Just who does influence you.....

Two interesting pieces on influence in the last few days. Firstly, at the Web Expo 2.0 in Berlin, Nate Elliot of Jupiter did an interesting session on who really influences you in his talk The Future of Influence, from whence comes this matrix wot I made:



In essence, his argument is that we trust people like us a lot, and our friends most, especially when they respond to our Requests for Information. No real surprises there, its the current mantra (what his real angle was about is what marketers can do, which was focus on the "personal, unsolicited box" - illuminating in a sort of Beacon privacy worrying way). However, Nate's main talk was on New vs Classic influentials - the "Gladwellian Tipping Pointers" being the Classics, the "Wired Generation" being the New. Got a Blog, on Twitter, comment on forums? You are a New influencer.

But I must say I was a bit surprised that the Mantra was still being used, as in my experience I (and sundry oddball others) do tend to trust friends for some things, but not big things that we don't think they know a lot about. In that respect I do like the "Solicited, Broadcast" model - or even the "Unsolicited" model if it has people with expertise doing reviews - or just sheer numbers like on Amazon. That I am not alone has been brought out by an interesting piece of research by....Jupiter Research. I saw it on C:Net via Profy:

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"-- recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

Are these contradictory - at first I thought so, but then realised they were just starting to be very specific in niche categories. Bloggers who I read I begin to trust over time - and I interact with them, so they move slowly into the "Personal, Solicited" space. They get there by dint of the huge amount of information they give out about the person - after reading a blog a while, you know whether the writer/s are pimps or genuine, and you can see context up the wazoo. This is why they have a Right to Brand as New Influencers.

As to Social Nets, well there again "it depends". I think we do trust our friends and the People Like Us on a Social Net if we solicit the information we think they are competent to give us (restaurants, cameras etc). (question - is trust higher in an early adoption phase of a network - say Twitter - as we think more people are Like Us?).

But also, clearly, the Punters are ahead of the Marketers here in the big picture - Nate is saying the Marketers best play is to go "Personal, Unsolicited" - ie into SocNet land (think Beacon) - but the users have already sussed this and don't quite trust it so much anymore - even if you do dress it up as seeming to come "solicited" from their activity feeds.

Or maybe because of that.....

Last word to Svetlana Gladkova at Profy:

As a blogger I can’t help but be happy about such a rosy picture of the future with reliable bloggers working with the best advertisers to drive readers into making the right buying decisions.