One of the most challenging things in social media is finding the conversation leaders. Those people who drive the conversation, and create a community.
FriendFeedHolic (ffholic) has taken the base knowledge that exists in FriendFeed and added a ranking mechanism to it based on input and output. In fact, they weight the participation in the FriendFeed community more heavily than participation in other communities.
This is important. Although FriendFeedHolic is separate from FriendFeed, they have found the way to isolate and target those users who are most likely to participate and create conversations. These users, be it Scoble or Mona N, are where advertisers and marketers can target their money.
How would they do this?
Think about it. If someone that is a large commenter or conversation-creator on FriendFeed creates new content, they are assigned a higher ranking in the new conversation-driven ad-discovery model that advertisers will have to create to succeed.
This new targeted advertising logic will be forced to discover:

  • The content of the conversation
  • The context of the conversation
  • The tone of the conversation
  • The participants in the conversation

This model will be able to identify when it is an inward-facing conversation that involves mostly super-users, or if it is a conversation that engages a wide-spectrum of people.
Conversations among super-users will lead to more passive advertising being shown, as that is a spectator event, with only a few participants.
Conversations created by super-users, or that involve super-users, but have a higher participation from the general community will get more intelligent attention to ensure that the marketing messages and advertising shown fit the four criteria above.
In this new model, advertisers will have to see that they can’t simply slap a set of ads up on the popular kids web sites. They will have to understand who leads a community, who generates buzz, and who can engage the most people on a regular basis.
In this model, the leader has far less power than the community that they create. And maintain.