When I first started thinking about the technology that became BuzzLogic, social media was just beginning its rise. Yet, even then, people were arguing about whether blogs were relevant, if conversational media was worth paying any attention to, which mystified me, because humans have been recording conversations since the dawn of time. Conversations are how we learn. The discussions between Socrates, Crito and other Greeks still shape our thinking today. The stories in Gilgamesh and told by Homer are records if people planning and acting together--social exchanges are history, so we should always pay attention.
Social media dramatically expands the challenge of determining what matters. With so many conversations recorded, which matter? For the marketer, this is a question of context, not of absolute values and eternal principles. Many names have been proposed for this phenomenon. Wirearchy, emergence and "wisdom of the crowd" have all been applied to it, but we think "influence economy" is the most apt name, because it wraps in the notion that leadership is valuable. Influencers are the leaders in this market, it is more democratic than any previous market because, today, leaders can come from virtually anywhere, not just the editorial departments of a few media companies.
What ideas are you interested in? The evolution of those ideas matter to you, whether it is a discussion of your brand, a political topic or a hobby you care about. I'm certain that if you are interested in the public perception of genomics that you may be interested in the the blogs of researchers studying the canine genome but that you won't want to know about my daughter's blog musings about the cuteness of Corgi dogs. Want to know what 11-year-old girls like in dogs, you may want to tune into my daughter. Wondering about the breeding of the Corgi? Now you may want to see how the preferences of 11-year-old girls are shaping the goals of canine geneticists.
Mass media metrics were a Newtonian approach to understanding the vast forces that shape opinion and sentiment, relying on the notion of reach to account for the most powerful mechanism of influence. The larger the audience, the more influential the
source--a reasonable way to account for influence when publications and programs are created for millions of people at a time. In those days, huge forces were required to move markets. A feature story in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal were the nuclear weapons a marketer craved--working to win coverage and get messages into those influential venues was fairly simple, because they involved massive forces.
Those massive forces still exist, but social media is made up of quantum forces affecting individual perception that must be understood and managed to some degree to create the market-shaking disruptions and preserve brands in the face of swarm logic.
Social media is individuals communicating, ideas bouncing off other ideas and passing through people, sometimes changing in the process and at other times simply becoming more powerful because they find repetition in another venue. The science of influence becomes immensely more complex, and far more maleable than ever before if marketers can gather the data and manage their participation in conversational networks to gain the maximum return.
There are several ways to analyze the influence of one person's ideas on another's future thinking and actions. The most important are the public acts people perform on the Web, making links to articles and postings that support or contest their opinion, adding new language and linking information in novel ways to create new and different conclusions. Comments on blogs and media sites, social tagging and bookmarks that increase the likelihood a particular message will propigate, are all important but infinitely smaller acts than a Times feature story that shape sentiment in the social media. All these forms of communication reshape the messages that once dominated mass media, making every interaction with brand, product and company personal.
BuzzLogic has focused on influence in its first release, what the Oxford English Dictionary describes as "the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something." The real work of the information age is shaping perception of others, whether for the good or bad, based on the truth or lies. Influence leads to action and it can be measured by examining all those public actions--linking, commenting, tagging and bookmarking--that happen in social media.
As I wrote on ZD Net in May 2006, we believe influence is the productive feature of the networked economy. Influence is where the greatest value is being created and is essential that marketers be able to measure and respond to or participate with influencers if they want to master the art of conversational marketing. Another focus of effort today is in the area of attention, what people look at on the Web, and we believe there is some valuable work being done on attention that we will ultimately be able to integrate into our analysis. However, it is the way we share information, referring one another to ideas and opinions through linking, comments and other social media behavior that BuzzLogic believes is the keystone to beginning to understand and enter into an economy of influence where value is created and rewarded in much smaller units that collectively transform entire markets.
There will be a lot more to talk about now that BuzzLogic is going public. Let me close this first posting with a few links that provide the background on the technology and its evolution since we launched the company in early 2004:
Blogs by volume doesn't point to change, but blogs by influence does; May 2005Influence: Seeing through the ends to the conversations; July 2005
The Era of Paramedia; blog posting and podcast, October 2005
Comments (1)
Now Mitch isn't this what one might call a nice turn on a dime and gives you nine cents change? Not that a dime of difference is very perceptible nowadays, if it ever was. Still you were the writer who wrote "Let's look beyond personal feelings to democratic principles." To continue your quote "To be completely fair, I didn't say "put a blogger on the bus." I said "The bloggers and the vloggers who are using personal media and social media to live their lives at least partly on the record are setting a completely different agenda for conversation in the United States and I'd like to urge you as a candidate to do the same." Then you go on to a discussion of the seats that Sen. Edwards is providing on his bus, I suppose carried to adnausium we would be talking about the (and still might) the interior design of the seats no doubt. .. Which when we are talking the design of eye candy in its presentation and impact upon thoughts is very important to the extent that it opens people mind to reason when presented attractively. But I see you've changed from what you once might have called the "Let's look beyond personal feelings to democratic principles." To what I think more accurately is described now as "looking beyond the democratic principles" to the "Demographic principles" of the social media which is not evolving at a slow Darwinian pace but rather apparently creating itself in spectacular fashion at the molecular level at the speed of the speed of light, what has been described, one time or another, in a quantum Field of Complexity Theory... The Chaos of Intelligent design. Congratulations for your splendid insight, no doubt next time we meet maybe a meeting of the minds at the Republican National Convention:) Or you might simply stop in to pick up your "Buzz Button" Doctor Buzzard's Tasteless Tonic and Medicine Show!
Posted by Lucky7Star | September 20, 2006 9:14 AM
Posted on September 20, 2006 09:14