F*ck Influencers (or Influencing Conversations)

I've recently been asked to work on an Influencer strategy.

I have to admit that I had a bit of a negative initial reaction to the task.  So much of what I read online about "influencers" seems to assume that people live to spread messages.  While there is some "status" truth to being the source or the first to report something, this rings naive and hollow as a prime motivator to me.  My personal sense of my own motivations is not that I desire to spread messages, but rather that I want to be part of a larger conversation or participate in something meaningful.

My first thought on how to approach this task was to expand influencers beyond a select group of "key" people.

In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure.  So to focus on just "A listers" or big names is to severely limit the potential for what can be achieved.    That's not to say I don't want "A listers" (if they even exist) to join in the conversation, rather it says that I always prefer to not put all my eggs in one basket.

My next step was to redefine influencers from people to nodes of influence. 

A node can be a major platform or property such as Twitter, Facebook or MTV.  A node can also be a community of interest that has gathered around a topic.  I spent some time defining all the different areas of influence (around the topic at hand) and then narrowing down into the nodes that make up each ecosystem or circle of influence.  These grew into some rather intricate maps that opened up all kinds of new opportunities I had not considered when I first approached this task, and it shifted quickly from finding a handful of influencers to looking at how to reach hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Next I pulled back to revisit the purpose of any influencer strategy, which I am currently defining as "to encourage conversations around the brand that are shared by individuals across their networks of influence."

Key stress is placed on individuals and the fact that each has unique networks but with lots of duplication between these networks. 

All of this thinking led me to some key questions.

Why do people share links or retweet on platforms like Twitter?
What types of things do people share and for what benefit?
How does how people see their networks affect their decisions on what to share?

I don't have any solid answers yet but I was brought to some wonderful resources by some great people within my network.  I look forward to other thoughts on this matter.

Dana Boyd's Analysis of ReTweeting activity on Twitter (h/t to Karen Quinn Fung via Twitter)

Segmenting and Targeting Users by Their Level of Interaction

Behavior First, Design Second (attention, to collect, status and vanity)

Image Source: FAS.research