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The new influencer landscape: the summary The rise of social media
Proliferation of influence channels
• Has turned hundreds of millions of us into content creators and placed billions of opinions online
• The world’s collective thinking is now online and published, a first in history
• A total revolution in the way consumers share influence and opinion Digital friends • Digital channels have moved more of our social interactions into the virtual space and into text and the written word • The web has expanded our networks to include people we don’t know and people we used to know and in a pre web age we would have lost contact with • Digital channels encourage more frequent interaction and make it easier to share influence e.g through sending links, videos or pictures
• The continual rise of social media and the growth of mechanisms for user input have created an incredible wealth of outlets to share opinions and thoughts • There is a new form of casual influence – It is now incredibly easy to share opinion, from voting buttons, to wish lists to comments. These are powerful forms of influence that do not require much commitment • We now trust a strangers recommendation as much as our closest friends • We trust recommendations in social media channels more than paid-for communications