Social Media Top 5: RIP Influencers

After a week of the sniffles and moving the blog over to hosted WordPress, the Social Media Top 5 is back, for my amusement, and perhaps yours. This week, i had a little help from my friends:

1) Well, a man named Duncan Watts has exposed the myth of influencers, and taken out Malcolm Gladwell’s until-now well-regarded book “The Tipping Point,” thanks to this hard-hitting piece in Fast Company. There is nothing to do now but expose people who, yes, really have no influence. At all. Even though they think they do:

• Parents of teenage children (especially the fathers)
• Major League Baseball managers
• Network News anchors
• The PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center)
• The RIAA (how’s that anti-piracy thing going?)
• High school guidance counselors
• Older siblings
• Toll Booth operators
• Stephen Colbert

(some of these answers courtesy of my friends on Twitter)

2) But I, for one, still believe in influencers. It’s just they aren’t necessarily the people you think they are. Here are the real influencers:

• Teenage children (especially the girls)
• Parents of grown children (why don’t you call?)
• Crossing guards (do NOT mess with them, and if one told me to buy a certain brand of anything, I would do it)
• Your dog or cat
• Younger siblings
• People in front of you at the toll booth
• Stephen Colbert

3) So, last thought on the subject. Should Duncan Watts influence me to think that influencers don’t influence me? If he does, then I have to admit there are influencers in obvious places. If he doesn;t influence me to think that way, then maybe he’s right, in which case he did influence me to admit there are no influencers… does your head hurt yet?

4) MTV has discovered how to get younger voters involved in the political process: have them report live from mobile phones to the Web on Super Tuesday (Feb. 5) in the latest “Choose or Lose” campaign. $50 says that more than half the young men and women filing the reports don’t bother to vote.

5) Is DEMO influential anymore? We’ll find out, as the much-buzzed-about Seesmic presents at the prestigious show, while competitor (?) Utterz responds by simply adding more functions and integrating itself with your other social networks and blogs. Myself, I have been using Utterz more and more. Here is an example of how Utterz can save the world:

.Technorati Tags: election, influuencers, tipping+point, Malcolm+Gladwell, Duncan+Watts, Fastcompany, DEMO, seesmic, utterz, Choose+or+Lose