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Friday April 01

efluentials.com

Burson Marstellar has created a website to desiminate its thinking on online opinion leaders whom they call Efluentials. The Es are basically people who participate and offer opinions in online forums, newsgroups and messageboards. (Funnily enough, BM has left out bloggers and have included newsgroups.) Es are not to be confused with tech-fluentials who offer their opinions on the specific subject of technology and are not limited by their medium and communicate both online and offline. Es however communicate primarily through the internet and are not limited in topic which can range from politics to technology.

http://www.efluentials.com/

Comments

Thanks for your interest in our study. We didn’t forget blogs when we initially defined e-fluentials.  It’s just that blogs were not as commonly used back then as they are now. (Even now, you may argue that blogging has not hit mainstream.)

We came up with the idea of the original research in 1997 and conducted the first wave in 1999. The rise of new speaking platforms (blogs, SMS, IM, etc.) is why we looked into how e-fluentials were riding the high-tech wave. We asked about blogs in our recent study. Guess what-- 33% of tech-fluentials write their own blogs. That’s significantly more than the national U.S. average (2-7% according to Pew). I bet you’re a tech-fluential :-)

Idil, thanks for commenting!

It makes a lot of sense that tech-fluentials are writing their own blogs. A lot of them are probably into podcasting and voip right now!

I think I misunderstood the BM paper the first time I read it. It just seemed that my interpretation of it made more sense to me. At least where it applies to myself. I don’t think I’m so much of a tech-fluential because nothing I write about has much to do with technology as it does with the internet from the user or usage perspective. I don’t know if that would be considered tech-fluentially enough.

Tim - I think you got it right pretty much. Tech-fluentials do not have to only talk about technology. But they use technology to spread their word and get their information. For instance, they are big on wireless and VOIP (as you guessed). Their homes are networked and they think search engines are among the most influential technologies of the past five years. So it’s more about how you integrate technology into your daily life - at work or at home.

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