Where do we find the influencers?

Finding the right influencers, or "leaders", is one of the most essential things for any organisation that wants to approach social media. It is important to always aim for the viral effect to optimize the potential of social media, and by finding the right influencers your message can ramify in all directions and deliver a qualitative message to both present and potential audiences/clients/buyers.

At Forrester I found a classification of how people use social media:

Creators: People who add social content: in blogs, on websites, upload photos and music etc.
Critics: People who comment on other people's content. This group participates in discussions in forums, post ratings of other people's content, comment on blog posts etc.
Collectors: People who organize content by themselves and others by using RSS feeds, tags, voting systems etc.
Joiners, People who maintain a social profile at social network sites like facebook and myspace.
Sectators, People who take part of the content publish by others: blogs, pictures, music. They read comments and voting.
Inactive, don't do anything of the activities described above.

Influencers can be found in the three top groups. They produce content, they comment on other people's content and organizes and spread content from themselves and others. The people we want to target in our communication are however present in all the groups of this spectrum!

So, who are the influencers in your local area? 

Deveny as an influencer

This morning it was announced that the Australian newspaper The Age has sacked a columnist, the comedian Catherine Deveny, because of her Tweets during the Logies awards (Australian TV awards). I don't know this comedian; I don't read her column and don't follow her on Twitter; so I am definitely not in the position of judging anybody here. The tweets were quite tasteless, but judging by the nature of the tweets, it can't possibly be the first provocative words by Deveny. In fact, she must quite certainly have been chosen to write columns in The Age because of her humor (appreciated or not).

Another reason to believe that The Age wanted to be connected to Deveny is that she was named one of the 100 most influential people in Melbourne by The Age Melbourne Magazine in 2007. So they have decided to use Deveny to reach out to people that they are interested in. They bought in on Deveny as an influencer. For business reasons, of course. So, when the "business deal" turns out to their disadvantage Deveny stands alone.