What I Learned In Social Media This Week

This week I have a couple of things.

1. Facebook Launches Places

The big news of the week was that Facebook announced a new feature called Places. This allows you to check in places through Facebook much like Foursquare of Gowalla. The feature that Facebook touts as different is the ability to tag your friends at certain locations. Here is the video that Facebook published explaining the new feature.

They are supposedly partnering with Foursquare and Gowalla but Foursquare has said that they are not sure how they will work with it yet. @Dens - Foursquare CEO - said that they are not that concerned with Places. But then again what else are they going to say. Here is a video from Mashable with the Foursquare VP of Mobile and Partnerships Holger Luedorf.

I am talking about Foursquare instead of Facebook because time will tell what people think of the new feature but location has been one of the hottest spaces in technology and Foursquare has been the golden child of that space. The most interesting thing to me is if this will change the landscape of this space considerably or if they will coexist. One note is that Foursquare had its largest signup day ever after this announcement.

2. Rowfeeder Has a Major Update

I talked about Rowfeeder two weeks ago. Right after that they released a major new release that really stepped up the sexiness of the product. They now generate 'native Excel files with pre-populated charts, visualizations and pivot tables'. The original beauty of this was that I could get the data in the raw format so that I could create whatever I wanted on top of that. I lived in Excel for 10 years so that is very comfortable for me. Now they just lowered the barrier for use even more by pre-populating some of the first use cases they are hearing. I have talked to these guys a few times and I can tell you they are pushing to continually improve this product and are gaining great traction. Nice work guys.

3. The Word Influence is Being Bastardized.

I will talk about this more as this is my real area of passion but the word influence and influencer is a term that is really getting abused. SO many people are talking about this and they are defining it in whatever way is convenient for their purposes but not necessarily in ways that will provide true value. There are a few companies that are trying to so metrics around influence but they are very 1.0 in their thinking. I have discussed this with a friend of mine about what the true roles in a network are and how you really measure them. There is a better way and over time I will be talking about the more and more here. This is a problem that there is real business value in discussing and solving, and this is an issue that were are working through at my day job currently. As companies start into social media this is a space that they are trying to get their arms around and the misuse of these terms are going to cause confusion and false starts for many companies.

How Social Media has Changed Influence

Right before SXSW I was chatting with Gene Kim (@RealGeneKim) about the idea of influencers in the IT security market. He pointed out to me that we need to clearly understand what we are talking about. People who have a ton of followers or people who are creating original thoughts into the conversation. Since that conversation I have been thinking about that a ton and talked with many folks about this at SXSW. It would seem to be a wildly important concept for any company to understand and has become one that I am very interested in. I want to understand how the dynamics work and what roles they play.

I recently read a blog post by Tamar Weinberg (@tamar) over at Techipedia where she wrote a recent post entitled How to Get an Influencer's Attention. I looked at the list and did not think everyone on there met my definition of an influencer. Some of them where merely amplifiers in my mind. But this is probably more of a matter of how people define an influencer. Each person is going to look at influencers different because influence is also a matter of personal context.

Now, influencers are nothing new. They have always been around but the internet, and especially social media tools, give everyone a voice as long as they have an internet connection. Anyone can get ahold of one of those somewhere thus anyone has a voice. This has changed the world forever in a very positive way but I think that over time people are going to see that they have a new job they didn't have before. You need to develop your own filter. In the past this was the job of an editor or publisher. Now you would think that the masses would weed out most of the crap but I'm not so sure.

There are a few buckets of people but I want to understand (maybe more):

1. The Thought Leaders - these are the people that are putting original thoughts into the conversation that have value. They are driving the edges of the conversation. My assumption here is that most of these types are very interested in the problem and how to solve it. Not many are interested in having 1,000,000 followers. In fact they are probably very much the opposite.
2. The Amplifiers - these are the people that are connected to tons of people and don't really say anything of importance but they share a bunch of stuff they find interesting to their mass of followers. They can massively explode a message out but this does not mean that they people that get the message will be driven to do anything about it.
3. The Influencers - Influencers gets tossed around a bunch but I'm not sure people really all mean the same thing. Influence can mean the amplifier but I want a term that means someone who is a Thought Leader + Amplifier. What is a better term for this? Anyone? These are the people that are driving the conversation and they know how to get the message out and they drive people to take action.

Social media can make anyone an amplifier. There are tons of people out there who know how to game the system to get tens of thousands of Twitter followers, which gives them a platform to blast their message as much as they want. From what I have observed social media is allowing people that would have not otherwise risen to the top of their fields to appear as though they have. And if the top means a bunch of people look at you as though you are the lord of the flies, then well, I guess you are. I believe that as the wild west of social media calms down, and more people embrace the daily use of these tools, the true thought leaders will rise to the top again.

I had a chance to talk with Brian Solis (@briansolis) at SXSW and picked up his new book, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web . I am trying to get a slide he presented where he talks about this subject and made a great point about how it is really important to know what is driving someone so that you can engage with them in the proper way. I could not agree more and is something that I am exploring better ways to identify and plan engagement around understanding how people fit into the ecosystem.

The more people I talk with this is a hot topic that many people care about. What do you think? Please leave a comment here to extend this conversation about what defines influence and has social media changed this?