Meet Gen C…

The Influencer’s Influencer…

The Trend Spotters, the Cool Hunters, The Social Media Influencer’s, Bloggers and Media Critics that influence what consumers think online.

We met Gen C on our blog in July 2007, but only just recently (thanks to Nick Hodge at Microsoft) have we put a name to this elite breed of new thinkers.

“In the golden age of branding, several guests at the party held sway: brand, PR, marketing, external relations (ER), research, and the agencies. On top of that, we had a few occasional attendees, such as consumer affairs, investor relations, and community relations.

Today, in the golden age of consumer empowerment, we have the same party guests, but their sway is being challenged in a very big way by an aggressive, sometimes rude and abrupt new guest at the party: the consumer influencer.

They may have accrued influence over time or have situational influence (e.g., they were first to try and review the iPhone, hence setting off a broader chain reaction). That influence often spills from the online zone into the offline or vice versa. Indeed, today’s uber-influencers are largely platform agnostic, except they tend to have a more quantifiable digital trail of results online. Put another way, if you search their names, you’ll find evidence of something they said.”

One of the most interesting aspects of Gen-C, is they can’t be bought, reached by PR agencies or brought over to traditional media’s point of view.

They are often highly informed, highly critical, strongly opionated. They have little regard for trashing your reputation to millions of online readers if they percieve you to have wronged them in anyways.

So how do we manage and monitoring these what Gen-C says about your brand? We have been using BuzzNumbers recently to manage and monitor what Gen-C is saying about our clients. What have you been using?

What do you think of this Gen-C hype? (Gen-C Wikipedia) Leave a comment.