Top 20 Social Media Influencers and Beyond…

Kristi Hines (@kikolani) published a nice list of “The 20 most influential people in social media” and Simon Kemp (@eskimon) did a good job in this thread reminding us all that since more than 80% of the world’s social media users live outside of the US it would be a good idea to add some other influential names beyond America’s shores to the list.

Brava Kristi and bravo Simon. So far so good.

Krishna De is an outstanding communicator and a long time digital-friend. She suggested that I could be considered as an influencer in Finland. First of all, I’d like to thank Krishna for mentioning me as an influencer. I tend to work with my “head down”, putting all the passion and commitment I have into everything I do in this industry. Ultimately, my greatest reward is to see a satisfied smile on the face of whoever I’m working with because what we did together meant something to them and made a difference. So, when someone points me out for any reason related to what I do, I feel honored.

Secondly, though, after reading the following comment I felt that I should probably clarify my position a bit and give out a little bit more information about what I do since I have been – and still am – very involved in the Finnish social media and technology space…

Jaana Nyström - Not wanting to promote myself but I'm the "Google+ envoy in Finland", according to the local Google Industry Manager... At least I'm diligent! :D

If you can’t see/load the picture above:

Jaana Nyström – +Krishna De New York in Finland now? 🙂 +Andrea Vascellari has nothing to do with Finland, I think? Must be an error this…

Not wanting to promote myself but I’m the “Google+ envoy in Finland”, according to the local Google Industry Manager… At least I’m diligent! 😀

For those of you who have been connected with me for a while now, you are probably aware that my company and I work on international projects, but for the sake of this thread on G+, here’s my reply which just focuses on some of the ways I’ve been “influential” in Finland.

Hi Everyone,

Hi Jaana,

Jaana I’ve been living and working in Finland since 2005 and I’ve been researching and studying the Finnish information society cluster since 2002.

In Finland, I’m currently running several projects for national and local governments, regional development, B2B, B2C, pharma and education. If you have a look at the people/connections we commonly share here on Google+ you’ll notice that I’m well-networked with the Finnish social media sphere 😉

I’m often a contributor to various international podcasts sharing my point of view from the Finnish perspective (but not only, since I have Italian-Canadian roots) specifically in the fields of PR, marketing and communications. In addition to that, since public speaking is part of what I do, I’ve been invited to speak at some of the largest conferences in Finland i.e. Mindtrek, ITK, etc. If you quickly browse through my Linkedin profile you’ll notice that I’ve been invited as an official blogger to many industry conferences, such as the LeWeb, Web 2.0 Expo, etc. and I’ve also represented Finland at two editions of the Bloggers World Forum respectively in Bucharest and Vienna. So these are most likely some of the reasons why you’ll find a fairly large group of people worldwide referring to me when they think of Finland – it’s the same for me when I think of Ireland and 2 names immediately come to mind Krishna De (@krishnade) and Bernie Goldbach (@topgold).

On the other hand, leading an international digital strategy agency requires me to travel quite often, but my home is currently in Finland. My team and I work across 4 continents and we recently opened a new office in New York (NYC) so the information you see on my Twitter profile refers to that. I hope this explains and clarifies everything.

Andrea @vascellari

– Good to meet you, Jaana. Andrea

It’s Time to Go Back to Conversation Streams

A recent twitter conversation with Dan York got me thinking.

The increasing pollution of the web with meaningless content made bloggers move towards higher quality blog posts. This led many bloggers, including me, to gradually reduce the frequency of released content. Blogs lost that dynamic conversation and vibe they used to have back in the day.

Did all this interaction disappear? No, not at all. It just shifted to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Buzz etc. The only problem with it is that people started to rely too much on these external platforms/environments… read this great post by Bernie Goldbach to understand more about what I mean.

Back to Dan and me. A few days ago, Dan sent out a tweet with a simple question and a link that was redirecting to a really short post on his blog. Initially I thought “why didn’t he choose to have this conversation just on Twitter?” But after a second that blog post brought back to my mind the early days of when I started blogging around 2002, when we owned our content, when we were the hosts of our conversations, when people loved to comment on posts because it was like sitting in a cafe’ and talking with some good friends about topics we cared about the most. In 2002, we probably weren’t talking about streams yet, but that was the feeling and I believe we should probably get back to it. We still need our digital homes, we can’t live like digital nomads.

As long as the quality of what we share is good, meaningful or it represents a good conversation starter I think we should still invite or leave the door open to our friends to have a cup of coffee in our digital living room to sit and talk. Worried about what people on the outside are saying? No problem, there are a bunch of tools & tech (i.e. backtype) that can eventually help us capture what the social web is saying about it.

I think this magic feeling is not gone, we just don’t need to forget about it…and this would probably help us avoid ending up feeling like Loic (@Loic it’s all good! Your name is not Brogan or Godin. You are Loic and that’s how you talk and engage with your audience. It worked well for you until now, just keep at it!).

What about me? Well, as soon as this intense period for the new launch of itive.net is over, I’ll get back to my regular posting activity… bringing back the stream feeling…or I’ll probably start right away 😉 I guess you’ll find out!

How about you? What’s your take? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.

Andrea