hyperempowered

Influencials And The Power Of "The Link"

Scott Karp hits the nail on the head when he writes on his blog Publishing 2.0:

"In the networked web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g. newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web — the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, del.icio.us power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social network user with links to lots of friends."

He then goes on to say:

"Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online."

A lot has been written about "Influencers" and how important they may be in spreading information and endorsements, and ultimately, driving sales. At a time when  so much of our time is spent online, I think that Scott's analysis is the best so far. 

You can read his full post here.

Why Isn't Portfolio Magazine Generating Any Buzz?

My colleague Dominic Basulto on his Endless Innovation blog, points to a terrific post by Lois Kelly on her Foghound blog which attempts to answer the question:

"Why isn't Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine generating any buzz?"

Lois' analysis is terrific as she compares Portfolio side by side with it's main competition, Time Warner's Fortune.  What she finds as Portfolio's downfall when it comes to buzz is that the articles in Portfolio are too focused on anxiety and offer two few forward thinking trends.  Because of this, she proposes, there's no word-of-mouth.

She writes:

"While both publications run about the same number of personal stories and glitz and glam features, Portfolio, unlike Fortune, runs many articles that raise apprehension, fear, doubt and anxieties about different businesses or business trends. Consider the headlines on the Portfolio cover flap: 

“Did Chiquita Finance Murder: Inside the Company’s Death-Squad Crisis,” “Starwood’s Barry Sternlicht Exacts His Revenge,” Google: The Worst News Ever for Cell-Phone Carriers.”

“Anxiety” stories once had appeal, but have lost their juice because the media and politicians have over-played the anxiety angle. Elevated security levels, retirement crises, healthcare fraud….it’s too much negativity all the time about topics people can generally do little to change. So we tune out the anxiety stories."

"Another difference is that Fortune features five stories on “avalanches about to roll,” those big trends about to happen, compared to just two in Portfolio. These stories always appeal to business people because we like to be insiders about what’s coming next and be early in tracking big trends. Aside from having so few “avalanche” stories the Portfolio trend articles seem not so trendy —  one on the PC industry in China and the other on alternative fuels for cars."

I also liked Dominic's final thought in his post today when he writes:

"The blog post from Lois is fascinating on another level as well. It's an example of an author transforming a book from a "product" into a "tool"? By using her "buzz framework" for analyzing the content in PortfolioFortune, Lois Kelly is presenting readers with an example of how to use her thinking and insights as a tool for examining how "buzz-worthy" any trend or phenomenon might be." and

The Effects of Cumulative Advantage

There's a wonderful piece in today's New York Times Magazine in which Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, explains the effect that "“cumulative advantage" has in determining what becomes a "hit" and what doesn't in today's popular culture.   

What Watts explains is that those things that become breakout hits - say a Madonna CD or a blockbuster movie - isn't determined by our independent preferences of what we like and what we don't like, but rather, as Watt's explains it, "because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing."

He writes:

"...if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place."

It's a fascinating piece that I can't recommend highly enough. 

Here's the link.

The Problem With Measuring Buzz

... is that is just plain doesn't work.

Reading Rafat Ali's rant in today's PaidContent reminded me of that great quote by the British comedian Vic Reeves:

"96.2% of all statistics are made up."