Thanks for writing!

Amanda

The major changes that drives all this are:

1) communities. before social media, brands where talking to “everyone “, whether it be thru TV, press or radio. Now expectations is that brands come up with messages that are relevant for the communties they are delivered to.

2) the end of “everyone”. because if every brand talks to everyone, this is just information overload and spam.

3) the demand that brand stop talking unless they have a very relevant thing to say.

At the end of the day, this is very useful when communties you’re in filter out the relevant messages from the others.

In an ideal world, brand should stop talking and nurture their ecosystems (made up by communities and influencers) with valuable responses to people …so that people find them and trust them.

Where I agree with you is that “top influencers” is not the right way to go.

As an example, We’ve worked for a major Cosmetic firm and we’ve identified and map hundred’s of relevant “influencers”, grouped in a few communities:
- people discussing luxuory products in skin care
- people discussing bio ingredients in skin care; these people don’t like brands at all
- people discussing medical issues and risk in skin care (aging, cancer…)

There are relevant people and you find influencers in these communities that are important to talk to. These people are not R Scoble or G Kawasaki with a few hundreds of follower in twitter but they are influencers for this specifc purpose.

So it all depends on how you define influencers I guess.

Best