The Basement

Intro to The Influentials

I've been reading the book The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. This book is based on 30+ years of market research and presents the concept of The American Influential. The basic idea is that there are a simple set of survey questions that serve as a litmus test for identifying Influentials – a group of about 10% of the American population. These Influentials act as stunningly accurate bellwethers for all kinds of stuff like technology adoption and value trends. It's very interesting and compelling stuff.

Bloggers and Influentials

While the idea of some people being “influential” is not terribly unique – this is what Seth Godin calls sneezers and Malcolm Gladwell subdivides into connectors, mavens and salesmen – Berry and Keller go beyond simply musing about the idea. They prove that these Influentials are quantifiable and identifiable, and demonstrate how.

As I read Berry and Keller's description of the Influential, I can't help but notice the similarities to bloggers (or at least the ones that I read – primarily professionally focused and/or motivated who provide editorial insights in addition to links, etc.) In fact, by virtue of blogging, bloggers exhibit several influential characteristics like being connected with many people, being technologically literate, having active minds, trendsetting, and belief in growth and change. There are other characteristics that I also see in the bloggers that I read. For example, Influentials are focused on family. In the last week we've heard stories from Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra (followed up here), Jeff Jarvis and Robert Scoble (mp3 podcast with his son Patrick) that illustrate their family focus.

I constantly have to remind myself that this book was written in 2002 – before blogs had any significant public awareness or momentum – it is not about bloggers and doesn't even mention the word “blog” (or “web log”) - yet, without every using the word, it screams BLOGGERS.

I was particularly struck by this quote...

Getting through to the Influentials is not easy. They're hard to reach. They are among the most critical citizens and consumers in the society. They hold business to higher standards, are harder to persuade, see through hype more easily, and drive a harder bargain than the average American.

Hmmm. This easily could've been written by someone at Dell about Jeff Jarvis. Sure it's easy to email Jeff Jarvis and he will probably even respond, but try to change his mind. Can you imagine this conversation, “Hi Mr. Jarvis, this is Dell and we're listening now...” Dell would just be setting themselves up for another 3 or 4 weeks of ridiculing posts.

Certainly Jeff's not the only critical one. Steve Rubel has started to spot Vigilante Marketing blogs. Speaking of Steve Rubel, he's jointed Mr. Jarvis and switched from Microsoft to an Apple and has mentioned it prominently, if politely, on his blog. Each of these guys have thousands of people reading their posts everyday. This brings comfort to Geoffrey Moore's early majority and speeds chasm crossing. This, in part, is what makes them Influentials.

Then there is this gem...

Knowing what [Influentials are] talking about and where they influence opinions in the society doesn't mean an advertising copywriter will be able to speak persuasively. In fact, without a broader understanding of Influentials, such as their expectations of business, the copywriter will likely have a very difficult time.

This is important. Bloggers, at least those that are indeed Influentials, are difficult to reach through advertising! This is why I think RSS Ad Sense, cookies in RSS feeds and similar nonsense is, well, nonsense. Blogs are a customer driven conversation. If a blogger allows commercial interest to unnaturally interfere she loses credibility. If companies think blogs are important, then they should respect the bloggers and listen, optionally engage intelligently and individually – but they shouldn't try to persuade through advertising, as the old joke goes, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Okay, Some Bloggers Might Be Influentials, So What?

In my experimentation with BlogPulse, and my recent discussion of the base, I've begun imagining a new blog trending tool (or the evolution of an existing one, hint, hint), one designed to listen to bloggers that are also Influentials, or what I'm going to start calling Blog Influentials.

So what would a Blog Influential trend tool like? It would have to have a way to set the base to be known Influentials within the area of interest – instead of a doomed to fail attempt at the whole blogosphere.

Let's outline a hypothetical example.

A report published early last year by the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet of the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, together with RoperASW (employer of Berry and Keller) and Nielsen//NetRatings titled Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign concludes that “Online Political Citizens Are Influentials.” Knowing this, a political campaign might use blog trend data from blogs identified as “Online Political Citizens” aka Blog Influentials to glean insights and spot trends earlier.

Do blogs contain this type of political trend data? Can it be mined from blogs? Natalie Glance over at Intelliseek and Lada Adamic of HP Labs wrote a paper titled The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog that make a strong case indicating yes – on both counts. This report was looking retrospectively at the presidential campaign to validate the idea – but there is no reason the same techniques couldn't be used to look forward.

So imaging a blog aggregator sucking feeds from say 1,000 political blogs written by folks identified as “likely Blog Influentials”. Now, we trend – no spam, no new blogs added (unless prequalified). Voila, instant-up-to-the-minute Influential insights focused on our topic of interest.

Market Research of the Future

The interesting thing here is that the IPDI at George Washington U conducted 1,392 online surveys and 1,029 RDD sampled national telephone surveys to confirm their findings. This is expensive market research as is only a snapshot of the respondents views. Comparitively speaking, blog aggregation can be very inexpensive – especially if companies like BlogPule and IceRocket continue to improve their trending tools and/or provide access to low cost aggregated data sets. Perhaps more importantly, monitoring Blog Influentials can provide continuous data.

In the future market researchers may call Intelliseek, Technoratti, IceRocket or BlogLines to buy six months worth of political Blog Influential posts, or Female 18-25 Blog Influential posts, or Blog Influentials who have mentioned iPods at least once in the last six months, etc. in much the same way they buy targeted sample lists today. Another product might be just the list of feed addresses (in OPML or some such) for a particular demographic. The researcher could then create their own aggregator, indexes, searchers and trend data. This would eliminate the bias introduced by indexing techniques selected by the blog data vendor – like the removal of English noise words.

Conclusions

It's worth noting that this is example where the size of the whole blogosphere doesn't matter. All that matters is whether there are enough Blog Influentials within our topic of interest. Without looking, I know that we have enough for politics, technology, teens, business, blogging and marketing. According to the MIT Weblog Survey, female bloggers outnumber their male counterparts 7 to 4 so maybe blogs are a good source of female Influentials.

So to summarize:

(good) bloggers = Influentials

To stay ahead of the curve:

1. Find your Blog Influentials.

2. Listen.

3. Repeat step 2.

So how exactly do we identify Blog Influentials, well, that's another post. And to those of you who still think that no one reads blogs I have two points: 1) You're reading this and it's a blog and 2) even people that have never heard of blogs read blogs.