The 4Fs of Citizen Marketing

Happy to see an excerpt from Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba's book "Citizen Marketing".  They've rebooted their perspective on word of mouth, dealing now with the social media  world and its four participant archetypes:

The Filters: information hounds and links experts, their blogs and podcasts are a consistent beehive of activity with their feed aggregators working over time

The Fanatic: people that want to contribute and get involved - they praise and constructively critique to make their underlying subject or brand of interest as good as it can be

The Facilitators - the community builders, the people who connect fans, build support groups and increasingly interest advertisers

The Firecrackers -  they deal in memes, frequently and episodically popping up as entertaining mimicry, visual buzz, mashups and creative genius   

As noted by the book, all of these people have a power that is structurally elusive for most marketers, it's this magical thing called authenticity.

Why are they more authentic? Well - they do it because they're volunteers (no paid or compensated vested interest), they contribute freely because their passionate about enhancing and improving stuff regardless of the implications and they do it to personally express themselves (it's not their job).

Tough stuff to compete against as a command and control marketer ...perhaps it's about time, we involve these influencers and say "Yes, I agree and we could...." as opposed to "Thanks but no thanks, but instead we could...".