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Working out who influences the influencers

Ross Dawson, August 3, 2009 4:31 AM US PT

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!

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.