Jeremy Gutsche, head honcho at Toronto's Trend Hunter, recently published his company's 50 Top Interviews of 2009. Interviewees ranged from new media to old media types, women and men responsible for generating memes and spotting trends who provided brief but candid responses to a series of repetitive questions asked -- with minor variations, according to their respective industries -- by Gutsche's Trend Hunter team.

My several gleanings from the read are too numerous to distill into just a single blogpost, but one interview with Ignacio Oreamuno of Ihaveanidea massively resonated. Oreamuno suggest three possible new media/Web 2.0 job titles that I'd never seen in print before, and as my eyes blew down the page I wondered whether any of them might be apt descriptors for the sorts of things that I myself get up to online.

They were: Twitter Propagator, Community Builder, and Follower Transfixer.

Let's break these down individually...

Twitter Propagator

Oreamuno describes how companies who flog product -- both MNCs and SMEs -- are cleverly leveraging Twitter to generate more sales, and that's hardly news. What is news, however, is how over the next two years we shall likely see the advent of Twitter "propagators," people whose sole obligation it will be to spead and seed the word out about new products and services into the Twittersphere.

Take this analogy, for instance: the bouncing beach ball at a college frat party.

If the inflatable ball represents a company's new product and its prospective customers are respresented by the punch-drunk students frolicking in the mosh pit, then the lilting of that multicoloured ball and it diffuses throughout the crowd -- as it's tapped, sometimes violently, from one end of the room to the other and back again -- is like the Twitter Propagator's job. Like the swaddled Moses in his mother Tzipporah's proverbial reed basket, the Twitter Propagator will gently lay down news of a product into the fast-moving Twitterstream and attempt to coax along the current, hoping that it will be picked up by a "Potiphar" and shared with the "powers that be" and "elevated into a position of prominence."

Okay, so you don't like my Biblical analogy, but I think you're cottoning onto the idea.

In a sense, all of us on Twitter -- those of us who aren't geeks or speciality interest groups -- are propagators in our own right, to some extent. Sure, there are still those who deeply lament the commercialization of Twitter -- nay, the commercialization of the entire web -- yet product placement is a direct outgrowth of the "gathering spaces" phenomenon which is an organic outgrowth of where the web is headed today.

Each of us -- in our own way -- is trying to lay down out our "reed baskets" in a sense, to introduce our delicate fledglings and babies into the wide world. Twitter is just one of the latest and best ways of doing so.

Community Builder

The Community Builder is a cherished slot because at the end of the day it's people who make things happen for you and people who help make you money.

As people gather, things happen. Things like commerce. For example, if I have bread, you might have iron. Someone else might have apples, while I might have cloth. You've got meat, and I've got milk. We agree to meet on a Tuesday at the market in the town square and swap goods at a fair rate of exchange, with both parties walking away satisfied as they load up their respective wagons and roll on back to the homestead, eyeing their cache of new goodies with a wide grin.

It all works, in theory, but someone has to first map out the trading area in the town square. Someone has to establish the market stalls which will eventually lead to hundreds and thousands of spontaneous interconnections that will lead to successful business transactions, and that's why the Community Builder's position is so pitvotal.

With the exponential explosion of online business, with people freely purchasing goods and services and flinging their credit card numbers over websites with wanton abandon, it's the Community Builder that sets the tempo of all this sales activity.

Several companies and organizations have already allocated budgets to hire separate "social media evangelizers," appointing point persons to somehow get a handle on what's going on in the wild woolliness Web 2.0 space. If you've ever spent any considerable amount of time on either Facebook or Twitter, then you already know how extraordinarily time-consuming this effort at wrangling the both of those down can be. Empowering someone to exclusively handle this looks like an increasingly bright idea.

Follower Transfixer

For the holder of this lofty title to be successful, one first has to gain a loyal following. That process alone is a lengthy process indeed, because it's all about trust. Some questions to be answered on the serpentine road towards dedicated follower-dom might include:

** Do you always deliver on what you promise?
** Do you churn out content which is relevant and helpful to your following?
** Are you charismatic enough in your oral and written deliveries, or are you more plodding and technical?
** Can you break things down into lowest-common-denominator speech to make things more accessible for the Average Joes who -- like anywhere -- comprise the bulk of your audience?
** Who else can vouch for your bona fides?

Prepare to devote a series of concentrated months to gain the trust you seek and need.

For those with their online followings already in intact, what are you doing to astound and transfix this audience? Do you speak and/or write well and convincingly?

An ever more undesirable position is to keep a community, but not do much with it or for it. This should never be you.

There's more legs, or permanence, in community, truth be told. Twitter may come and go -- or morph into something entirely different -- while followers tend to be flighty when confronted with more dazzling, telegenic competitors, but communities are always self-propagating and self-sustaining in a way. Since it's always a many-to-many interaction, one person isn't always in control. One person doesn't set the tempo, and, moreover, one person can't dissolve a community by fiat or make "executive decisions" to imperil a community.

Ultimately, I'd like to give more energy at becoming a better Community Builder.

My thanks to go out again to Jeremy's Trend Hunters for inspiring today's post.