Urgently seeking influence sensors
We often cannot make heads or tails of it. Opinions are voiced everywhere on the web, be it on forums or by followers, bloggers, likers, official media, or converted journalists. They all take the floor in a happy cacophony. But who holds the reins?
By Joel Grandjean
Editor-in-Chief
For the last fifteen years or so, watchmaking blogs have been growing like mushrooms in the virtual jungle. And there are always new voices emerging which hope to make an impression and have a say.
Multi-genres, converted journalists and institutions
The first in line are the blogs that blend genres in a more or less well-defined catch-all spirit. These add to watchmaking some other trendy lifestyle themes: a hint of gastronomy or automobile, a zest of dream tourism and a pinch of luxury, including collector pens, yachts anchored in Monaco, toys for post-Bobo materialists and unusual objects.
Those guardians of information are not only rookies but also merry and rather disorganized. When and if noticed by brands, they usurp either the privileges hitherto reserved to well-established journalists or a part of the godsend advertising floods from the sector.
And speaking of well-established journalists, those who used to save themselves for print and the information establishment, not a month goes by that at least one “insider” creates their own blog. It’s a vicious circle; a funny change of scene for the established experts who would have, had they had the chance, eradicated the phenomenon as soon as it started. Do their editors in chief bully them so much that they aspire to lead a life of freedom where they won’t have to worry about formatting or consensual obligations? Or do they simply go freelance as a result of the impact the crisis has had on the media? Maybe, after a period of unacknowledged (on their side) unemployment, they sometimes feel forced to do a ‘back-to-basics’ and return to their origins as freelance journalists. Or, rather, it is a matter of not wanting to lose touch with their specialist fields and their networks.
Whatever their motivations, these new digital actors are also part of the myriad of voices we now see everywhere on the web.
Examples include Elisabeth Doer, a German freelance watchmaking journalist who recently created “quillandpad.com” and Eric Othenin-Girard, a member of our editorial team, who writes the blog “watches-and-friends.com”. Incidentally, it was already a few years ago in the early 2000s that Othenin-Girard created “bloghorloger.ch”. The latter was one of the very first webzines, together with Gregory Pons’ famous “businessmontres.com”. Pons’ site was a “mediafacture” of electronic information about the marvelous French watchmaking model, Mediapart. The well-organized and very polyvalent Michel Jeannot also joined the webzine hub with the creation of WTheJournnal.com. He was by then already editor in chief of “Le Guide”, now a major yearly edition in the watchmaking world.
But that’s not all. Also joining this phenomenon that constantly welcomes new voices, we find the official media that claims this to be a legitimate extension of their written publications, which will also differ from the latter inasmuch as possible. Broadcasting does not seem to have any intention of missing out either, as opposed to true media, which chose this diffusion mode when it had just made its debut. They are surprisingly interviewed often in papers or magazines to share their expertise. These new “contributors” see this as a consecration and gladly assume their new journalist role.
Alexander Friedman and Marco Gabella, Watchonista.com co-founders, are part of them and it is not difficult to find their signatures on magazine articles. Yet their business model, which has no newspaper background whatsoever, is quite a case study. Ben Clymer is another star of internet media. He created Hodinkee.com and is still one of the site’s most important guest contributors. He is in charge of columns in major magazines but has not given up on the web, his favorite field.
Social networks
Suddenly all these actors have frenetically started to multiply their extensions on social networks. More or less inspired bloggers, more or less mutant journalists, institutional media that are more or less followers, early web professionals who have a successful edition on the internet… They all have at least a Twitter account, a Google space, a Facebook page and, lately, an Instagram account, as trends have not yet changed. Some extensions have become completely separate media vehicles, as proves the remarkable success of trendsetter Anish. He has more than one million followers on “Instagram.com/watchanish” and has, in spite of himself, even seen dozens of imitators spur in the hope of achieving his same level of success.
Tips on how to make heads or tails of this
Watchmaking brands, ins spite of being leading marketing gurus, are puzzled next to this ambient cacophony or swarming anarchy. They wonder how to invest their communication budget in the best way and what they should expect from it. If only there was a scientific solution to this! But that is impossible as the most prominent – though not always the most successful – refuse to publish their turnover while others throw in irrefutable arguments to illustrate how many visits they get and how much time is spent reading their stuff. There is nothing more puzzling or that offers less guarantees.
Concerning these tools, which guaranteed to help tell apart the good from the bad through systematic rankings, they have already shown their limitations. Past experience shows us that a site like Alexa.com is not as reliable as it seems and that the prioritization they offer often lacks precision.
It would seem that several actors will finally enter the field soon, and that the future encourages this type of approach. Among them is Augure.com, which we have tested. The result was positive as the company illustrates the sense and the stakes of research since its philosophy is based on tracking and on the commitment to influence. The next trend will be to track the most listened to and followed sites, in other words leading sites, be it by colleagues or web surfers.
In terms of methodology, the idea is to continuously check which sites are the most cited in a given context. To that end, the company uses several contextual indicators: their exposition, their potential influencer audience, their diffusion capacities, their pertinence and their level of expertise on the subjects.
Knowing and measuring the influence that each determining sector has seems much more productive than only quantifying the number of visits. Isn’t it just better to be read by only a few who count and whose sphere of influence and resources are in synch with the cause rather than blindly following the voice of those who speak more loudly than others and have attracted the mass? This discussion is nowhere near finished for it sparks as much passion as it does vocations.