Blogs as Truth-Telling Networks

A friend of mine was down in San Diego last week for four intensive days with about 40 other folks. Just 40 measly people - so who cares about reaching that market? Well I know for a fact that many computer and software vendors would have killed to be a fly on the wall at this meeting.

Why? This was an ensemblage of the largest Internet properties in the world and the veeps and directors of operations that are responsible for keeping those sites up and humming 24/7. (And they buy a lot of stuff for those massive data centers in the process.) When they don't meet face-to-face they keep in touch online. It's a knowledge sharing network that transcends competition and its roots go back to the earliest days of the mega-sites when no one singly had the know-how to go it alone. It's organized by the IT operations folks for IT operations folks.

Frank Barneko, CBS Marketwatch, scratches his head in his column "Blogs: Much Ado About Nothing" and wonders how can blogs matter if so few people are reading them. Basically he is using television metrics to assess the impact of networked media. Absolutely, positively dead wrong. Forget the Neilsens. Forget mass market. Think truth-telling networks. Think influentials. Think opinion-leaders.

Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer (manifesto here), recently lauded by WSJ, advocates managers develop their own "truth-telling networks."

...Employess, operating out of self-interest, often shade the truth when they pass information upward. So, to play hardball, you must develop your own truth-telling network, or you will never be sure what the heart-of-the-matter issues really are. Truth-telling networks are very personal and largely informal, and may include colleagues, customers, advisors, friends and family members.

In case this isn't obvious, let me assure you people believe that companies selling a product or service also operate out of their own self-interest and thus shade the truth as well. We've all developed our own truth-telling networks. Blogs and other customer-generated media online are a highly efficient format for the creation of global truth-telling networks especially among opinion-leaders. And corporations and organizations would be insane to ignore them.

I've been in the IT buyer's seat before. While I do get information from the trade press, I take it all with a grain of salt. I know that the press is fed vendor's stories (and I've been on the vendor's side of table more often). As a buyer, I seek out unbiased information from peers. And at a focus group for CTOs lead by O'Reilly at their Emerging Technology Conference in 2003 that was the consensus opinion as well.

These truth-telling networks aren't anything new - but they're amplified and made more efficient by networked media.

Valdis Krebs (I'd love him to start blogging!) speaking at the KM Cluster on Enterprise Social Network Analysis (next one is on Dec 3), told us that many pharmaceutical companies now only market to the opinion-leaders rather than try to reach all doctors within a specific field. They found doctors don't really make decisions on published data either - even if it comes from the FDA. Doctors check in with a few select opinion leaders in their field whom are apt to have tried out a new drug and then share their first-hand experience and recommendations.

Valdis also pointed us to research by John P. Kotter that shows that the higher up the organizational chart you go within an organization, the less executives made decisions based on data and they more they made them based on feedback from their network. They'll just ask Verna who knows that area what she thinks and then reality-check it outside the corporate social network - perhaps with other CEOs and advisors. It turns out that 80 percent of executive's work is conversation.

Should you be doing some mapping of your target market's opinion leaders, don't ask: Are you an expert or an opinion leader? Ask instead: Who do you go to for X? Or, whose opinion do you seek for Y? (And note that sometimes these aren't the experts but they're go-to-people. Turns out these aren't necessarily the smartest people, but ones that are most willing to help others be smarter.) In social network analysis, this is called a prestige mapping. Unlike a lot of social network analysis, you only need to survey about 15% of the population to get a good sense of the key opinion leaders.

Paying attention to blogs at a minimum lets you be a fly on the wall on some pretty important conversations happening among opinion leaders' truth-telling networks. If you're savvy, you listen, learn and participate in the conversations.

If you're still trying to understand this influence/opinion-leader aspect of blogs and participatory networked media, here are a few recommended books: Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Chris Locke, Rick Levine, David Weinberger, Doc Searles, Anatomy of Buzz, by Emanuel Rosen, Unleashing the Ideavirus, by Seth Godin, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, The Influentials, by Ed Keller, Six Degrees, by Duncan Watts, Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Nexus by Mark Buchanan.

Comments

[Yvonne DiVita]

This should be required reading for every business today. It's incredible how little respect blogs get... except from other bloggers...and yet, as you note, Evelyn, decisions are most often made by using feedback from influentials. Bloggers know who influences what, and they aren't afraid to blog about it. Good stuff.

[Jory Des Jardins]

It's true: most people don't blog, let alone HAVE a blog. But 10 years ago most people didn't email. Someone had to get the party started. I almost wince at the thought of everyone having a blog. It seems, at least for now, that they truly are the medium of the media. Even if only .0011 percent of people online went to Wonkette, as Frank Barneko says in his article, the word gets out; the right people spread it.

[abdiwali]

iam requesting to tell me the influence of opinion leadership