We have been thinking a bit more about the concept of “efluencers,” our term for “online influencers.” My colleague Jason shares his ideas here (and my ideas on how this is reflective of CIC’s culture is here).

Let me build on Jason’s ideas….

One of the visuals that we present to clients which can make a strong impression is the “80/20” rule of community content creators such as the one below taken from our upcoming mobile phone white paper. The paper, which covers Q1 2007 conversations, will be released this week.

In this case, it’s not exactly 80/20, but more 70/20. That is, 20% of the 731,403 posters writing posts about or coming from forums related to mobile phones account for 70% of the 4,997,258 posts. We have found this rule exists, with slight variation, in almost every category we work in including cosmetics, automobile and pharmaceutical.

For marketers interested in understanding online social networks, especially for the purposes of the current fad of “viral marketing,” this information can be very interesting. Even more interesting is to distinguish posters according to what they are talking about (i.e. brand mentions within messages) and dig deeper on how and to what extent they connect with others (i.e. how many individuals reply to their messages, how many replies each message receives on average). Below is one example from our mobile phone white paper of how you can dig deeper in terms of connections to others.

We recognize that defining, and even more, identifying “influence” is complex, but for the sake of discussion, let’s refer to all of this as influence. From a marketers perspective, these are the community leaders, the influentials, the “nodes,” who, if you connect with them, or reward them, will help spread your message. They are the whole basis of the Tipping Point. Right?

Well…maybe.

We have found in our experience in China (as others have found as well here ) that passion about content creation or about particular topics does NOT necessarily equate to influence. This misconception is an easy trap to fall into, and one of the biggest reasons is this: seeing BBS and blog messages as only being a media (i.e. consumer media). Most certainly these messages are media, which are published for all to see and which therefore influence others. However, these “influencers” are not journalists with an obligation or duty to “report” or “spread” anything. At the core, they are consumers expressing ideas and opinions and experiences about brands, products and services.

It is this “core” that makes them even more important than simply being the conduit to a successful campaign or to spread your “good word of mouth.” More than just influencers, they are the leading voices of communities of passion built around concepts and categories like cosmetics, automobiles, mobile phones and every imaginable category up and down the long tail. To listen to these voices is to listen the voices of consumers. To analyze these voices in a systematic way, i.e. through text mining, is market research.

You may have noticed that we coined the term Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM). CIC is an Internet Word of Mouth research and consulting firm. We define IWOM as:

Consumer discussions and multi-media content related to brands, products or services on such online channels as BBS (online message boards), blogs and video sites.

We chose IWOM, not social media and not consumer generated media (CGM) because we think this “talk” on BBS and blogs is consumer insight and intelligence first, media second. The fact that it is a media makes listening even more important because this talk can have impact beyond just the individuals discussing (for example, conversations are archived and can be found via search engines).

This lays the ground work for our LISTEN-KNOW-PARTICIPATE framework.

LISTEN means to track overall trends of conversations happening around brands, products and services. How much talk is there? What are they saying? Is it good or bad?

KNOW is to understand the culture and interests of the community around these conversations. A key component of community is efluencers. As Jason suggests in his post, we have decided to broaden the meaning of the term beyond “online opinion leaders.” Efluencers are:

the consumers who are discussing brands, products or services via posting multi-media content on such online channels as BBS (online message boards), blogs and video sites.

Efluencers are not just the most active posters, but rather include the entire population of netizens contributing content to their online communities and engaging other efluencers. Are they “representative” of the general population? Absolutely not. Are they representative of the most engaged, most informed, and most connected group that can influence online and offline? Absolutely. And understanding the topics that really drive their conversations, the language they speak, and their interests are essential.

PARTICIPATE means marketing initiatives which are, based on the insight gained from LISTEN and KNOW, meaningful and a good fit for the community. As Janet Edan-Harris of Umbria suggests in this excellent article “You want to ride the wave rather than trying to start one on your own.”

In China, we see successful examples of PARTICIPATE occurring in a number of campaigns that were built on and/or leveraged IWOM. Our data showed that the award winning Pepsi Creative Challenge last year, which inspired 28,000 consumers to submit script ideas for a Jay Zhou commercial, generated over 600,000 mentions on BBS and blogs. In addition to great execution, the success was based on the understanding that music fans are insanely supportive of their idols, and will do everything they can to make sure the object of their affection succeed. Examples of the passion can also be seen in fans creating Jay Zhou TVC scripts months before the contest launch.

Of course, since we are calling IWOM consumer insight, it is important to note that the insight that comes from IWOM research is not limited to “online behavior” or “online campaign effective measurement,” though it can certainly represent these. Consumers are using BBS and blogs as channels to discuss all sorts of experiences, not just online ones.

In the end, we think marketers will make full, strategic use of this valuable data when they recognize that IWOM not only influences consumer opinion and perception, it IS consumer opinion and perception that can be used for insight about brands, products and services for both online and offline topics.

Recommended: article covering similar issues for US market here.