Now the FTC investigates paid advocacy

I wrote last month on the perils of sponsoring conversations on blogs and Twitter. How prescient was I?! The FTC in the US is investigating the use of such tactics as potential deception. Good thing too.

There are two reasons not to engage in this kind of paid advocacy ploy:

1. The lack of authenticity in the advocacy undermines the very point of doing it. It’s only useful if it’s genuine (or if an interest is declared).
2. Users don’t want to receive it. Spam is spam, irrespective of whether it’s delivered by SMS, email, Twitter or blog comments.

The secret to advocacy is quite simple, as Hugh McLeod explains:

Marketing starts with the product, and the product starts with marketing. If your product sucks then no amount of marketing will fix it. If your product is remarkable then people will talk about it anyway. Marketing is only really necessary when your product is like everybody else’s.

Bloggers – a non-category

After following the influence of blogs and bloggers for over two years I’ve concluded that it’s meaningless to talk about blogger influence.

We’ve just completed a piece of research in a market where 80% of the top 50 influencers blog. But none of those bloggers, save one, blogged as their primary activity. There were developers, consultants, journalists, sales people, marketers, senior management, academics, regulators and government officials. So to say that bloggers are influential is an understatement, on the one hand, and meaningless, on the other. Blogging is just something that people do. They are no more correctly categorised as “bloggers” as “humans.”

But it does indicate the importance of blogging as a medium in that particular sector, a highly technology-orientated one. In other cases, I’ve measured communities of influencers in which there are precisely zero bloggers. That is, none of the influencers blog. There are probably blogs being written about the industry segment in question, but none of them are influential.

In the vast majority of cases, influencers that blog gain the majority of their influence from their other activities. At Influencer50, only in rare cases do we categorise influencers as bloggers, and this is only if they are influential primarily (or solely) because of their blog.

Interestingly, in these cases, bloggers’ influence is always supplemented by influential activity away from the blog – speeches, consulting, bylined articles, and so on.

As I said in the book, influencers blog, rather than bloggers influence.

The death of blogging?

There have been a couple of high profile discussions on the supposed death of blogging. The Economist* and Wired lead the debate.

I’ve followed these with interest, not because I favour one side of the argument over another, but because I think the discussion is a tad pointless. Why?

Firstly, from an influence viewpoint, blogging was never very ‘alive’ in the first place. The early bloggers themselves talked up the whole phenomenon, hyped up the degree of their own influence, and inflated the perceived popularity of blogs in general by referencing each other (thus distorting perception of uptake and influence). In fact, as influencers, bloggers are a rare crowd (in my B2B world at any rate).

Secondly, those that are claiming the death of blogging are the early adopters, and they are moving onto that post-blog phenomenon, Twitter. Twitter is blogging on speed, in both senses of the word. But Twitterers are, by and large, early adopters of any technology. They were early to blogging. Now that blogging is mature, passé say some, they’re colonising Twitter. I’m sure they’ll migrate onto something else in time too.** Meanwhile,the value of blogging is finally penetrating the mass market.

I sense a more balanced view of blogs emerging from the wild west situation of the last few years. There’s no doubt that blogging as a format for communicating views has become established as the de facto medium (just check out the BBC). The combination of personalised views written in normal-speak rather than ‘corporatese’ plus the distribution via RSS means that blogs are digestible insights into, well, whatever you’re interested in.

Blogging is not dead, but it has reached middle age. It comes to us all in the long run…

*Subscription required.

**The same is happening in MySpace: a musician friend of mind claims that “no self-respecting musician now has a MySpace page.” It’s just not cool.

How important are blogs? To me? To decision makers?

I’ve been busy. Really busy. Too busy to blog.

Is this true, though? How important is blogging to you? How important should it be to me?

The truth is, if you’re going to blog you should commit time and resource to it. I haven’t, lately. My bad (as they say). As luck would have it the projects we’ve been working on recently both had interesting perspectives on blogging.

The projects show that bloggers are now emerging as influencers in specific niche areas. A year ago it’s doubtful that any bloggers would have appeared on our top 50 list of influencers. Senior decision makers, in general, didn’t read blogs. This has changed, not in a big way, but blogs are now firmly on the list of decision maker reading. There are some infrastructure reasons for this. The adoption of RSS makes reading blogs easy nowadays, even for busy technology buyers. More likely, the adoption of blogging as a communications mechanism by already well-established influencers encourages adoption of the medium, which then prompts wider exploration of the blogosphere.

The main reason, we think, for growth in blogger influence is that the influential bloggers are getting out more. They attend conferences, they write articles in mainstream media, they consult and advise. In short, they engage in more ways than just on their blog. This, we think, is the primary reason why bloggers are increasingly influential.

What’s also interesting is that, in general, bloggers refer to other bloggers in a self-referencing cluster. This is why bloggers appear to be highly influential – they increase the number of links and references from blogs by increasing links and references to other blogs. For most, though, their influence is restricted to the blogosphere and few have escaped into influencing the real world, and real decision makers.

HP’s Lusher on AR and social media

Carter Lusher, AR head at HP and ex-Gartner analyst, posts on the use of social media by analyst firms (synopsis: not enough) and wonders on the impact of blogging on influence from analysts. Great issues.

The current position, as I see it, is that bloggers have relatively little influence on CIO-level execs and business folk. They do, however, have influence in the more techie arenas. Big generalisations, of course, but it seems to hold for most markets, and makes a reasonable starting hypothesis. Demographics are also an important feature of socila media’s reach (but this may be changing: if The Archers are podcasting, anyone can…). Country differences also exist (e.g. France is generally more blog-friendly…).

It’s important to recognise that bloggers are often influential because of their “day job” and just happen to blog nowadays. Richard Holway is a good example. Blogging is a means of access, and it allows previously inaccessible people to gain exposure. So you find DBAs and developers emerging as influential bloggers – their influence is expanded out to the web, beyond the confines of their employers.

In researching case studies for the book, I discovered that blogging and other social media need to be dedicated activities, with time and budget allocated. Otherwise it’s just dabbling, as Carter points out in IDC’s approach.

The key question is always, influential on whom? If analysts are trying to influence CIOs then there is no immediate need to blog, because CIOs generally don’t read them. James Governor is successful because he aims at the more techie audience, and is thus more influential on that audience.

The trick, then, is to monitor blog readership closely, and to respond when the sitation changes.

Review of H+K’s Influencing Technology Decision Makers research

There’s a really interesting video and white paper produced by Hill and Knowlton, the PR/AR firm. The title is Influencing Technology Decision Makers (sounds relevant!) and the work is based on a research project carried out on behalf of H+K.

On the whole it is a really thought-provoking piece of research. The interesting bits, for me, are (in italics, with my comments):

• Previous experience is the primary driver for decision making. I agree, and where a decision maker doesn’t have this experience they have to borrow it from another source – influencers.
• Decision makers are cynical towards sales collateral and marketing messages. Yep.
• There is increasing influence of blogs, even in the C-suite. I disagree – we’ve completed a round of research for a client which shows that, except in France, blogs have little influence at the C-level. Blogs do tend to influence more technical audiences, and where blogs are part of the cultural make-up of the market under investigation (i.e. predominately online markets).
• Gartner and Forrester are the leading analysts, and there is not much between them. Gartner has greater influence on the IT managers, while Forrester is more widely read in the boardroom. Interesting. This indicates that Forrester has caught up with Gartner, and has more credibility with senior decision makers. We certainly see these two far and away the biggest influential analysts.
• Events are not that influential. I think this referred to analyst events, but I find it’s true in general. Gartner Symposium is the only analyst event that occurs in our research on a regular basis.
• The Financial Times is the most influential non-IT publication. The Wall Street Journal leads in the US but trails the FT in other countries. In the UK, the Sunday Times, Telegraph and The Economist ran highest. No real surprises here, except perhaps for the poor showing of the Journal outside the US.
• Print media is more widely read than online media. I agree, though the boundaries are often being blurred. As far as I know, the study didn’t track whether a respondent that read the FT did so in print or online format.
• Analysts are important throughout the decision making process. Absolutely. In the book we’ve mapped various influencer types to the decision making process, and analysts play more roles than any other type. It’s important to understand, though, that although analyst firms play various roles, it’s not the same analysts that play all roles.
• Use the media and analysts to influence decision makers, not to please your CEO on tour. Hoorah! If vendors take a decision maker focus, rather than creating noise to satisfy their own internal ends, then they might not annoy their customers and prospects so much. It is refreshing to hear this from a PR/AR firm.

The big criticism: where are the other influencers? This study only looks at the media, analysts and blogs. What about consultants, resellers, peers, user groups, academics, procurement experts, gurus and thought leaders, or the vendors themselves? I’d love to see the research run next year with this broader remit.

(A few words on the methodology. The research involved 420 interviews, across the UK, US Canada and China, and were conducted using a mix of online, face-to-face and telephone interviews. Interviews were also split by C-Suite and IT managers, and by large enterprises and SMEs. The sample looks a bit thin, when spread across all of these splits. But good food for thought.)

Improving the influence of your blog…?

You may have detected from previous posts here, here and here that I’m doubtful of the influence of blogs. There are influential blogs, for sure, but finding them amongst the mountain of drivel is hard. And blog links are a crude and inaccurate mechanism for determining influence.

So I’m intrigued to see the emergence of a comment rating utility, SezWho. Basically, it’s the same facility that allows readers to score the usefulness of a review on Amazon. “Was this review helpful to you, Yes or No?” In the same way, blog readers will be able to rae comments – “Was this comment helpful to you, Yes or No?” In that way, readers will be able to see who posts the most valuable comments.

I also think that commenters will think twice about what they say before commenting, thus improving the overall standard of comments. And thus the usefulness, and therefore the influence, of the blog should increase (all other things being equal).

Is this blog influential to AR professionals?

I’m intrigued to find this blog mentioned on ARmageddon, the Analyst Relations blog, in the context of Forrester’s research into the blogs that AR pros read. Apparently (though I can’t trace the source email) Forrester sent a list of blogs to its AR program subscribers asking which one they read. Tacked on at the end of the list is my humble offering.

I’m intrigued because I wouldn’t position Infuse as an AR blog, though I do have some strong views on the analyst industry (having been an analyst for 12 years). This is a blog on Influencer Marketing (and I trust this isn’t news to you).

Have I been included by mistake? Or by misunderstanding? Or by the interest from AR in Influencer Relations? I don’t know.

Perhaps Forrester will let me know when they complete their research. Ta.

Blogging for bigwigs?

The Economist runs a story (subscription required) on the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, featuring the promotion of blogging for CEOs. The conference theme is “The Shifting Power Equation” – a reference in part to the rise of social media as an influential means of communication.

Should CEOs blog? Seth Godin, a marketing hero of mine, thinks not. Quoted in the article, he says,

“Blogs work when they are based on the values of candour, urgency, timeliness, pithiness and controversy. Does this sound like a CEO to you?”

Few CEOs blog, and those that do seem to do so sporadically. I guess they’re busy running the company.

It begs the question, who in a firm should maintain a corporate blog?

Open Source Analysts – taking on the big boys

I’m really interested in the emergence of a concept called open source analysis. Essentially, it’s an approach that links smaller industry analyst firms in collaboration – the analogy is with the open source software movement that allows programmers from all points to collaborate by contributing their programming expertise.

It’s unclear whether collaboration refers to research and opinion or to commercial relationships, or both (or neither?!). Interested parties have established a wiki project to sort out the detail.

I’m watching developments with interest because of the potential impact on the big influential analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester. It’s long been my contention that influence is a factor of the individual and the firm. In other words, some analysts are influential primarily because they work at a big firm, and some are influential because of their individual knowledge and expertise despite working for a small firm (or for themselves). But the most influential analysts both work for a big firm and are true experts individually. This is true in all but a few exceptions.

The open source movement aims to change this dynamic. There is the obvious commercial impact, that of individual analysts combining to deliver collectively a major project beyond the resource capability of each on their own. Freelance contractors have done this for decades.

The other potential impact is to collaborate on research, the intellectual property of analysts itself. The key challenge here is quality control. Collating input from a variety of different sources requires some oversight on quality, lest the overall value of the opinion and advice be diminished. Blogs already suffer from this dilution of credibility, and if open source analysis is to differentiate itself from “mere” blogs it must sort this out.

Unless, of course, blogs undermine the business case for analysts altogether…?

There’s no doubt that there are some smart analysts outside the major analyst firms – the Neils at MWD (former colleagues of mine), James Governor and so on. I’d like to see them increase their profile and influence because they have much value to add to the industry.

If open source analysis enables this then I’m all for it.