The death of journalism? (not yet dammit)

Time & again I come back to to the work of Paul Gillin, from his 'New Influencers' book, to the work he contributes to other publications.

But his recent blog posting "How New Influencers are Reinventing Journalism" is definately worthy of a read:
http://www.paulgillin.com/2008/04/how-new-influencers-are-reinventing.html

"The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We're really just a curator of consumer-generated content."
Get used to this. It's the online journalism model of the future.

This probably hurt a few of those old dogs out there in "snail (Daily) Mail" land..

The New Influencers - Part 3

Paul Gillin's book, that I've also covered in previous posts, is proving to be a far more insightful read than I anticipated.

The 3rd Chapter 'The Enthusiasts' covers the friend/enemy creation dilema that every company worries about when they start to deal with the Influencers. One of the biggest concerns at this point is how to identify and solicit their opinions.

In one case study he cites about the Nokia N90 phone, he covers the way that the Enthusiasts were identified and dealt with.

This is a filtering process of:

a. Identify a seasoned professional who can help
In this case, they got Andy Abramson on-board

b. Scour the Internet (blogsphere, Google, Technorati, etc.) for the respected voices
Note: It doesn't say what criteria and weighting he used

c. Whittle your list down to a select a small group of individuals.
Again, it doesn't say how this was exactly done. But 50 people were sent actual product to in advance of the official launch date. I guess 50 may have been a number set by Nokia, but even this is a szeable investment for something they hadn't done before ($600 X 50 = $30,000 retail value).

d. Monitor the response you get fromthese selected individuals.
According to Paul (and Andy I assume), over 40 bloggers responded by writing about the phone.

I do however have a couple of further questions:
1. How did he measure the 'Buzz' created by these 40 bloggers?
2. What would happen if this was a service or a non-tanglible product?

The New Influencers - Part 2

I have tried to find out more about the background behind the diagram in Chapter 2 of Paul Gillin's book. This diagram by Cymphony (who's 'Orchestra' tool is apparently very useful for identifying and measuring modern influence) correllates the relationship between traditional media and the more recent digital channels of blogs, usenet & social media.

However, I can't find anything more about it on their website (but did stumble across Jim Nail's blog which I found most illuminating). This was a little annoying, as I was hoping to learn more about their model. It should have moved on since the book was written over a year ago and I am keen to read up more about it.

What this did lead me to though, was the website for the book and Paul Gillin's own blog. Now this man has quite an array of really useful articles (that I'm now going to try and read)

The New Influencers : Part1

Having said I was going to buy it in a previous post, I recently started to read Paul Gillin's book The New Influencers, about Social Media Marketing. He writes about how the general trends in media are transformed by the new way that people communicate & engage with others & companies. His statement that social media is the “greatest change in market dynamics since television.” will be worrying to a lot of traditional marketers, but ring true to others.

His book immediately resonated with my own thoughts on individual/company influence and his words have moved my own understanding on somewhat.

His book has proved instantly value for come consultancy work I'm doing for one of my current clients. They are considering a large video UGC campaign and wanted to understand the current market situation in a nutshell (pros & cons, including reading Jim Kaskade's article on 'Who's afraid of UGC'). As well as providing them with a breakdown of the landscape, barriers to adoption, etc., I lent one of them the book over the weekend to thumb through.

It seems its done the trick, they are now planning their approach and the book has been ordered by them as instant reference material.

I daresay I'll be writing some more about this book in subsequent postings (and finding some way to make some commission on sales with any luck)

Influencers

I was in the shower this morning and was thinking about my day ahead (as I do) and get my brain 'in gear'.
I began thinking about influence and those that provided it.
Note:
I've just added the following to my Amazon 'wish list':
http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Influencers-Marketers-Guide-social/dp/1884956653

This then got me onto thinking about the different types of influence. Perhaps it can just be as simple as:
Positive (of benefit to a company)
Negative (of detriment to a company)

Although hype, campaign penetration, brand loyalty, revenue and long-term market stability are all inter-related, perhaps these (or others) could be separate indicators of the influence individuals (or other entities) have on an organisation?