My firm – Burson-Marsteller – sponsored the Summit, which took place today in Sydney and San Francisco. The event is produced by The Insight Exchange and was chaired by Ross Dawson.

The Summit covered a wide range of topics relating to the somewhat nebulous concept of Influence.  It’s really hard to summarise the findings or conclusions from the event so I thought I would summarise my most interesting statements and perspectives.

The speaker list including Brian Solis, Richard Bell, Tim Burrowes and Duncan Riley:

• There is a whole industry dedicated to ‘gaming Google’
• We may trust people in one sphere but its hard to transfer that sense of reliability if them from one field to another
• New tools are emerging that allow us to accurately measure Influence
• A currency of influence is/ will emerge
• Dell and Starbucks are two companies that have successfully listened to the feedback provided by their community and implemented it (i.e. made a change). One example of this in the context of Starbucks is the Raspberry Muffin, which was dropped but then brought back as a result of feedback provided by customers
• Advertising and marketing industries are moving from audience measurement (readership, circulation) to influence measurement
• We live in a confetti economy – high fragmentation of media and proliferation and distribution of source of information
• Burson-Marsteller research with PR Week: 78% of American consumers say that advertising does not provide enough information for them to make a purchase. Approx. 60% of American consumer say that the media does not provide enough information…
• Brian Solis categorised the social media community as an ‘ego-system’
• Lessons are learnt in failure. Google refers to this as ‘failing wisely’
• The Dell @DellOutlet Twitter concept succeeded partly as a result of very cheap products
• The number of active Twitter uses is staggeringly low
• Intel: Marketing industries should stop referring to ‘target audiences’ and start thinking about them as people
• CBS: Economics dictate a high degree of consolidation in online media. Today’s tier one bloggers will become the trust agents of the future. We are in the adolescence of the new media industry. Power will return to marketers, as a result
• 80% of online news content is consumer online via Fairfax properties in Australia. New media lacks credibility in this market.
• Joe Talcott: The message is the message. Technology is the focus for communications today but technology will gradually retreat into the background and content will assume its rightful position as the most important aspect of communication
• 80% of communication is non-verbal and 90% of conversations about brands still takes place offline

Lots of interesting thoughts and conversations here. No firm answers for a definition of influence or for a criteria or standard for measuring it.

There’s no doubt that this area of digital marketing will grow into the future, with organisations launching methods for measuring influence. I think there is a risk in using the degree to which people are inter-connected as a measure of influence.  There is also a danger in placing higher value on quant. measures of influence such as delicious tags because it assumes that the community that either has access to that content or access to the Web is somehow representative of the total, when this is not necesarily the case.

At the end of the day its very easy to ‘game the system’ and today’s Summit is yet more evidence that big business will invest heavily to excert influence online – at the cost of authenticity, trust and truthfulness in some cases. I believe that we place too much faith in the Web at our peril.

Trust in institutions has eroded; we need to protect and foster the trust that we have in each other.

The prediction markets are going to be really interesting. More on this a little later…  

MEDIA RELEASE:

A crystal ball for the media industry: Future of Media Summit connects insights between Silicon Valley and Australia   

Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School defines Enterprise 2.0 as:

The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

These social software platforms would include: wikis, blogs, social networks, prediction markets, RSS, links, search and tags.

Dawson opened the event with a presentation on business value creation as it relates to Enterprise 2.0. Dawson presented recommendations for Enterprise 2.0:

• Make governance an enabler
• Start from business applications, not tools
• Make work easier
• Build strategies at the architecture level
• Allow experimentation
• Create pilots that yield useful lessons

The last two points here have come through as strong themes from all of the presenters as has the need to ‘ask for forgiveness rather than asking for permission’.

The over-riding message is that Enterprise 2.0 platforms need to be allowed to develop and emerge organically within an organisation. Managers should resist the tempatation to apply structure and to act as administrators, style guides and editors.

McAfee referred to email as the incumbent collaboration technology and pointed to research that shows that users tend to under-estimate the potential of new collaboration technologies and over-estimate the benefits of platforms that they are already acquainted with.

There has been some talk about demographics and the experience that difference groups have had with technology – Boomer, Gen X and Y.

Email may have lost relevance among the Gen Y group, who are more familiar with social networks, but the consensus is that email is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

My question: Will MicroHoo (should it happen) result in the resurgence of email based on the convergence of email and social networks. I, for one, would like to access my Yahoo! email account via Facebook (that’s not going to happen but the convergence of social networks and email must be on the agenda for this potential merger/acquisition). Web based email services remain relevant as people’s email addresses often function as the user name login for many third party sites.

The most entertaining presenter – thus far – has been Nathan Wallace, associate director – Technology at Janssen-Cilag, one of J&J’s subsidiaries. The company has 340 employees and a great wiki story to tell, which is now the channel for all internal news (saving approx. 250,000 internal emails). The take up has been very impressive and the company just added a Twitter like application for its staff, many of which are in the field.

The event has been a great advert for Confluence, it has been the sole wiki provider referenced by the presenters.

The power of predictive markets has also been a dominant theme – more on this later.