Information Week and Alice LaPlante had an interesting article that surveys current thinking on identifying influencers in certain communities and then "targeting" them for communications. It's worth a read as it does distinguish betwen traditional marketing communications and the effort necessary to build relationships. They also challenge the notion that one can identify influencers by profile or even by purchase behavior. Here's a quote:
"For starters, rather than trying to identify opinion leaders, an increasingly popular method of penetrating an online community to seed an effective word-of-mouth campaign is to ask people who are interested in spreading the word to step up and identify themselves, said Leonard M. Lodish, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the school's MBA course on entrepreneurial marketing. For example, he said, there's the time-tested strategy of offering incentives to people who can refer other people to your product or service. The Internet tends to accelerate as well as exaggerate the effects of this, he said.
At one startup Lodish is familiar with, three people self-identified themselves as interested in the brand by referring 1,500 customers apiece to the company. "I wouldn't necessarily call them opinion leaders, but ordinary people who got interested in the product and decided on a personal basis to spread the word," he said.
"Most trends are started, not by one influential, but by a critical mass of easily influenced people, each of whom is exposed to an idea or product by a single member of their community," said Watt, who calls the people who trigger these cascades "accidental influentials." "
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