The Challenge

The influencers’ paradoxes

Published by Esteban Glas on December 4th, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Blogs, Web 2.0, philosophical rant

People in the ranks of alltop, so-called “gurus” such as Scoble or Jeremiah are what we consider as “influencers” in the under-under-under world of web-oh-two(too)-cool. This guys have crept out of the background noise of the bloggosphere and twitterati and made themselves more prominent than the Nerdy Average Joe that lurks the very same services this influencers use.

With raging ranks of followers and some fans that would make Tommy Lee jealous (I’ve seen commenters praise and sustain some of the most outrageous and, dare I say, dumb remarks) the influencers get an amplification power similar to the one achieved by Spinal Tap’s “mine go to eleven” boxes.

The effect of this is quite simple: more people listen (and reply) to this guys than they do to the other “participants in the conversation”. Some call that higher reach.

The outcome is a paradox.

Remember the days of mass media? Remember all the Social-web-2.0-power-to-the-masses fuzz? The premise was that everyone could be a Journalist, everyone could have a voice.

Certainly everyone can have a voice. But not everyone’s voice can be heard. Since there is so much content out there there is no way everyone can get an audience. I’ll agree that there is content out there that is of little or no appeal to most of the audience, but there is quite a deal of excellent and original writing that goes unnoticed.

The issue becomes that the same means that was (allegedly?) allowing a revolution in communications is now fostering individuals and groups of people that resemble more and more traditional media. The only difference is that they never had their content in print to begin with.

All the top-ranked blogs out there have heavy editorial lines. On the other end of things many newspapers and magazines are relying heavily on blogs and have opened comments on their usual content. The difference between those is becoming harder to tell. There are hints that tell them apart, such as very segmented content (most blogs deal with one general theme, whereas newspapers cover tons of different topics), very visible faces / personalities behind blogs and a general lean on the side of bloggers to share opinions more explicitly.

The way Marketing bucks have to deal with this popular blogs is resembling more and more that of traditional media. Or maybe worst. But that’s ok.

Now, to round up the paradox idea -if you haven’t understood what the main paradox is so far: bloggers resemble journalists and vice versa, even when they both shout out loud that they are quite different- yet another issue pops up when bloggers monetize their content, and while doing so their so-called transparency is put to the trial. I’m affraid many have succumbed to journalism’s worst sin: selling of. Of course this is not the case with all bloggers.

The other fairly visible tendency I see in some of this influencers is that they are tending to rely on repeating themselves and using the same couple of formulas over and over again. One of the overly-used ones is deceiving the readership into believing they are participants when, all truth be said, they are being leached.

There is a fine line between calling for interaction and dialogue and abusing those who follow you to get content and ideas.

It might be just that I am a cynic. Very cynic.

Edit: David, makes some similar remarks over his blog as well.

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