This weeks reading was by Jay Oatway and was called Mastering Story, Community and Influence : How to Use Social Media to Become a Socialeader. I found this quite useful and helpful especially with the project I am doing for this class now. As I have written I have started an Instagram about travel and photos of travel. In it I link the travel category of my blog. The reason I found the reading useful is because it helped in identifying the people and communities you need to be aware of and use to further your involvement in your community and gain traction. He lists the big five as:

• Bloggers- “the new newsmakers”
• Professional Groups- “group of experts who often derive some sort of livelihood from that expertise”
• Topic Chats- “live, public online conversations”
• Aggregators- “giant beast of curation”
• Midfluencers- online presence who “hold a disproportionate amount of online influence” – Oatway

These major players are the aim of who to target when building your online presence. He goes into detail about how you can interact with the above so you can exchange “social currency” (Oatway, p99) However, he does emphasise that you shouldn’t always aim for he highest and utilise people who’s content is quality and specific to what you are trying to achieve. This is something I have really resinated with and have tried to implement this into my Instagram. I have tried to follow people with 1000’s of subscribers instead of tens of thousands to actually be able to communicate with them and interact.

References:

Oatway, Jay, Apr 26, 2012, Mastering Story, Community and Influence : How to Use Social Media to Become a Socialeader Wiley, Hoboken. 97-109.