THE INFLUENCERS

Abstract

It is about influencers as social actors and about their growing importance for both our business and governance organizations that we will discuss in this dissertation. We will try to highlight the way and means by which their role has evolved from modern to contemporary times; and also to understand how, through the exercise of this non-institutionalized opinion interpreting and coordinating role, they progressively acquired an exclusive capacity to infer and lead social debates, first offline and now also online. In addition to the above mentioned general objectives, we will try to demonstrate how, contemporary influencers – legitimated and sustained by the number and variety of social links they possess, by their ability to coordinate information flows and to intercept this huge amount of information that incessantly crosses the World wide Web, with the purpose of capturing and then interpreting people’s opinions, feelings, ideas, beliefs on cultural, social, political matters, or on other governance and business related problems- use their capacities, their countless “weak ties” (Granovetter, May 1973) and exclusive information as strategic resources to become indispensable advisors for three groups of social actors, which have key roles in the political, the scientific and the business environments, respectively: • The politicians, helping them guiding the online as well as the offline governance debate. understanding the needs and wants of their electorate and formulating their policy proposals, by using their knowledge and information (or Big Data). • The technicians (or academics), acting as managers and banner-men of academics’ ideas, models, instruments and organizational myths vis-à-vis elected politicians and public institutions. • The corporates, acting as online marketers and promoters of firms’ products; by launching new trends, life styles, modes and orienting online opinions and discussions on products.