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Future of Media Summit Blog
Influence Networks
While there is a huge volume of user created content out there, it is the influence networks that continue to be the key. There may be tens of millions of blogs, but some are of huge importance and some are not on the radar at all...
So I was interested to see that Get Up have a competition running at the moment for user created 30 second political ads. You can browse the entries here. The big take away for me is that these ads are by and large not going to go viral. They are not going to influence.
Why? Because regardless of people's passion, they have to be able to express themselves using the medium in such a way as to leverage the influence networks. Lackluster scripting, flat voice overs, bad audio..... etc etc - they mean that the message gets lost.
So lets be careful when we get all glassy eyed about the raw numbers of people who are part of social networks to understand that it is the influence networks that are going to continue to hold sway. And they are going to be run by people with professional skills and an ability to succinctly communicate
So the challenge is how do we find out what the “influence network” is? Who are the influencers? Perhaps one becomes an influencer through the sheer attraction of a professional communications approach? I would argue that it is the readers who determine who the influencers are, and I would suggest that sometimes influencers might overcome a lack of eloquence with the power of what they have to say (there are probably some good examples in political life).
So my interest is in visualising the influence networks so that we can analyse them. My interest in social/organisational network analysis (SNA/ONA) is its capability to analyse large networks to identify who the key influencers are. SNA has been applied to tracking of diseases like AIDS and SARS, so why not advertising? An example of ONA applied to media ownership in Australia is provided in the Future of media report. I hope the power of the technique in identifying key players from large networks of individual actors is evident. Imagine what a map of the world’s blogs or wikipedia’s network of editors would look like? If the data was accessible, imagine the influence networks that an ONA could expose would look like, and who the major influencers are…