The ability to effectively filter information is a new ‘literacy’ that our society requires in order to sort the valuable information online from the crap.  This Crap Detection was one of the opening gambits provided by Howard Rheingold during today’s The Future of Influence Summit 2009.

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.

Tags: #foi09, Advertising, dawson, Influence, marketing, PR, social, solis, summit