I lucked out. I was almost stuck (if that’s the right verb) in Europe under its cloud of Icelandic ash. But thanks to the help of many strangers and much good fortune and speed, I made it out on one of the last flights from Germany before all its airports were shut down.
I was at the re:publica conference this week giving a talk on publicness and privacy (and penises … more on that when the video is available) and was scheduled to leave Friday morning, before it ended.
Last night, friends Micah Sifry, Heather Gold, and I had dinner with some new (to me) friends, including one who couldn’t get back to her home in Oslo, which was already ashed-in. Hearing that, I thought it would be clever of me to get to the Berlin airport early this morning to catch an earlier flight than my scheduled 10:50a to Frankfurt so I’d be safer making my connection to Newark. Lufthansa said nothing about delays to my flights, listing only a handful of the thousands eventually canceled across Europe on its web site.
Not for the first time, I was an ignorant fool. Berlin’s airport had been shut the night before and when I arrived before 7a, the line at the ticket counter was long — but friendly. We fellow travelers shared strategies and information—one young lady helping a family call busses and ferries, a Berliner giving us tips and news.
I’m a neurotic wreck at moments such as this. I tie myself up in knots that become all too evident as I start getting heart palpitations and worry that this could lead to all-out arrhythmia. But someone joking in Twitter told me think zen. Silly as it was meant to be, it helped. I just kept reminding myself all day that there wasn’t anything I could do (except get the hell out of Berlin with its still-tiny, preunification-sized airport).
My guardian angel in line was a guy named Daniel, a local fixer for a Bollywood film crew who’d been scouting locations in Berlin and needed to get back to India. As he helped them find every imaginable option, he also told me that a friend of his had just rented a car to go to Munich to get to a meeting. He called her and, bless them, she and her friend agreed to take me in.
I was at the front of the ticket line. I debated whether to drive or train to Munich (in the south, farther away from the cloud) or Frankfurt (where there would be many more flights to New York when the cloud lifted). The Lufthansa agent made my decision by finding me a seat (or so I thought) on a 3:20p flight from Munich. It was now 8:30a. I jumped in the car.
On the way, I went through three iPhone charges using it nonstop as our navigation system (since you’ll ask, I didn’t have a German SIM for my Nexus One) and compulsively tweeting to find information mixed with misinformation and to make smart-assed remarks: I thought myself quite clever making a gag in German, paraphrasing the word for asshole — Arschloch — into the news-appropriate “Ashloch” for a one-word tweet, only to be met with literal-minded Germans correcting my spelling and thinking me both ignorant and rude. ASH, you get it? I tweeted. Ashes, I grumbled.
Along the way, I had a Burger King cheeseburger for breakfast, for that’s what fate offered. I refused to do the calculation from kilometers per hours to miles per hour as I saw the driver of our car, a student friend of Daniel’s friend, tickle 220. Zen. Zoom. Zen.
At a cigarette break (theirs, not mine, though I was tempted), they told me they were actually going to a city 80 kilometers north of Munich for a meeting. So I now had to figure out how to get to the airport with what looked, according to my Google Maps’ calculations, to be very little time. But Google Maps doesn’t calculate the weight of the foot of a German driver. So we made it to Ingolstadt in what anywhere else in the world would be illegally good time.
My departing friends called a taxi for me at a gas station. Even though Ingolstadt is Audi’s HQ, the car that arrived was a rattletrap Mercedes and we got stuck in construction in a single lane behind a literal-minded German who didn’t go a KM over the posted 60. Zen. Breath. Zen.
But on the way into the airport, I saw a plane landing and had hope. For a mere 120 euros, we got to the airport an hour ahead of departure — neurotic me refers at least two hours, for no good reason — and I sauntered — no, dashed — to the check-in machine only to be told that I’m stand-by. Damn. Damn. Damn. All this way and I’m on stand-by?
As I said, I’m a neurotic SOB. One of my many neuroses is getting aisle seats since I’m as spindly as Ichabod Crane (Twitter readers who see me in person are surprised to see that I’m tall because, after all, everybody looks short in Twitter; I’m 6′4″). Normally, as soon as I make a reservation, I get a seat assignment both so I won’t get stuck by window and so I won’t be stuck on stand-by. But on this trip, I stupidly if subconsciously thought I’d jinx myself if I checked in from the road. Idiot, I silently shouted to myself as I dashed to the gate through extreme if usual security.
At the gate, another stranger become not a stranger when the guy next to me asked whether I was Jeff Jarvis. He watches This Week in Google (and forces his wife to listen to every Leo Laporte podcast in the car). They’d been diverted from New Delhi to Munich instead of Frankfurt and they also were on stand-by. They thought good thoughts. I thought evil thoughts, wishing people couldn’t make it to Munich from ports north.
All day I consoled myself that if I were stuck in Munich, I could continue my tour of German saunas (more on schwitzing my way across Europe later). But I also got nervous that I could be stuck there for a long time and would have to do such things as get prescriptions for the medications that would prevent the arrhythmia that my nervous, neuroses, and palpitations could bring on (my wife seemed shock that I didn’t have a week’s extra supply; she would). Another Twitter wag told me that the last time this Icelandic volcano erupted, it lasted from 1811 to 1812. “Buy a house,” he advised. Zen, damnit, Zen.
But I made it onto the flight. I refused to tweet that I’d been successful. A guy in line in Berlin said that the night before, his plane was next to take off to Paris when the airport was shut. This story wouldn’t be over until the skinny guy took off. I was still superstitious.
We backed away from the gate. But then we sat there. Then we returned to the gate. Shit. My zen was failing me. So far yet so near yet so far.
Turned out they had an unidentified bag in the hold and once they retrieved it, we were off. Take off. I never thought I’d want to hear a pilot say, as ours did in two languages, “Better late than never.”
En route, I watched the nerdy map of our little plane (well, actually quite big, relatively) crossing Europe and the Atlantic, this time taking a wide southern swing. I felt relief passing Iceland. As I write this, we are approaching good ol’ Canada and if you read this, you’ll know I made it, thanks to the kindness of strangers and Twitter zen.
I think it’s possible today to run a news organization — up to the point of publishing — from the cloud, changing not only the production process of news but also its culture. John Paton, CEO of Journal Register, is about to prove it with his Ben Franklin Project.
John and I were sitting in my CUNY office as he told me about the technology he’s saddled with at this orphaned newspaper company where he just took the helm. He used a term I swear I hadn’t heard in well more than a decade: “VDT.” That stand for “video display terminal,” the old, dumb box that was wired into newspaper mainframes. I was talking with a bunch of young journalists shortly afterwards and they’d never heard of VDTs (though they thought it could be cured with a shot). Well, Paton still has VDTs.
And so, as he was talking about having to buy new computers, I took to the whiteboard and drew out how I think a news(paper) can be produced from WordPress, Google Docs, and Flickr (or their equivalents). We’ll get to the other functions shortly.
This up-in-the-air production is made possible by Paton’s edict at JRC (as he dictated at ImpreMedia before) that digital comes first, print last. If print comes first, newspaper people will worry about H&J (hyphenation & justification — that is, fitting text to finite holes in print designs). That dictated their process.
But not JRC. By putting print at the end of the line, production for paper won’t dictate the rest of the line. So now a reporter can start blogging at the beginning of a story. And that makes a profound shift in the culture of news: it opens up the process to the public. “Here’s what I think I’ll work on,” the reporter says to the community she covers. “Good idea? Is there something else you think I should do instead? What’s the best use of my time? What do you want me to find out for you? If I do this story, what questions do you have? What do you know? Whom should I call?” As the process continues, the reporter can share what she learns — and doesn’t learn — and the community can help fill in blanks and make the reporting better.
At some point in this process, the reporter likely will write what we’d still recognize as an article. Indeed, writing it before publication opens the possibility of the community still helping by correcting and enhancing.
Then a print editor can grab the story and fit it for print. No longer a big deal.
At the same time, the reporter and editor can ask the community for photos to illustrate the story. They can be shared via Flickr. When it’s time to print, an editor can copy the high-resolution version of an image. If the photographer chooses, he can make the photo available under Creative Commons. If the paper chooses to (as Bild does in Germany), it can pay. That’s up to them. The taking of photos can become competitive: a reader says “I can beat that.”
There are still bureaucratic details that must be handled: schedules of stories, who’s working on what, and so on. Google Docs is perfect for that. My CUNY colleague Jeremy Caplan showed our faculty how much more Docs can do: enabling reporters to, for example, graph data and create their own illustrations. Docs can be used to publish documents to the web.
From these three streams, content can come to a print editor — who is now, remember, at the end of the line — to fill the paper (which my friend and fellow JRC advisor Jay Rosen points out, is the most expensive space). The readers can even help the editor decide what deserves ink.
Note the profound cultural shift this new process brings to a news organization. Rather than doing everything we do and then sharing it with the public — and allowing them to comment on (or snark at) our work — we become transparent, we view news as a process instead of a product, and we open up our process to constructive collaboration with the community we serve. Hallelujah.
The rest of the process of publishing a newspaper is more complicated — at least to me, as I don’t know the tools. I’m not sure all that can be done with free tools but I’ll bet it can all be done in the cloud. At a Salesforce.com event last week, I talked with an exec who said that his service can be used to handle ad order entry. Other systems can handle business tracking, payroll, H&R, and such. I don’t think JRC needs to be dogmatic about living in the cloud but I do think it can avoid huge expense of buying and integrating new systems and hardware.
All this is why I’m delighting in advising JRC and Paton. They are going to try to do the things I’ve been wanting to see news(papers) do — I’ve been writing about this since at least 2005 — the things that tradition and fear prevented other papers from doing. They’re not alone. AnnArbor.com (which I also advised) is entirely on Movable Type. Online news organizations, of course, operate on blogs. But here’s the chance to jump a newspaper company from the past — from the age of VDTs and discs — to the future. I can’t wait to watch and help.
So I reboxed the iPad so I can return it to Apple. As I say in the video, it’s not out of dogmatism but because I simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500 on something I’m not going to use. As I also said on This Week in Google tonight, if killer apps come out, I could end up buying it again and I’ll say so eating any necessary crow. But for now, it’s going back…
In the discussion about the iPad, much has been made of its nature as a content consumption — versus creation — device. I lament its limitations as a tool of creation. Howard Owens, speaking for many, tells me that most people don’t want to create content.
But what’s content?
We in media have a bad habit of viewing the world in our image. We think the internet is a medium (I say instead it’s a place; this Cisco post says it is a language). We in media also think we get to define what content is: It’s what we make.
But Google, for one, doesn’t define content that way. It sees content everywhere, in everyone’s words and actions and it gains signals, knowledge, and value from that. We in media are blind to that value because we can’t see the content in that.
When we email a link to a friend, that act creates content. When we comment on content, we create content. When we mention a movie in Twitter — that’s just useless chatter, right? — our tweets add up to valuable content: a predictor of movie box office that’s 97.3% accurate. When we take a picture and load it up to Flickr — 4 billion times — that’s content. When we say something about those photos — tagging them or captioning them or saying where they were taken — that’s content. When we do these things on Facebook, which can see our social graph, that creates a meta layer that adds more value to our content. On Foursquare, our actions become content (the fact that this bar is more popular than that bar is information worth having). When we file a health complaint about a restaurant, that’s content. Our movements on highways, tracked through our cellphones, creates content: traffic reports. Our search queries are content (that awareness — that new ability to listen to the public’s questions — led Demand Media to a big business).
Do we all make content? Absolutely.
So when I complain about the iPad hampering our ability to create content, I mean that it makes it harder to share links and thoughts and images when I wish it had made it easier. And the apps media companies are making also make it hard to share our views and link into or out of their closed worlds. When they do that, they are shutting themselves off from the content people create every day and the value it holds.
There is content everywhere. You just have to be able to see it. And respect it.
I’ve amended my proposed Bill of Rights in Cyberspace thanks to a suggestion in the comments from Jeff Sonderman: All data are created equal. I made that all bits are created equal, which broadens it somewhat and is quite relevant today in the discussion of net neutrality that will explode because of an Appeals Court decision in Washington that told the FCC it did not have jurisdiction to tell Comcast to stop discriminating on bits.
Here’s the rub: On the one hand, I do not want government regulation of the internet. On the other hand, I do not want monopoly discrimination against bits on the internet. I see it as a principle that all bits are, indeed, created equal. But how is this enforced when internet service is provided by monopolies? Regulation. But I don’t want regulation. But… That is the vicious cycle of the net neutrality debate.
At a Union Square Ventures event a few years ago, Tom Evslin said that regulation is a temporary necessity until the marketplace and technology open up internet access to competition. In a competitive environment, we won’t tolerate the ISP that hampers our service. Now, we’re stuck.
The other path to fixing this is legislation. But, of course, that is another form of regulation of the internet: a claim of sovereignty by government over the net that I want to avoid.
All this, I believe, is all the more reason to have a set of principles and standards we, the internet nation, can point to, all the more reason to have a Bill of Rights for Cyberspace. Here is mine, amended:
I. We have a right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak.
III. We have the right to assemble.
IV. We have the right to act.
V. We have the right to control our data.
VI. We have the right to control our identity.
VII. What is public is a public good.
VIII. All bits are created equal.
IX. The internet shall be operated openly.
: MORE: Dan Gillmor on the decision. The Hill blog has more details.
At the end of this video from this year’s Davos (at 2:30), Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposes the need to create an academic discipline — cutting across technology, psychology, anthropology, and other fields — to study and understand the web:
Now Rensellaer Polytechnic announces that it is creating the first undergraduate degree in web science. (I found out about through an email to my son, who was accepted there and is now deciding among the University of Rochester, NYU, George Washington University, and Boston University, plus Case Western, Drexel, and Northwestern…. if any of you have any advice and experience, let me know). RPI says its students will “investigate issues on the Web related to security, trust, privacy, content value, and the development of the Web of the future.”
Sir Tim himself praised the RPI program in its press release. He has also helped start the Web Science Trust.
Of course, there are many good minds studying the web today, from danah boyd to Clay Shirky to Jay Rosen to Jonathan Zittrain. But I agree that it is time to pull together study and thinking and questions under a discipline that treats the web as the enormous social force it is. Says the Web Science site:
Nothing like the Web has ever happened in all of human history. The scale of its impact and the rate of its adoption are unparalleled. This is a great opportunity as well as an obligation. If we are to ensure the Web benefits the human race we must first do our best to understand it.
The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to understand what the Web is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.
I tweeted earlier that after having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I woke up with morning-after regrets. She’s sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid.
Cute line, appropriate for retweets. But as my hangover settles in, I realize that there’s something much more basic and profound that worries me about the iPad — and not just the iPad but the architecture upon which it is built. I see danger in moving from the web to apps.
The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.
That’s what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it’s meant for consumption, we’re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue’s review, that this is our grandma’s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I’ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny’s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.
The iPad’s architecture supports these limitations in a few ways:
First, in its hardware design, it does not include a camera — the easiest and in some ways most democratic means of creation (you don’t have to write well) — even though its smaller cousin, the iPhone, has one. Equally important, it does not include a simple (fucking) USB port, which means that I can’t bring in and take out content easily. If I want to edit a document in Apple’s Pages, I have to go through many hoops of moving and snycing and emailing or using Apple’s own services. Cloud? I see no cloud, just Apple’s blue skies. Why no USB? Well, I can only imagine that Apple doesn’t want us to think what Walt Mossberg did in his review — the polar opposite of Pogue’s — that this pad could replace its more expensive laptops. The iPad is purposely handicapped, but it doesn’t need to be. See the German WePad, which comes with USB port(s!), a camera, multitasking, and the more open Android operating system and marketplace.
Second, the iPad is built on apps. So are phones, Apple’s and others’. Apps can be wonderful things because they are built to a purpose. I’m not anti-app, let’s be clear. But I also want to stop and examine the impact of shifting from a page- and site-based internet to one built on apps. I’ve been arguing that we are, indeed, moving past a page-, site-, and search-based web to one also built on streams and flows, to a distributed web where you can’t expect people to come to you but you must go to them; you must get yourself into their streams. This shift to apps is a move in precisely the opposite direction. Apps are more closed, contained, controlling. That, again, is why media companies like them. But they don’t interoperate — they don’t play well — with other apps and with the web itself; they are hostile to links and search. What we do in apps is less open to the world. I just want to consider the consequences.
So I see the iPad as a Bizarro Trojan Horse. Instead of importing soldiers into the kingdom to break down its walls, in this horse, we, the people, are stuffed inside and wheeled into the old walls; the gate is shut and we’re welcomed back into the kingdom of controlling media that we left almost a generation ago.
There are alternatives. I now see the battle between Apple and Google Android in clearer focus. At Davos, Eric Schmidt said that phones (and he saw the iPad as just a big phone… which it is, just without the phone and a few other things) will be defined by their apps. The mobile (that is to say, constantly connected) war will be won on apps. Google is competing with openness, Apple with control; Google will have countless manufacturers and brands spreading its OS, Apple will have media and fanboys (including me) do the work for it.
But Google has a long way to go if it hopes to win this war. I’m using my Nexus One phone (which I also had morning-after doubts about) and generally liking it but I still find it awkward. Google has lost its way, its devotion to profound simplicity. Google Wave and Buzz are confusing and generally unusable messes; Android needed to be thought through more (I shouldn’t have to think about what a button does in this use case before using it); Google Docs could be more elegant; YouTube’s redesign is halfway to clean. Still, Google and Apple’s competition presents us with choices.
I find it interesting that though many commercial brands — from Amazon to Bank of America to Fandango — have written for both Apple and Android, many media brands — most notable The New York Times and my Guardian — have written only for Apple and they now are devoting much resource to recreating apps for the iPad. The audience on Android is bigger than the audience on iPad but the sexiness and control Apple offers is alluring. This, I think, is why Salon CEO Richard Gingras calls the iPad a fatal distraction for publishers. They are deluding themselves into thinking that the future lies in their past.
On This Week in Google last night, I went too far slathering over the iPad and some of its very neat apps (ABC’s is great; I watched the Modern Family about the iPad on the iPad and smugly loved being so meta). I am a toy boy at heart and didn’t stop to cast a critical eye, as TWiG’s iPadless Gina Trapani did. This morning on Twitter, I went too far the other way kvetching about the inconveniences of the iPad’s limitations (just a fucking USB, please!) in compensation. That’s the problem with Twitter, at least for my readers: it’s thinking out loud.
I’ll sleep with the iPad a few more nights. I might well rebox and return it; I don’t have $500 to throw away. But considering what I do for a living, I perhaps should hold onto it so I can understand its implications. And that’s the real point of this post: there are implications.
: MORE: Of course, I must link to Cory Doctorow’s eloquent examination of the infantilization of technology. I’m not quite as principled, I guess, as Cory is on the topic; I’m not telling people they should not buy the iPad; I don’t much like that verb in any context. But on the merits and demerits, we agree.
And Dave Winer: “Today it’s something to play with, not something to use. That’s the kind way to say it. The direct way: It’s a toy.”
: By the way, back in the day, about a decade ago, I worked with Intel (through my employer, Advance) on a web pad that was meant to be used to consume in the home (we knew then that the on-screen keyboard sucked; it was meant to be a couch satellite to the desk’s PC). Intel lost nerve and didn’t launch it. Besides, the technology was early (they built the wireless on Intel Anypoint, not wi-fi or even bluetooth). Here’s the pad in the flesh. I have it in my basement museum of dead technlogy, next to my CueCat.
: More, Monday: NPR’s related report and Jonathan Zittrain’s worries.
At the Brite conference, I talked about mobile coming to be synonymous with local. Here are a few paragraphs I wrote on the topic for an essay in a German book about the future of the net:
The biggest battlefield is local and mobile (I combine them because soon, local will mean simply wherever you are now). That’s why Google is in the phone business and the mapping business and why it is working hard to let us search by speaking or even by taking pictures so we don’t have to type while walking or driving.
The winner in local will be the one that knows more about what’s around me right now. Using my smartphone’s GPS and maps—or using Google Googles to simply take a picture of, say, a club on the corner—I can ask the web what it knows about that place. Are any of my friends there now? (Foursquare or Gowalla or soon Facebook and Twitter and Google Buzz could tell me.) Do my friends like the place? (Facebook and Yelp have the answer.) Show me pictures and video from inside (that’s just geo-tagged content from Flickr and YouTube). Show me government data on the place (any health violations or arrests? Everyblock has that). What band is playing there tonight? Let me hear them. Let me buy their music. What’s on the menu? What’s the most popular dish? Give me coupons and bargains. OK, now I’ll tell my friends (on Twitter and Facebook) that I’m there and they’ll follow. This scenario—more than a newspaper story—will define local.
To do all this, Google—or the next Google—needs two things: First, it needs more data; it needs us to annotate the world with information (if Google can’t find this data elsewhere on the web, it will create the means for us to generate it). Second, Google needs to know more about us—it needs more signals such as location, usage history, and social networks—so it can make its services more relevant to us.
We keep hunting the elusive influencer because marketing people, especially, but also politicians (marketers in bad suits) and media people (marketers in denial) think that if they can find and convince or brainwash that one influencer, he or she will spread their word like Jesus and their work will be done. But I think this quest is starting to look like a snipe hunt.
At this week’s very good Brite marketing conference at Columbia, Duncan Watts, Yahoo research scientist, presented interesting work trying to track down the influence of influencers via Twitter, with help from the data Bit.ly provides about links. He asked — hypothetically, thank God — whether it would be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a tweet to her alleged 3.27 million followers. He found that targeting instead lots of people who have far fewer followers would yield “much, much higher ROI.”
What that says to me — ironically — is that trying to find the big influencer with big audience is really just old mass marketing in a cheap dress. Old mass marketing (go with the largest numbers … and breasts) isn’t economical; neither, it turns out, is marketing to just one or a few powerful people — the mythical influencer. That brings us to a new hybrid to mass marketing, which is what I think Watts is suggesting: Target many people who at least have some friends who’ll hear them. (Disclosure: This was a key insight in the development of the company 33Across that made me invest in it.)
Or to put this question in the current argot: Is there more influence in the tail than in the head? If you talk to 100k people who talk to 10 people each, do you get more bang than talking to one person who has 1m followers? (Watts did also say that a combination of mass and tail marketing is effective.)
In his talk, Watts referenced me and Dell Hell as an illustration of influence. But I protested. I’m no influencer, I said. When I wrote about Dell, I had no juice in the tech/gadget world; still don’t. I then pointed to the amazing Dave Carroll, he of the “United Breaks Guitars” viral phenom, who’d spoken earlier, and said he was no influencer in airline travel or customer service. What was influential in both cases was not the messenger but the message.
But if it’s the message that is, indeed, the key to influence then there’s really no way to predict and thus measure and replicate its power; messages spread on merit. That is a frightening idea for marketers because the viral influencer in social media — pick your buzzword — is their messiah for the digital age, the key to escaping the cost and inefficiency of mass media (and the cost and apparent tedium of real relationships with us as individuals). If you can’t bottle influence, you can’t sell it.
Now it’s true, of course, that the most magnificent message ever won’t spread if no one hears it, if a person with zero followers on Twitter says it. (Tree, forrest, etc.) But a banal message in Miss Kardashian’s Twitter feed — I know, it’d never happen — will go thud and die no matter how many people she speaks to if no one cares about it. Some people need to gather around the speaker for what she says to be heard. But more people doesn’t equal more influence. And this doesn’t make that speaker an influencer. The speaker is merely a node in a network.
So the message spreads not because of who spoke it but because the message is worth spreading. What makes us spread it? First, again, we spread it if it resonates and it is relevance; it has value to us and we think it will have value to others. Second, trust or authority is a factor. If I see Clay Shirky or Jay Rosen or Kevin Marks tell me to click on a link I’m more likely to do so because I respect them and trust their judgment and I’ve found in the past that clicking on their links tends to be worth the effort. They give me ROC (return on click). But if I followed Miss Kardashian (I don’t) and she told me to click on a link, I’d be less likely to, both because I don’t put her in the same intellectual corral as my other friends and have no relationship with her and because I have seen that clicking on her links gives me lousy ROC. Is trust or authority or experience influence? In a small circle of actual friends, I don’t think so. And in any case, having only a small circle of friends isn’t the one-stop-shopping influence marketers are seeking.
So abandon the hunt, marketers. You’re not going to bag the influencer. She doesn’t exist (well, one did but she quit her TV show).
What does this mean then for marketers in social media? I think it means they need to reread The Cluetrain Manifesto (out in a 10th anniversary edition) and recognize that messages and influence aren’t the future of marketing; conversations and relationships are. No getting around it. No shortcuts.
Think about it: I don’t want someone to influence me. I don’t want to be influenced. The whole idea of looking for influencers is so old marketing: spewing messages to people who didn’t ask for them. So looking for influencers only perpetuates the mistakes of marketing past. Stop.
: MORE: Brite organizer David Rogers wrote about influencers and Watts earlier.
