What is Influence?

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Created on Tuesday, 26 April 2011 19:14

Written by Christine Mason Mccaull

Influence is a powerful force, and it used to be an invisible force, a behind closed doors social network that was difficult to model or graph or understand. But in the digital era, one aspect of influence mapping is now possible: living persons who are digitally connected to other living persons can now be graphed based on their interactions. And this has the social media world and brand marketers in particular falling over each other to figure out how to make the most use of this data. We thought it was worth looking at from a broader lens.- Christine & Chip

What is Influence anyway?

Influencers change people’s ideas, opinions and actions- they redirect the flow of thought, and alter outcomes. They have a pulling or attractive energy; a potency that commands attention; they make us take notice. People generally gain influence through the accumulated weight of experience, knowledge and relationships. Sometimes influence comes from raw skill, amazing talent, a unique insight, lens or perspective that draws people in. Influence is also highly contextual. That is to say, you can’t give a blanket answer to the question “how influential is someone?”. That answer must be qualified in three directions- influential IN WHAT SPHERE, TO WHOM and TO WHAT END.

People have influence in a particular sphere where they are especially knowledgeable, or creative (such as human rights or net neutrality or sports or art or wine or social media, or even a geography). Just because someone influences in one sphere doesn’t mean they’ll have any impact in another.

Whether someone is an influencer depends on those who allow themselves to be influenced by that person- which is deeply dependent on the listeners own values. Two equally knowledgeable people (eg, politicians) may interpret and frame their opinions on the same subject matter (eg, health care) very differently the people they influence will more likely be aligned to the person who shares their own values (eg, party lines).

It’s a big step to allow one's self to succumb to, or to acknowledge someone’s direct influence. It’s a big leap of trust. For me, someone has to really do something outstanding to be someone I follow or am influenced by. A young woman we know said that “you choose to allow yourself to be influenced- you see things you aspire to, you keep them with you, you let them dwell in you, you are almost subconsciously consulting these voices when deciding things.”

Over the long term (a lifetime, say) when asked “who influences you” or “who are your influences?” people are very selective about who they acknowledge. In our scientifically invalid survey, people named spiritual teachers, literary greats, masters of their craft- or, alternatively, those in their closest social sphere – their kids, their spouse. (We actually saw a posting on the 100 most influential people of all time- Ptolemy, Jesus, etc- just to put the relevance of Biebs’ Twitter followers in context).

Can you measure influence?

There’s a lot of talk going around about measuring “influence” in social media. It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of interest from those who want to get their message out- its just like celebrity endorsements- one micro endorsement from a trusted source on Twitter can drive real impact, so why not seek out those that can help you achieve this goal?

Whether it's your follower count, the number of times a person passes on your ideas/tweets to others, a Klout score or some form of a statistical or visual social graph, the offline clambering for position and hierarchy has migrated to the social network, this time rewarding the tireless content generator, the friend magnet, and less snarkily, the one who takes the time to curate deep knowledge or unique perspective.

The companies who are driving toward creating understanding influence make big promises about its potential. For example, Viralheat, a company doing really interesting work in looking at online relationships, says on their website “Imagine being able to identify the handful of people that are the de-facto conversation shapers for your campaign.” Well, we’ve imagined it, and want to know, THEN WHAT?

Joe Fernandez, the co-founder and CEO of Klout, a company that’s trying to give each person a badge, or a single score to measure their influence online rationalizes it this way “We are moving into an attention economy and your ability to leverage your influence to activate your network is going to be incredibly valuable.” But valuable for what? and how can I act on it or even evaluate it’s relative signficance?

It all begs the question: what would you do with an influence score if you could get an accurate one?

If you knew who the influencers were, you would follow them right? You would probably send them information, invite them to dinner, to VIP parties, you would try to break through the noise and get to them. You may even try to bribe them, to sample them like they do at the award shows, to have them give some of their influence cred to you or your idea. And in the meantime, while you were focused on the big fish the rest of the online world is happily going about their business.

While we see value in this, we tend to be more of the opinion that you want to know who’s supporting you, giving share of mind to your brand, so you can thank them, and interact with them. You can and must do this on the individual level, but with much more of a giving than a getting mentality. Similarly, you want to know what people are interested in the same things you are interested in, so you can get to know them, and see if you are of a common mind.

Rather than just understanding and trying to influence the “influencers”, remember that everyone matters more than any one- listen to the pulse, the sentiment of the many, as much as you would the select high-signal few. In short, sentiment and influence are understood globally but acted on locally: the aggregated sentiment of the social graph is more valuable than any one component.

Socialogue approaches identifying top supporters in our application and algorithms by looking at a combination of number of interactions with your brand or campaign (including any aliases you might have set) and reach (something we call a TruPop or true attentive population score) over time to help you determine and interact with your top supporters. In addition, you can identify people who might be interested in your brand or topic by looking across their profiles and content (if public) to help identify who may be of interest to interact with.

For example, these are my top 5 supporters in the last week:

We also begin to understand who our fans and followers are by the way they describe themselves and what they are interested in. Here's a cloud tag for the fans and followers of our local TEDx, from our community attributes page- nice to see the fit with "Technology, Entertainment and Design", and the strong overlap with world/global/travel- yep, that's our audience, and that's who we will speak to in our communications. We do the same kind of grouping and analysis on content and mentions.

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