Despite the explosion in social network usage over the past few years, blogs still wield incredible influence over consumers. And brands want in. Recent findings contained in Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report  shed some insight into how the seemingly magical world of digital influence works. Some of the results may sound surprisingly old-school: Blogs are the third-most likely online channel to influence purchase (after retail sites and brand sites). Can I pay you to create custom content on your blog for my brand? MORE >>

Old media models have dominated the markets influence for years. The mix that drives both the influence and the related models fall into five categories that drive economic returns. Most communities have to attract and support a high proportion of advertising to cover the costs of production; without it, they could not leverage resources to gain their traffic position, influence and viewers. “Communities” now are forming around “flak positions” and new media practitioners are propagating content to support or oppose relevant positions. MORE >>

G: How would you define a social media “influencer” and how do you measure influence? He’d probably think the modern man has gone plumb insane writing unending volumes on topics such as influence. My own writing on the topic is merely an effort to highlight the absurdity of reducing such a complex, multifaceted concept as influence to a two digit or elementary ranking. People search for an absolute and once-and-for-all measure of influence, yet influence is relative and dynamic.  T: Marketing to influencers is definitely overrated. MORE >>

Overall, the report talks about how important it is to reach fans with relevant and engaging content in their News Feed, since their interaction with the content makes your message spread to their friends. Further, several cases (respectively based on both earned and paid media) were included in the report in order to demonstrate how successful management of a community contributes to the brand increasing its sales figures. Some are online most of their time commenting and engaging with brands – others are just observing and passively seeing what their friends are doing. MORE >>

Most recently, this struck me with regard to influencer outreach. was discussing this with my colleague,  Jennifer Kane , after she attended the  Influencer Throwdown Panel with David Binkowski , Kevin Dugan and Krista Neher (moderated by Saul Colt ) at SXSW Interactive. One thing that really got her thinking was this interesting concept that the panel posed: The biggest mistake PR professionals make when working with influencers is to take a media relations approach, rather than a community relations approach. It’s simply not enough to build a list of influencers. MORE >>