I would say at MS, it was less about response mgmt to positive or negative and more about just plain outreach with some bias towards influencers but not to the exclusion of general users. Like most things, it depended on the team, the state of the product cycle and other factors - but the motivation was more about engage than about response.

sean

What’s your experience Sean?

Did Microsoft use sentiment analysis in finding customers and responding?

That said, I incline to share Duncan’s belief that the role of “influentials” is overstated in many ways. First of all, as he points out, the studies are all after the fact — which means that the history being studied is typically filtered through the lenses of the “influentials” who were part of it, reporting on it, and around it at the time; unsurprisingly, this tends to overstate their impact. Also, the people writing the books see themselves as “influentials”, and need to get jacket blurbs and positive reviews from other “influentials”; so there’s a natural tendency to focus on how incredibly important they are. And there’s a huge selection bias: people get identified as influentials based on volume of communications, which tends to favor certain communication styles (and in particular, biases towards men and against women). And so on …

Which is not to deny the importance of influentials; I just think it’s overstated in many situations.

In terms of terminology, first of all I completely agree on the problems with the word ‘evangelist’. In much of the world, this is associated with colonialism: assisting corrupt governments, forced conversion, and major deaths of native populations. Heck, this is true even in parts of the U.S. (there’s a statue of Junipero Serra with his arm pointing out at a rest stop on 280 in Silicon Valley, and the joke is that he’s pointing and saying “look, there’s one getting away!”) but it’s an even bigger deal elsewhere in the world.] Particularly for US-based companies, when the rest of the world is sensitive to our countries sometimes-imperialist-appearing attitudes, this really sends the wrong message. Also, the connotations of evangelists include “talking more than listening; is this really the message a large corporation wants to send?

As for the other terms, I think it’s useful to talk about different roles (expert, hub, connector, catalyst) and having shared vocabularly like Gladwell’s is valuable even if it isn’t cleanly defined. However labeling people with roles is almost always misleading: most people can play multiple roles at different time, and often do so simultaneously.

Great discussion, thanks for kicking it off!

jon

What’s interesting to me, at least today, is serendipity and the objection to descriptions. There’s a thread right now on how “evangelist” is a word with bad connotations. Yesterday my set books for my next university correspondence course on systems theory arrived; it included a copy of Linked (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi). In the introduction he takes an example from the Bible, that of Saul/Paul. Regardless of whether you believe it’s true or not it’s interesting; a man with a previous belief to stamp out the new sect of Christianity upon conversion he used his knowledge of social networks (in the non-”e” meaning) to spread the word; walking 10,000 miles over the rest of his life, targeting large groups and then letting them spread the word to smaller groups. At that time Christianity wasn’t really spreading, the groups were silent due to oppression and fear; so was it Paul and his influence and working of groups that spread the message, or was it the originator, Jesus that did it? You can argue it was Paul, and that’s an interesting lesson, that manufacturers don’t have as much influence as they think they have (and their marketing teams think they deserve, but the ego of marketing people is best left for another day) and that people who are independent and can argue both for and against are those who should be courted, not those who just spout the corporate line.

(Oh and it annoys me immensely to take some lesson from the bible *grin*)

sean

However the problem is not that of the 10%, but of the assumption that floats around them. Part of the reaction I get to the MVP programme is “So you’re doing a job for Microsoft, but not getting paid for it?”. As soon as the 10% is highlighted in some way you have two dangers; 1) their standing as independent in the community is affected (although anyone who has seen me speak knows I’m very vocal about my area’s shortcomings) and 2) the way they are treated by the “products” they are enthusiastic about changes (and I’m sure you’ve heard the complaint from MVPs that certain product teams expect them to act as mouthpieces, at least until they’re beaten with a large clue stick).

So the obvious marketing question becomes “If 5% of those 10% are 50% praise, 50% critical …. who do we back?” As soon as measurement of effectiveness starts coming into the mix (and business realities of course dictate that it must) there’s a big danger that advocates that may be viewed as independent/maverick from a business perspective, but who will have a greater community standing get ignored; in same way those who simply feed back to a product team with their in the field experiences don’t get enough recognition. I think your point those who feedback is more semantic, it’s down to the assumption that the only valuable influencers are those who influence potential customers, which is a big mistake. Influencing a product team, or a marketing team or anyone else internally to produce a better end product is obviously valuable and should be nurtured.