influentials

Marketing is often confused with promotion, but it’s more than that. As Peter Drucker put it, “the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” In truth, marketing is about insights more than anything else.

The unicorn is perhaps unique among myths in that the creature doesn’t appear in the mythology of any culture. The ancient Greeks, for all of their centaurs, hydras and medusas, never had any stories of unicorns, they simply believed that some existed somewhere.

"Influentials" is a funny word that makes me think of someone sick with influenza, with a runny nose and a feverish delirium. That aside, Merriam-Webster offers an amusing definition of influence as "an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans."

by: Guy Kawasaki

by: Matt Rhodes

by: David Jennings

There's an interesting article in Sunday's New York Times about how we arrive at collective judgements of cultural products.

by: Matt Rhodes

Next week I’m speaking at the SocialMediaInfluence conference in London on Measuring Influence and Audience online. It’s a tricky subject and looking around today I have been unable to find any examples of an approach which has been successfully and repeatedly applied.

by: Mark Rogers

Julian Smith of Jupiter Research highlights the increasing influence of blogs in a piece for the BBC website in the context of the WeMedia forum. He mentions Market Sentinel’s Dell case study as an example of evidence showing that bloggers can be influential.

by: Mark Rogers

Duncan Watts is a Yahoo researcher who has done detailed work looking at the best strategy to launch a viral campaign - the kind of campaign which is aimed at getting the consumer to pass the idea along. Watts compares campaigns which targeted viral communications via “influentials” in the social network with campaigns which simply seeded the viral in the maximum number of places in the network. Watts found that the latter was a more effective way of launching a campaign.