is in how the news cycle has changed.

In the old days news was broken on real-time channels such as radio and TV, reinforced and pushed out to a broader audience through newspapers, discussed again in chat shows, and sometimes had life added to the news with updates or responses.

Today, while elements of that cycle remain, much of it has changed. Twitter has had one of biggest impacts on the news cycle, firstly by often being the first media to break news, in offering a discussion forum around mainstream media coverage, and amplifying stories that have appeared in traditional formats.

I stumbled across a couple of interesting graphics and analysis by Samuel Degremont at Burson-Marsteller Paris who shows some of these changes visually.

Click on the images to see them in full size and read Samuel's detailed discussion (in French).[UPDATE:] Here is the blog post translated into English.

Twitter has just announced the first of a series of changes to how retweeting is incorporated into the Twitter platform, called Project Retweet. This is significant in how influencers make content popular, one of the key themes of the upcoming Future of Influence Summit.

Retweeting (forwarding someone else’s tweet to all of your followers) has become central to how Twitter is used. This user-invented behavior means that Twitter has become an extremely strong amplifier of the dissemination of interesting content.

It also provides a very good indication of people’s influence and credibility. While Twitter follower numbers are very crude a proxy of influence, it is far more effective to see how much people are prepared to forward someone’s messages. High follower numbers does not necessarily result in lots of (or any) Retweets. However if someone is consistently and diversely retweeted, they must be saying interesting things, or more often, pointing to interesting content.

Awesome! Tara Hunt, renowned author of The Whuffie Factor, will be doing the opening keynote at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco.

Below is the video where I first saw Tara in action, speaking at the Web 2.0 Conference in April 2009 about The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities.

The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.

For those not in the know, "whuffie" is the measure of reputation used in Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Since we don't have any other good words for describing collectively assessed reputation, whuffie has gained traction as a description of this phenomenon.

Taken from the book description:

How many Twitter followers do you have?

One of the reasons Twitter is important is that it is introducing the concept of assessing people's degree of influence. A person's number of Twitter followers is increasingly being taken as a proxy for their influence. If the only thing you know about someone is that they have 5,000 Twitter followers (or 50), you can make some preliminary assumptions about their influence.

Of course Twitter follower numbers is a hopelessly flawed measure for many, many reasons, and pretty much everyone knows that. However it's often all you have.

Relatively few people have blogs, and in the broader population not many people know about blog ranking engines such as Technorati and Wikio. Everyone understands that numbers of Facebook and LinkedIn friends don't indicate much other than how inclined people are to connect online.

Today Twitter follower numbers is becoming even less accurate as an influence measure due to extensive gaming.

Systems such as Twitter Grader and Twinfluence take into account other factors such as who your followers are and how they behave, follower/ following ratios, retweets, conversational activity, and so on to give a more accurate view of influence.

However not everyone is on Twitter and has much time to spend on it. That doesn't mean they are not influential - just that they are not bringing to bear their influence through the channel of Twitter.

It is inevitable that broader measures of influence will be developed. Of course these can only be valid within a specific context, so the best measures of influence will provide a single slice view.

The fact remains that Twitter follower numbers has provided us with our very first proxy for influence, however crude, however flawed. We now as a society have seen our first measure of influence. This will accelerate the creation and uptake of more sophisticated measures in the very near future.

We will explore the idea of measures of influence - and the business models that surround them - at Future of Influence Summit 2009.

At Future of Influence Summit at the end of this month many of the most prominent people in the influence space will get their heads around where the space is going.

Given what I’ve been seeing and hearing over just the last few months, it is clear that an important part of this is the sweet spot where influence meets advertising.

A good overview of the space and two of the leading players in the space – 33Across and Media6Degrees - is provided in a recent article in New York Times titled The Online Ad That Knows Where Your Friends Shop. The article concludes with:

Margaret Clerkin, the head of the invention group at Mindshare, a division of WPP’s GroupM, who works with clients including Unilever and Sprint, said she wondered whether the approach would work for every category.

“The theory feels strong that in this very social environment that people are influenced more by their friends than they are by advertisers and brands,” she said. She plans to test Media6Degrees and 33Across later this year.

“I think the validity of that is going to end up being tested by brand and by category,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re going to see the same ratio in buying a bar of soap that you are in buying a car. The influence rate is going to be so much greater as the price tag of the product goes up.”

A recent article in AdWeek, Connect the Thoughts, also examines the space in some detail, describing some of the key ideas:

One of the key themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009 on August 31 / September 1 will be the emergence of the 'reputation economy', and how value is being created in that space.

Howard Rheingold, who has been deeply involved in this space since the 1980s, and has demonstrated his prescience by writing - among others books - Virtual Reality in 1991 and Smart Mobs in 2002, will be doing a keynote at the conference.

In our recent conversation about influence and reputation Howard mentioned the 2004 article Manifesto for a Reputation Society, which appeared in First Monday. I saw this a number of years ago but had forgotten it. It is in fact a great overview of where reputation may go. The abstract reads:

In the lead-up to Social Media for Marketing: An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior, created by new media research company One to One Interactive.

Digg was one of the first "influence aggregators", bringing together the opinions of many to guide what content people read. In addition, the Digg ecosystem is a great example of an influence network. Research in early 2007 showed that 30 people were responsible for 30% of the stories that made the front page of Digg. Their personal influence networks generated waves of behavior that resulted in stories becoming very popular.

Today Digg's prominence as an influence aggregator has waned relative to the growth other channels, most notably Twitter, however it is still a powerful force that concentrates vast amounts of web traffic to those stories the community push to the fore.

One to One Interactive uses a proprietary methodology that uses physiological data (breath rate, galvanic skin response, heart rate) in addition to eye tracking information and self-reporting to assess engagement. They did the study on a number of respondents who visit Digg an average of twice a day to see how the engage with the site.

The above diagram from the report shows part of the research that resulted in the second insight below, that headlines are the most important factor in driving attention and traffic to stories.

These are the four key insights generated by the study:

Some more interesting insights from the UK OFCOM report (in addition to the shift in social networking activity from youths to adults I wrote about earlier today).

There has been a 25% slide in newspaper revenue over the four years to 2008 (with the biggest drop in 2008, and likely a larger one coming in 2009). Most interestingly, half of this loss has come from local classifieds.

UK has a distinctive structure to its newspaper market, with a number of national dailies mainly out of London, and a large variety of local newspapers. Classifieds by its nature tends to be a local market, so the national newspapers have in fact not taken the bulk of this revenue - this has been the province of the many local papers, which have been slammed by the fall in classifieds revenue.

UK telecom regulator Ofcom has released a major study on use of telecommunications in the UK, out of which some interesting statistics on use of social networking have come.

It's not surprising to see the substantial rise in social networking in the 25-54 year old age bracket. Adults have "got it" and piled on board to network online with friends and for work. What is more surprising is that 15-24 year olds are using social networks slightly less than they were, with the Guardian speculating (there is no evidence for this from the report) that it is the uptake of social networks by older people that is causing this "adolescent exodus". The nub of it is this:

"There is nothing to suggest overall usage of the internet among 15-to 24-year-olds is going down," said Peter Phillips, the regulator's head of strategy. "Data suggests they are spending less time on social networking sites."

Part of it is definitional - what constitutes a social network? When young people use the Internet, they are primarily using it to connect with their peers. Whether that is on Facebook, through content sharing, or on music sites, they are effectively social networking.

The significant drops in use of social networks by the 65+ year olds makes me question the survey methodology - I find it hard to believe that 80% of the over 75 year olds who were using social networks a year ago have dropped out with none taking their place.

Here is the data as a spreadsheet, kindly provided by The Guardian's Datablog.

For the last years I have only got to Europe irregularly - my intent has been to focus on USA and Australia, however I have been getting fairly frequent speaking and consulting work in Asia and the Middle East as well.

I will be in Istanbul on 21 October to do the opening keynote at Marketing&Management Institute's Digital Marketing Summit, and am exploring some possibilities to do public workshops or in-house strategy sessions in Brussels and Helsinki before or after then.

Let me know if there are other possible opportunities we should discuss for when I'm in that quadrant of the globe :-).

Sponsored Tweets has just launched, providing a sophisticated pay per tweet system. Mashable has a detailed review of Sponsored Tweets, including how disclosure is handled.

The Sponsored Tweets platform works by giving advertisers the ability to create campaigns and select, invite, and approve Twitterers of their choosing to participate in their sponsored campaigns. On the flip side, Twitterers can set their pay rate and find opportunities to tweet on behalf of advertisers and get paid per tweet and/or click.
…
Of course, IZEA’s attempting to cover the disclosure and ethics and portion with their Disclosure Engine software that automatically detects whether or not the appropriate hashtag or text is included. According to IZEA’s CEO, Ted Murphy, “disclosure is systematically enforced” and adheres to FTC and WOMMA guidelines.

This is the first substantive platform in what will undoubtedly become a crowded space. How prominent twitterers and their followers will respond to this is an unknown.

Knowledge and complexity guru Dave Snowden (@snowded) recently tweeted me to ask if I would like to have an on-stage conversation with him to close the KM Australia conference. Apparently the session as originally planned didn't pan out, so I'm the last-minute back-up plan.

In a brief Twitter exchange we decided on a discussion topic of :
"How to build organisations that succeed in a world of infinite information".

I think the idea is we'll walk on stage and have a conversation. I think it's fair to say that Dave is forthright in his opinions, so it should be fun. :-)

It will be quite a while since I've been to a knowledge management conference.

Travis Murdock has a nice blog post: Who influences the influencers? (which, tellingly, I found from @louisgray on Twitter).

Travis offers five tips:
1. Check who they are following on FriendFeed
2. Follow Influencer RSS reader feeds
3. Research Facebook events
4. Research ReTweets and @replies on Twitter
5. Follow the social brick road

There are a variety of other manual and automated ways to identify who key influencers are listening to and drawing on to shape their opinions.

What is critical about the idea of 'who influences the influencers' is that this intrinsically describes influence networks. Far too much influencer marketing is about finding the influence hubs and then trying to reach them.

The reality is far more subtle than that, in many ways. Influence flows through networks, and effectively working with influence can only be done by understanding influence networks, not the 'hub and spoke' model that many PR and marketing firms seem to base their thinking about influence on.

Far more on where influence is going at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco and Sydney, coming up soon!

This morning I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization.at their strategy offsite. It's not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. (See also my post on The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives)

As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these - scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer as well as a brief background on using scenarios in the strategy process see my scenarios for the future of financial services).

SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR THE WORLD IN 2030
A traditional scenario process identifies two dimensions to uncertainty, that when combined produce a matrix of four scenarios. Once the framework is created, the full richness of trends and uncertainties uncovered in the research process are integrated into the scenarios. Here the two dimensions selected are:

RESOURCES AVAILABILITY: Resource Poverty TO Resource Affluence
Availability and real cost of key resources including energy, food, water, and environmental stability.

COHESION: Cohesion TO Fragmentation
Cohesion of society, government, nations, and institutions.

Together these dimensions yield:

SCENARIOS FOR THE WORLD IN 2030

Tomorrow morning I'm doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I'll also speak a about the Singularity.

As such I've been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven't been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose.

Ray Kurzweil's Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I'll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives. The Universe becoming conscious is beyond the ambit of most strategy sessions.

Source: Ray Kurzweil, Applied Abstractions