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Influence Is Topicality With Tools

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Influence has been my favorite topic of late; in fact, it’s been everyone else’s, too. Let me bring you back up to speed with a bunch of good reads (not to mention a five-post series right here with many guest bloggers) since my series ran:

  • Gini Dietrich writes at Spin Sucks about Peer Index vs. Klout In this post she talks about tree frogs, her new pet and friend for Jack, and she also shares that Peer Index is trying mightily to be produce authorities on various topics.
  • Neicole Crepeau writes a heckuva intriguing post at Mark W. Schaefer’s blog, Grow, about a new way to measure and categorize influencers (she told me she is a “nerd” and this bit is all her intensity).
  • Shakirah Dawud tagged an Adweek article on Twitter about the Klout score showing up on resumes (I told you so…there, had to say that again.)
  • Judy Shapiro wrote a really good piece about why social media is a bad measure of influence (and she addresses that new influencer game, Empire Avenue (I’m staying far away from).

There’s another application I’d like to share based on a conversation and brief look at a beta site I saw yesterday. mBlast has products focusing on influencers and its flagship is mPact, rolled out earlier this year. mPact’s claim to fame is topicality as the filter of influence, and I liked what I saw although the kinks are still being worked out.

They’ve got a free product, so you can check it out, too, and its fee-based offering is reasonable considering what you’re going to get. In fact, as a small business, it’s quite reasonable at the lowest level.

One thing that resonated in my conversation with Mark Blount, vice president of mBlast, is about influence in general – it’s going to become more complex to sort through those with new social media influencer status, and the way to do that is going to be by using tools. Indeed.

(And, I especially like this Gartner-esque influencer map mPact offers…check it out…)

(images: TVArtists.org, mBlast)

How Does Your Blog Feel?

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Or, better yet, how do you feel about your blog?

This blog post has been under re-write in my head for two days now.  I’ve gone back and forth with how to present this as I didn’t want it to feel like I was complaining, depressed, or other. However, there’s something about blogging that’s hard to ignore – it’s your personal psyche that can get in the way.

Think on it…if you’re having a rough go, the tonality of your blog shows that. If you’re ever depressed, your words feel that way, too. It’s a good thing I didn’t publish yesterday (because my good friend Jenn Whinnem saved me with a coolio expletived blog post and title) because my exhaustion with two months of construction and a make-shift desk on a concrete slab with drywall dust for lipstick would’ve hindered the presentation of this content.

I’m not sure I still have this right…but, let me try anyway and see if this makes sense:

I wrote a post awhile back “Social Media, We’re All Talking to Ourselves,” and it got some positive and negative commentary; in fact, I got a slap to the hand. It was written when I was in a downtick of sorts, and that post mirrored the character of the day.

When I look around and dissect my social media experience, I see a peer group of highly astute people adopting and adapting to the next big thing in social. Everyone is jumping on board the Klout, the Quora, the Empire Avenue, the Evernote, the TED, and the everything because it’s what we do – we strive for that excitement and knowledge and thirst. But, where are our clients and those we serve? They’re way behind, still pecking away at “What is Twitter?”

Recently, Aaron Sachs wrote a similar post on his blog at SymplySocial, “Social Media Consultants: Are We All Just Preaching to the Choir?“, and he suggests that social media may not be as accessible to those not on the leader board. I was eager to read his take on how we all dance to the daily evolution of social.

About Blogs

There are industrial-strength blogs that feature every single bell and whistle with the most amazing design and wow factor. There are blogs done on free WordPress templates, and there are blogs still being published on Blogger, and WordPress.com sites. Although content is still king, it’s really challenging not to look at the A-list bloggers and then take a look at your own blog; this action can produce somewhat of a deflation in spirit.

What we bloggers need to remember is that there are those who thrive and strive to present the latest and greatest app, tool, game, concept, and more. I suspect they have oodles of time (Gini Dietrich wrote she spends 40 hours a week on Spin Sucks, and she just moved into the Top 40 of the Ad Age power 150), many peeps working to find angles and produce content, and a crack IT team to manage the back end. (I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing…not assuming…guessing.)

I’m now going to speak to myself in a public forum:

Jayme, you are one person with a full client load and client service comes first. Learning the technology of social media has always been my obstacle, yet the yearn to learn is my curse and blessing. It’s OK to have a blog that speaks to people and strives for warmth with welcome reception for all types of people. It’s wonderful to publish a blog where people who are shy, who don’t often comment feel comfortable stopping in. It’s OK not to be amongst the leaders every day, for what you deliver in content comes from a passionate place and striving for that sense of community is a goal that should never be forgotten. Remember not to be mechanical, because when that happens, it’s time to stop.

As said, I’m not sure I’m making total sense…it’s so easy to look around and want to be like Gini, like Mark, like Danny, like Griddy, like Jon, and like Sarah. But, you know what? It’s OK to be like Jayme, too ( Jayme).

(Image: ValueBookShop)

Standardize (Don’t Automate) Personal Success Measurement

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Rebecca A. Denison is a “klutzy, bubbly youngin’ taking on social media and PR measurement.” (Hey, those are NOT my words to describe her!). Today’s post is by an up-and-comer in the public relations profession; a woman I’ve been fully impressed by since I first met her on Twitter. Rebecca blogs over at One True Sentence (link above), and you can see her measurement topics appearing just about everywhere in PR blogs and circles. She’s got some fabulous posts on her blog about measurement, and how perfect is it that she segues from the series on Influence last week. Thanks, Rebecca, for sharing your expertise here; I’m so jazzed!

REBECCA A. DENISON SAYS:

Recently, Jayme wrote a great post which included some thought-provoking questions to start measuring your personal social media success (be sure to read the comments, too – tons of wisdom there). She also mentioned Klout as one tool she has used recently to measure her influence online.

I will be one of the first to jump at the chance to tell you why you should never rely on just one tool (especially an automated one) to measure influence. Influence is too contextual and situational. But that is certainly not my point today.

Personal success, much like influence, is entirely contextual and situational. This is never truer as when people, brands and companies search for the best ways to use social media. And so like influence, you just can’t automate the measure of personal success. Not with a single metric.

I joined Twitter in July 2009 when I was still a recent college graduate and searching for my place in this thing they call the workforce. Being a complete nerd, I literally wrote out the goals I had and how I would measure them. At the end of the day, my goal was to find a job, a company, a role that I fit into perfectly. But I was also looking to make a name for myself and share my passion with other nerds like me. I measured things like job offers and interviews, but also how many people referenced me as a thought-leader.

Everyone will have different goals for their own success in social media, but there will always be direct and indirect methods to show how far you’ve come. And it all starts with your goals. So let’s start there.

Standardize measurement of your personal success

1. Write your goals with pen. Goals don’t have to be nitty gritty. Think big picture. At the end of the day, if you were completely happy with your success, what would that mean? Would you have thousands of followers on Twitter? Would you be running a business through social media? Dream!

2. Define your terms. So let’s say you said you want to be a thought-leader. What does that mean exactly? Does that mean you’re well known? Does it mean your blog posts get read a lot? Maybe you are retweeted a bunch? This is where you get nitty gritty to really understand all the pieces that make up your goals. Think about setting time limits here, too. Do you want to be a thought-leader next week or next year? Give yourself time or even set smaller goals through the next year.

3. Find direct measures. Go through all of the pieces you defined above, and write down all the direct measures you know of. If you want to be retweeted more by next month, that’s an easy way to track, right? Using a tool like TweetDeck, HootSuite or CoTweet, you can easily find out how many times others share your thoughts. If you think there is a direct measure but don’t know what it is, do a bit of digging or ask around (even ask me). Don’t focus on finding an answer for everything, though!

4. Brainstorm indirect measures. For those terms that you just can’t find an easy way to measure, this is where you have to get creative. Something important to me was to be a source of expertise in measurement. I used the number of times someone recommended me as a person who might know the answer to track this. Not direct, but it’s close! If you’re a small business owner and want to increase foot traffic but can’t track your customers every hour of every day, try tracking foot traffic during lunch on Thursdays. If you see an increase, you can guess that overall traffic is increasing, and you can probably think up other ways to measure it more accurately, too.

5. Set yourself up to succeed. Once you have an idea of how you will be measuring, set yourself up to measure properly. If you want something to increase or decrease, make sure you measure a benchmark for comparison later. If you will need to use a tool to help you, sign up now and start tracking even if you won’t need the data yet. Trust me when I say measuring retroactively is much trickier.

How do you measure your own personal success? Even if you don’t take it too seriously, how do you measure progress?

Can We Measure Influence?

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Today marks the culmination of this week-long series on Influence. We’ve explored Klout, two camps, factors that influence, what it is, and now we look at ways to consider measuring influence.

Neicole Crepeau is a partner with Coherent Interactive, a digital shop specializing in all things web, social media, and digital, of course.  Aaron Sachs is working on his Masters degree at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where I’m certain his coursework includes many live discussions about measurement.

Neicole kicks off:

I believe there are several  factors that contribute to defining influence:

  • Topic—nobody has influence in every area, most people have influence in specific areas
  • Community—most influencers are active in certain communities or have the greatest impact in certain communities
  • Activity—some influencers are content creators, others are mainly speakers, etc.
  • Type—There are different types of influence. For example, there are people who are very good at spreading the word/content, and might be valuable for content marketing purposes or to gain traffic to your website. There are people who are very influential in terms of shaping opinions—think Walt Mossberg in tech. A recommendation from him on a tech topic carries a lot of weight. There are people who are influential in their ability to start conversations and connect with individuals. I think you and Mark Schaefer fall into that category, Jayme.  (Thank you, Neicole!) There are probably other types, as well, thought-leaders, etc.

From a business perspective, you’d want to connect with different influencers depending upon your goals and audience. You want influencers who are in the communities where your audience is and who are influential in the ways that will help with your goals. If I want to get someone to be a speaker at my conferences or do webinars for me, I probably want to connect with an influencer in the relationship-builder model. On the other hand, if I want my content shared widely to people interested in a certain topic, I probably want to connect with a content curator, as per my post on Mark Schaefer’s blog. And so on.

Measurement

Is there an effective way to measure influence? I don’t think so, not yet. Currently, systems are using proxies of real measurement.  We use RTs and reshares to measure how good an influencer is at spreading the word. But we can’t really accurately measure that. If I share a link, someone clicks on it and reads the blog post I linked to, and then clicks the Retweet button on the blogger’s site, we’ve lost the trail. Someone may click the link that the reader shared, and that click should actually be attributed to me, but we can’t track it.

Klout measure shares and @’s and DM’s and comments on Facebook, too. That measure’s engagement of a sort, but from the number of interactions, Klout makes assumptions about someone’s influence. If the influence type is Walt Mossberg style, @’s and DM’s may not matter at all. What matters is how well-regarded the influencer’s opinion is and how well-spread his/her opinions are to a key audience, not whether he/she actually talks a lot with fans.

To really measure, we’d have to have a good breakdown of the different types of influencers, by topic and community, use different measures for each community, and measure all the way through. We’d need to know things like what audiences/customers the influencer is reaching, how far down the sales funnel it’s happening, who is sharing the opinion/information with customers, and whether it actually resulted in conversions (however you measure conversions: sales, registrations, etc.). We aren’t anywhere near that, yet.

Influencer identification and measurement is still in its infancy. We’ve got a long ways to go.

Aaron Sachs has some great

I want to begin with the tools that are out there–Klout, Backtype, PeerIndex.  They all measure influence, but there’s a key thing missing, before we get to what the tools measure, and that is:  Who is defining influence for these tools and what are they basing it on?

It’s all well and good to have an indicator based on partial metrics–Tweets, retweets, followers/following ratios, etc.  But where is influence in all of this?

Michael Wu at Lithium has an excellent post on influence.  In an interview with him, Michael stated that simply, influence is the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions.  Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion.  It is causing someone to think or behave a certain way.  Whether the motives of the person influencing another person are “pure” or not is irrelevant to defining influence. However, we all hope that people influencing any field are pure of heart and have the best interests of an industry or field at heart and won’t influence the direction of an industry or field in a negative fashion.  But that’s beside the point.

The tools that are being used to measure influence are broken.  They don’t measure true influence.  RAAK did several tests looking at PeerIndex and Klout. The key test was Klout, as that seems to be the standard right now.  They found that the bot that tweeted the most had a higher score than the other three bots. By conducting that test, RAAK essentially found out that Klout’s definition of influence (and somewhat the industry standard, by proxy of accepting Klout as the defining measure of influence in the social media world) was relegated to Tweeting…a lot.  Is that really how we want to define influence for social media?  For that matter, do we want to define influence as simply retweeting, interacting with others, or posting content?  I would hope not.

For social media, there has to be a CONCLUSIVE measure of influence.  If the definition of influence is to cause a change of mind or behavior, then THAT is what should be measured.  Simply measuring retweets or interaction does NOT prove conclusively that a person has experienced a change of mind or behavior. Sorry 🙁 long rant about the tools.

The other factors that are missing in influence are things like credibility, relevance of material to audience (or relevance in general), physical appearance, communication skills, and persuasive ability. These items are the major items that contribute to influence.

Then, you take into account the things that have contributed toward a person being influential–professional opportunity (essentially status–we’re more likely to believe someone who is in a position that lends them more influence or credibility), economic opportunity, and access to tools/communities.

Retweets, tweets, and engagement are not a conclusive measure of influence, not if it is defined as causing a change of mind or behavior.  Really, the approach that the social media world should be taking to Klout and other influence measuring tools should be a mindset that understands that these tools don’t really measure influence.  If anything, they measure how engaged you are with your audience.  Engagement (does not =) Influence.

 

(Photo: NextWeb…never thought I’d see the day when Old Spice Man was relevant for an image; very cool.)

Define Influence with Goals, Trust, Behavior, Motivation

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This is the fourth post in the What is Influence series. I appreciate and thank our contributors today, Erica Allison, Michelle Quillin and Davina Brewer. Each of them are influential in their own right; they engage with their communities, they blog with aplomb, and they are accessible to anyone who wants to learn from their expertise.

What’s amazing to me about this series is that one word can conjure (not negatively) so many thoughts from a wide variety of people who blend disciplines in this social media marketing space. Please come back tomorrow when we close the series with Aaron Sachs and Neicole Crepeau who wrap this first phase with more on measurement.

Again, I appreciate the many comments and tweets about the blog content. I have enjoyed this! (This one is a bit longer than most to squeeze them all in…have edited a tad, Ladies, I hope you don’t mind.)

Erica Allison is president of Allison Development Group in North Carolina. Her public relations and social media firm is active in fashion, design and other industries. She blogs at Spot On. I had the pleasure of meeting Erica at Social Slam recently!

I view Influence as a goal, something that I strategically work towards in business and in relationships.  If my suggestions, advice, or identification of information and insight can make someone move from point A to point B or choose one option over another, then I’ve influenced that person or persons.  If my work or writings can cause someone to stop and think, or review their point of view from another perspective, that’s influence.

I find that the success of one’s influence is directly related to one’s relationship and level of trust between the two parties (or more) in the relationship.  If there is a high level of trust in what one person (the influencer) says or thinks, or in their credibility, based on their accomplishments and real life experiences, then that influencer has tremendous potential to change opinion, inspire action or change, and generally “influence” another.

In addition to relationships and level of trust and credibility, I think context is a major factor here as well.  In the social media world, Klout is obviously the major measurement tool for influence.  It’s convenient to say Klout doesn’t matter or it’s flawed, but it is a consideration among folks who work in the social media world and to ignore it may in fact result in lost work, lost credibility and lost opportunities.

For those folks NOT working in social media, and trust me, there are plenty, Klout has no relevance what so ever.  Influence is measured by results, pure and simple.  If you can’t deliver results, your level of influence is called into question.  Understanding your own level of experience, credibility and relationship ‘capital’ is key in understanding your own level of influence.

Michelle Quillin is co-owner of New England Multimedia. I’ve had the immense pleasure of working with Michelle at The SMB Collective, and she inspired me to produce my first video that shall remain unpublished at this time. She is consummate marketer on Facebook and recently launched a new LinkedIn Group.

How do you possibly measure influence?

In the realm of marketing our services via social media, my behavior changes as I “see” patterns of behavior online, including my own behavior. I’m a student of people, of the way we think, of how we engage with brands, of how they engage with us. I pick up on how people (including myself) respond to calls-to-action, even subtle ones, and then I in turn make choices to implement tactics and strategies and test the response. Over time, I’m getting more and more strategic as I see what works. I bet I could’ve learned all of this in school, but maybe not. Maybe it’s all about influence.

I’m a youth minister (7 years now), working with teens, and let me tell you – they are very, very easily influenced by media and entertainment, and they in turn wield powerful influence among their peers. They don’t even realize its happening. I wonder if we’re the same? Are we all being influenced all the time, even in ways we don’t realize?

Davina Brewer is owner of 3 Hats Communications with a very spritely blog. She is one of the most prolific commenters I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, and her opinions are on the leading edge.

The biggest obstacle to defining and measuring influence in the social arena is qualifying and quantifying motivation. My motivations have been to make real connections that develop my expertise, build my credibility and yes, someday lead to a network and a community of professionals which just may include referrals and money-growing trees. If I found better, more effective and profitable ways to develop my skills, build community and establish credibility, my motivations and therefore the influence would shift.

That said something by Gini may sway my opinion; she’s got me thinking of Livefyre. Something from someone else, because of a connection and friendship, may pull my attention to a particular blog post, on which I may or may not comment or RT. And someone’s perceived reputation and “Klout” may bias my opinions on someone’s authority and prestige.

We don’t always argue, debate or disagree with influencers or those in positions to possibly help further our own goals and objectives. Now we certainly are NOT a bunch of kiss-ass sycophants and I love that, I enjoy the intelligent debates and discussions. But I’ll read posts from many a TopNoOneElseCaresBigNumberList and be unimpressed, yet see mostly praise in comments. I’ll follow their tweets that seem pedestrian, downright ordinary.

I wonder WHY some have the reputation and influence they are reported to. Then I remind myself that they’ve built that reputation and cultivated their community over time, w/ lots and lots of hard work. And that anyone can think the same of me. It’s the WHY that’s the challenge. Things and people only influence us if we let them, right? So what influence I have (which is negative numbers) or who has influence over me gets into WHY I allow that, just not sure charting and graphing tweets and clicks will really reveal that.