Social real-world engagement

Bit of a continuation from my earlier post on Marketing Obsolescence. It continually bothers me that so much emphasis is being placed on engagement via social media technology, to the exclusion of debate and discussion on engagement in the real world.

Now, there’s no doubt that social media (such as this blog) provide a means to engage to a wide audience, and for some it has made all the difference (Seth, Hugh, James Governor, etc). I like to think that the successful bloggers would have been successful consultants or journalists or artists or whatever. In other words, social media happens to the media of choice for talented people. (It’s also the media of choice for untalented people, which is why the majority of blogs are lousy…)

Successful bloggers are successful because they say intelligent, insightful or sensible things. Their ability to communicate effectively is the core competence. The medium is blogging, but it needn’t be.

I guess I get concerned when social media gets colonised by those seeking shortcuts to a mass audience. Seth blogged on this very subject recently. It’s the very lack of friction that makes email and twitter so usable, and so quick to be colonised by spammers.

Forrester raves about the growth in social media marketing, yet I think marketers are missing a trick by not focusing on social real world engagement in parallel. Often the attraction is scale – you can certainly contact many more people by email than you can talk to face-to-face. But ask any sales person if they’d rather sell by email or by looking in their prospect’s eye, and there’s no competition. Face-to-face contact will always win.

Similarly, professional advisers are most effective (ie most influential) when they deliver their advice face-to-face. Importantly, this means actually looking into the eyes of the adviser, not just seeing their face on stage or a projected screen.

I’m absolutely in favour of social media, as this blog, our email newsletter and the new LinkedIn group testifies. But let’s not let the pendulum swing too far away from real world engagement.

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.

Measuring the influence of social media users

You may have detected from this blog that I’m less than convinced by the hype over Web 2.o and it’s impact on influence. Certainly, from our research work for clients, blogs rarely feature as a key influencer.

Part of my problem is that the degree of influence is asserted, measured by the number of links or some other dubious metric. So I’m intrigued by an emerging method of determining the influence of blogs and other social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn. Hat tip to James Governor who linked to David Brain’s sixtysecondview blog. David runs Edelman PR in the UK, but otherwise seems a good chap…

David’s idea is to measure not only the links that one gets on a blog, but also the links on LinkedIn, friends in FaceBook, Twitter friends, Flickr photo uploads, Diggs and other social media activities. The concept is premised on the trend for people to have more than one social tool in use. Sheesh – I can barely keep up with blogging.

I can’t help thinking that for all its diligence in tracking the various media it’s still measuring links, and links don’t necessarily imply influence. My beef with the links=influence assertion is that it’s easy to fake links, and that links are only a measure of one dimension of influence – connectedness. There are other dimensions, such as expertise, that are much harder to measure. And what about the value of particular connections? Connections are not equal – I know who matters more to me in my LinkedIn network.

But David’s composite score does help because it evens out some of the biases that would be present in just one social tool. By measuring half a dozen or so, an average score emerges.

What I find worrying is that in order to demonstrate and exert influence through social media one has to use multiple formats. I could spend all my time doing just that, but I have a proper job as well. Those that have time to keep up with the social media demands of influence run the risk of ignoring the other dimensions of influence. Plus the most important risk of all, which is forgetting who, why and how they are trying to influence in the first place.

Today’s state-of-the-art influence modus operanda is one-to-one communication, by meeting people face-to-face, telephone conversations and email. In that order. Social media is a distant fourth at the moment.

A long tail of authority?

James at Redmonk posts on Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s point is, in a nutshell, that user-generated content is inferior to that of professionals. So we take risks by using social media sources as reference points – Wikipedia and its (allegedly) dodgy content is the oft-cited example.

James contrasts Keen’s theory with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and suggests that a “long tail of authority” will emerge as the credibility of professional authorities diminishes.

Hmmm. A “long tail of authority” sounds like an oxymoron to me. We use third parties to replace experience we ourselves don’t have. For trivial needs (which toothpaste to buy) we defer to just about anyone (spouse, sales assistant, person also browsing for toothpaste, etc). But for more important decisions we tend to use more verifiable sources. It’s not just authority that’s important – accountability is also vital is such decisions. Which is why we pay professionals, and why professional need indemnity cover.

By definition (I think), authority in any market is concentrated in the “short head.” It’s a scarce resource. Social media helps to distribute authority but doesn’t help create it.

As always, the truth is in the middle somewhere. There’s no doubt that social media has enabled some new authorities to emerge (James is a good example, top rated analyst blog). But there’s also a huge amount of dross being generated. Telling the two apart can be difficult for the uninitiated.

(As an aside, the analyst industry is professional nowadays but wasn’t always so. In my early years at Ovum (mid 90s) we often referred to ourselves as enthusiastic amateurs writing on subjects we (at first) knew little about. Specialisation and professionalism have changed this – I wonder if we’re heading towards full circle…)

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.