Recently in Influence Category

The development of reputation systems will be a central aspect of the economy and society this decade. While we are still early in the overall process of building robust systems that are themselves trustworthy, the pace of development is accelerating.

Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) is putting a lot of thought into the issue. His recent post Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence, begins:

People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.

The ultimate issue for Craig is how these systems are developed:

I think the solution lies in a network of trust and reputation systems. We're seeing the evolution of a number of different ways of measuring trust, which reflects a human reality; different people think of trust in different ways.
...
We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested.

Craig expanded on these ideas in an interview for GigaOm, below.

While we were working on the Future of Influence Summit last year I encapsulated the essence of what I was seeing in the space in Five key trends in how influence is transforming society, complementing our Influence Landscape.

If you've managed to avoid Juicystar07 and Allthatglitters21 so far, your time is up. They provide a fantastic example of two of the key trends in influence. Blair Fowler (Juicystar07) and Elle Fowler (Allthatglitters21) are sisters who review beauty and fashion products on their YouTube channels, with a total of 50 million and 31 million video views respectively. The video below is a "haul" review of a sponsor's products which was also being filmed by Good Morning America.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch writes that this week a start-up will launch that is “effectively Yelp for people,” and promises detailed coverage in the next few days.

This is of great interest, not least because our own start-up Repyoot will be launching in public beta in the next couple of weeks, starting as an influence ratings engine within a limited domain, and intending to evolve into a broad-based reputation engine for people.

The thrust of Arrington’s article is that if we are all open to anonymous feedback…

It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.

…we will have to change how we judge reputation.

We’re going to be forced to adjust as a society. I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. Employers just won’t care that ridiculous drunk college pictures pop up about you when they do a HR background search on you.

In 2007 I expressed similar sentiments in Watch out! The intimate details of your life will be visible forever more…, saying

I was recently interviewed for a report created by the executive forum Vistage, titled 12 Trends That Will Define Business in the "New Normal".

One of the key trends covered in the report in which they drew on my thoughts is reputation management, excerpted below.

Trend 7: Reputation Management

Serendipity is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It originates from the story of "the Three Princes of Serendip", which tells the tale of three princes who had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries (see more on the story here).

For the last decade I have been talking about the idea of "enhanced serendipity". For example I wrote about how I used social networking software to create enhanced serendipity at a Living Networks event that I ran in New York in 2003, used the term to describe what was done by mobile social networking platform Dodgeball (the first attempt in the space by the founders of today's success story in the space Foursquare), and a longer post about Creating Enhanced Serendipity in 2006.

In today's New York Times, Nick Bilton writes a post titled ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web. He writes:

Earlier this week I did the opening keynote at the AMP Hillross annual convention, with the title of Embracing the Future. Hillross, one of the most upmarket of the wealth management networks, is seeking to lead the rest of the market by shifting to a pure fee-for-advice model, and rapidly developing a true professional culture. My keynote was designed to bring home the necessity of individual and firm leadership at this key juncture in industry structure.

One of the central themes of my talk was the increasing importance of reputation for professionals. Clearly reputation has always been critical for any professional, and there are some parts of professional services markets where reputation is already highly visible, such as prominent M&A lawyers, who are identified by numerous client surveys. While clients of other professional services (for example audit or management consulting) tend to be more focused on engaging firms rather than individuals, there is a fundamental shift from corporate to individual reputation under way.

Over the last couple of years the AdAge 150 has collated a dynamic list of the top blogs in advertising, media, and marketing. The list actually covers over 1,000 blogs, and ranks them daily by prominence, using a variety of sources including rankings from Alexa, PostRank, and Collective Intellect, as well as a subjective ranking by the list developer Todd Andrlik. These sources have changed throughout the history of the AdAge 150 list, in trying to provide a balanced view of blog authority

This blog was added to the list a couple of months ago, having previously not come to the attention of the list creators. While I write about other topics, including enterprise technology and the future of business, a large proportion of this blog is about media and marketing in their many guises. In fact I have often described the future of business as the media economy, in which almost all economic activity is a form of media.

The AdAge rankings are highly dynamic since they emphasize recent activity. At the time of writing this blog is ranked #97, which is pretty solid given many of the blogs on the list are professional blogs.

I’ve written before about blog rankings, notably about Wikio’s approach, and I’ve been intending to write about Technorati’s recent changes in authority ranking. I’ll try to get to a broader overview of the blog authority systems before long.

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

And one more summary of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, this time on the topic of influence, which has become very central to my interests and research.

1. Launch of the Influence Landscape framework (Beta)
A visual framework to explain the role and mechanisms of influence today

2. “Influence is the future of media”
Why influence is at the center of where the media industry is going

For a number of years I’ve talked about how we are effectively reaching a world infinite content, and the implications of that. That is becoming more real by the day, as in an economy increasingly driven by search and links, people find new ways to generate content that participates in this new information infrastructure.

I wrote last year about Philip Parker, who created programs that have automatically generated 200,000 books by aggregating and structuring content on the web. I haven’t read any of the books, but I’m told that they are – unsurprisingly – pretty poor, though of possible value to some people. However this is probably at the quality end of the spectrum of auto-generated content. For many years blog spammers have been auto-generating blog posts which have plausible language constructions, so they are picked up by search engines, but in fact are nonsense.

Adding to the morass of content are non-native speakers who lack background and context writing articles that are far more coherent than anything generated by computers, but which are still basically crap i.e. a waste of time to read.

The US Federal Trade Commission has released its long-awaited update to its "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising" to now cover blogging and social media.

The headline news is that:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

Those contravening the FTC Act can be fined up to $16,000 per post (it has been increased in the last year from the $11,000 that has been widely reported).

In other words, the world of paid influence that we explored at Future of Influence Summit will be regulated and laid open.

This whole thing is a minefield, and I wish had more time to run through all of the issues, but here are a few top-of-mind points that need to be made about this:

ABC Radio National Future Tense this morning featured a discussion on the future of influence (click here for the podcast of both the radio program, and the unabridged discussion between Duncan Riley and myself). It kicks off with a quote from Chris Saad saying that influence and reputation are the currencies of the day, even more than attention.

When asked why we rebadged Future of Media Summit as Future of Influence Summit this year, I explained why “influence is the future of media”, and the five key trends in how influence is transforming society.

Duncan pointed to how the rise of Internet and social media means that influence can now be global. He also raised the issue of trust agents, and what it takes to be trusted as a publisher. We have more choice in what we look for, and so we need markers of credibility.

On the topic of business models for influence, I talked about two key ideas. The first is whether and how individuals can profit from their influence, and how that will develop. The second is the emergence of influence as a currency, and the companies that profiting from making influence explicit for companies.

Listen to the long version of the interview for more details.

One of the most interesting topics at the recent Future of Influence Summit was the emergence of business models for influence. Some particularly intriguing issues were raised in the Business Models for Influence and Reputation panel, suggesting that one of the key currencies of the future will be influence.

The panellists generally agreed that total revenue in the influence sector, including the companies represented on the panel (Rapleaf, Buzzlogic, Klout) is around US$100 million. The primary business model is providing insights to companies on who the influencers are in their customer base.

One example given is a hotel that asks guests checking in for their Twitter name, swiftly ascertaining how influential in social media they are, and treating them accordingly. If someone who has real reach is their guest, the hotel might upgrade them or otherwise treat them in a way that they are likely to rave about.

Was just catching up on Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang joining Charlene Li's Altimeter group from Altimeter.

Jeremiah is quoted in the New York Times:

Mr. Owyang said that his story holds lessons for other companies. “I think this is an interesting trend that many companies are going through — personal brands are here to stay, alongside corporate ones, and the key to success is to make sure they help each other,” he said. “But now the power is shifting to the workers, because they can take their network and a lot of what they know with them, with these social media tools.”

The third trend in my recent Five key trends in how influence is transforming society is:

Reputation shifts from the corporation to the individual

I strongly believe in Jeremiah's point that individuals and corporations need to support each others' brands. In fact one of the important reasons I have pointed to as to why companies should support use of social networks is that it helps their employees to build their own brands, to the benefit of both individual and company.

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

In the wake of Future of Influence Summit last week, Seth Godin has done a short post titled Clout that neatly sums up one of the key themes of the event, and an issue that I and many others think is enormously relevant today. This subject is coming to the fore, as I suggested iin the second of Five key trends in how influence is transforming society.

I don't think Seth will mind if I put the full post here, as it doesn't really bear excerpting (as long as I include a solid plug for his awesome blog!)

Clout

The web knows something, but it's not telling us, at least not yet.

The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog.

It also knows how often those people retweet, amplify and spread your ideas.

It also knows how many followers your followers have...

So, what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout. Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread? Bloggers don't have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are (my readers, of course, are the most sophisticated and cloutful on the entire web).

If you knew which of your followers had clout, you could invest more time and energy in personal attention. If we knew where big ideas were starting, that would be neat, and even more useful would be understanding who the key people were in bringing those new ideas to the rest of the world.

Back in the old days, we had no idea, so we defaulted to big newspapers, or magazines or the TV networks. But now we know. We just need to surface the data in a way that is useful.

I'll be writing a lot more on this topic and how this can best be done in coming weeks and months.

Influence is the topic of the moment (as well as the next decade). In the wake of our very successful Future of Influence Summit earlier this week, not one but two significant studies of influence on Twitter were released today.

An extensive study titled The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter, created measures for relative influence, tracking in detail 12 popular users. Commentary on this further down in this post, and a nice visual showing response density to these users below.

Rapleaf, whose CEO Auren Hoffman spoke at Future of Influence Summit, released a quite different report showing the change in the structure of the Twitter ecosystem in the period late-March to mid-June of this year, during which time Twitter usage grew 60%. Rapleaf, in the course of doing a study to identify influencers in one of their clients’ customer community, came up with some interesting statistic in the dynamics of the most prominent Twitter users.