Today marks the launch of a new series, “What Is Influence?” The concept came from the many in-depth comments delivered on the April 20 blog post about Klout. There seems to be two camps re Klout (the first mover, for all intents and purposes) for gauging influence scoring — one dissects the algorithm and the analytics behind the score and discredits that number; the other (camp) looks ahead at the significance and potential impact an influencer score will have on the industry at large. I’m of the latter camp…methinks Klout and other influence assessment via metrics and scores will change the face of business development and marketing.
Mark W. Schaefer, one of the most consummate B-to-B marketers I’ve had the privilege of “growing” with, suggests Klout-type apps are not to be taken lightly. Mark says:
At the end of the day, influence is your ability to change another person’s view, attitude or behavior. That is why systems like Klout are so important to marketers. For the first time in history we can proximate (not necessarily quantify) word of mouth influence. That is a huge insight. Revolutionary. So no matter what you think of Klout from a personal standpoint, you need to pay attention from a business standpoint because it is an important development – a step toward measurement that will improve steadily.
To refresh what I said in the Klout blog last week, I defined influence as “authoritative, authentic, and accessible leadership.”
An opinion column in Advertising Age Feb. 28, 2011 by Greg Shove, founder and CEO of Halogen Media Group, said some pertinent things in his piece about influence metrics as they relate to traditional web publishing. I don’t want to take his opinions out of context, but he shares that Klout scoring is affecting online publishing; sites too large to be nimble and authentic are suffering. I’m fascinated with his remarks, pulled from his piece:
** “Being held to influence-measurement standards set by services such as Klout is the next blow that’s coming around the corner. Get ready for the next digital media bloodbath.
** Influence metrics will show that most big, blue-chip sites don’t have the same social influence that smaller, more authentic sites do.
** Though in its infancy, this shift to influence measurement will ultimately benefit publishers that cultivate and curate influence. I’d (Greg Shove) go so far as to call this ‘authentic media’ or the ‘authentic web,’ defined by the quality, passion and influence of their editorial and their audiences.”
Opinions about influence will vary as widely as the definitions I got to help me define public relations in the recent 15-post series done on this blog. I have invited my peers, with whom I engage every day, to provide their thoughts on defining influence.
Gini Dietrich, an extraordinary and impressive social media maven who blogs at Spin Sucks and will soon launch Spin Sucks Pro, says:
I define influence as a person or group of people who affect change around a product, service, industry, or cause. Your influencers are typically not the same as mine and vice versa. That’s why the issue of things like Klout doesn’t work because it’s not based on reality.
For instance, my Klout score is higher than Jay Leno’s, which is absolutely ridiculous because he is a household name and clearly has more influence. But, in certain circles (PR, especially), I definitely have more influence than Leno.
Finding your influencers takes a lot of hard work, time, commitment, and patience. There aren’t tools that effectively make it easy for you to find them. You have to research, dig, read, review, monitor, listen, and then do it all again to maintain the relationships. The only way to measure that is to benchmark what you are asking the influencers to do against your business goals. It’s the only way.
I’m eager and excited to see how this goes! With that comes a hearty thank you and sincere gratitude for your contributions here to make this blog come alive more each day. I appreciate everyone for visiting, sharing, and ‘raderie.
(Image: ShoutMeLoud)
The concept of influence is very interesting: are we able to be influenced, or open to be influenced if we’re not already in a state of readiness or preparedness to do so? Can I influence someone’s opinion, actions or behaviour of there isn’t already an underlying propensity to BE influenced?
If someone’s a “my mind’s made up, don’t bother me with facts” type, then I don’t think any amount of persuasion, cogent argument, facts or scintillating personality will influence. These are the people with whom we should smile, nod and carry on with our day.
If, however, someone is open-minded, eager to hear many sides to a story, and puts stock into those they “know, like and trust”, then the ability to influence their actions, behaviours and opinions is heightened.
I also believe there’s a “crowd influence” factor…that if enough people buy into something, we can be a little like sheep…willing to be influenced and follow, because so many others are already on the band wagon.
How to measure influence? Both Mark and Gini make interesting points, but key to both is measurement. I also believe that every person we come into contact with is a champion, ambassador, client, customer, connector, supplier or causal link…sometimes more than one of those:). And in each case, they are influencers. We’re marketing 24/7, and like the old shampoo commerical, we want 1 person to tell 2 people to tell 2 people…and so on, and so on…
So, although the measurement tools may be seen as readily available or difficult to find, if we take both a quantitative and qualitative approach to measurement, and see everyone we come into contact with as a potential “influencer”, I think that’s a pretty good way to keep and grow a sphere of influencers and influence. Just my two cents. Cheers! Kaarina
Uhmm, that’s more like a $US1 worth, Kaarina, and well worth the value; thanks for contributing. So, perhaps influence suggests the power of word-of-mouth marketing, too?
I’ll take that $US1;) Happy to contribute…WOM, regardless of the tool or vehicle, is top drawer. Looking forward to this series Jayme. Double cheers! Kaarina
Hey Jayme! Great post!
I agree with you (and the other folks) that this will change the face of marketing and development, but I think the tools are still so much in a rough form that there’s still some key stuff to get straight before they are fully adopted.
Really, the tools are great for gauging some things–they are and I believe that 100%. There is some serious potential for the way that things are looking. The potential to identify the niche influencers and find them by niche is an incredible opportunity for businesses. As marketers, if we can readily identify those influencers, it’s huge.
Still think it all goes back to the definition of influence and how/what exactly Klout is measuring. 🙂
I’ve saved your larger comments for the series, but what Gini Dietrich references in her comments in the piece correlate to yours — she’s got more influence than Jay Leno — IN PR! You’re right — there’s a whole niche marketing opportunity brewing, Aaron. Thanks!
Kaarina –
Great comment! Gotta have that qualitative stuff in there–why are they more likely to influence etc! What you asked in the first portion of your comment was huge–the propensity to be influenced. I think that’s why marketers search for the people who have the ability to influence a given niche.
Thanks, Aaron, for the lovely reply and comment: much appreciated!
I think Mark, Greg, and I are saying the same thing: Influence is based on how a person can affect another person or group of people to do something. The issue I take is with the short cuts. Sure tools like Klout give you a quick way to find someone’s influence, but when you don’t measure it against other things that person does, it’s just a short cut and you’ll be wasting time and money.
For instance, with the launch of Spin Sucks Pro, we’re looking at several different tools, Klout included, to help us decide who we will ask to review the service for us. But some it also is subjective, based on relationships we’ve built in the past three years with bloggers and media. That’s influence. Not some tool that is used by itself.
My thoughts are moving from the idea of influence and moving to the MEASUREMENT of influence. If we’re talking about how influential a person is, we mean I guess that they have influenced some significant portion of the population – and, as Gini says with the bit about Jay Leno, it entirely depends on the population you’re discussing. If you leave that population, just how influential are you in another population? You can’t take it with you. Possibly these thoughts are a little 4/20 and I’m late on that, sorry.
Ohmygosh. Please don’t ever assume you need to be on time to this blog to comment. Everyone has a life, work etc., and the comments section is never going to disappear! You are one of my most keen supporters, Missy, and I very much appreciate all you have to contribute whenever you wish to or have the time. Thank you.
One of the things I’ve been experimenting with on Klout is wine influence. Yesterday I got an invitation, through Klout, to join Lot18 and (not unlike Gilt or Rue La La) invite my friends to join for $25 credits. I tweeted it once yesterday afternoon and four friends joined. You can measure that influence. I don’t know what kind of dollars that represents for Lot18 (nothing unless those four friends buy), but these are the ways you can begin to understand and truly measure influence.
We’re at the tip of the iceberg on this entire discussion. Knowing who is influential and knowing how to ask them to contribute their influence will be critical in our profession. It will go beyond who blogs on what and be oriented to timing, topic and behavior.
I’m not sure, but there’s something here, and my cells are working over drive pondering this.
Upon reading the comments you may or may not see in this series (as posts), it’s fascinating to read everyone’s deductions and pathway to get there about this notion of influence. Highly similar exercise to the defining PR thing, yet to provide a simplistic explanation everyone agrees with is tricky.
Influencer relations, industry analyst relations, et al in our PR circles, Gini, are critical components to overall strategy and business goals. Yet…if everyone marches down a pathway of their own definition, will we be able to counsel appropriately its significance?
Thanks for thoughts; always welcome, appreciated.
Jayme. Thanks for creating this blog post. I would encourage you to browse our blog where we are actively talking about this topic. And before anyone slams me as being a vendor and biased in my response, I’ll be forthcoming and say that our company has a great product for finding influential voices. And we have some new solutions coming out soon – so follow up closely.
The one thing I will add to this is the importance of finding and measuring influential voices by first looking for people writing / talking about the topics your audience cares about. Since you write this around the world of marketing and PR, I hope you’ll agree with me that marketing and PR professionals have been “finding influencers” forever — it’s what we used to call media relations and building highly-targeted media lists based on what we were trying to market and who was most likely to resonate with our messages and help carry them forward to the market. If we are marketing electric cars, we historically would look for people whose beats covered automobiles, alternative energy, etc, and we would ignore anyone whose beats was sports, stock derivatives, etc unless we could find an angle which should include these beats.
In the world we live in today, that premise of “find influential voices based on their [beats]” is still true, but beats are more and more irrelevant today, and it’s far more important to find the voices who are topically relevant (talking about the things our target market cares about (ie: electric cars)), and then measure the influence those voices are having.
And the neat thing about this is that no person ever has one single score we can use to determine their ability to help us market. Instead, we believe passionately that done correctly, each person / voice has multiple influence scores based on the topic we care about. So to use my former example, I might be highly influential on the topic of “electric cars”, and have no influence whatsoever on the topic of “stock derivatives”. It’s only by searching for influential voices around each topic we care about that we can truly find the influential voices who can help us in our marketing and PR efforts.
I welcome the discussion here on Influence. It’s a powerful topic. And while I believe much of this “new” art of influence scoring is really not new and instead rooted in the methods we’ve used in marketing forever, the methods to do this are new, complex and must be able to sift through massive amounts of data (tweets, status updates, blogs and articles) to find the voices most influential on a topic.
Please keep the blogs coming. I welcome a chance to discuss this topic with you and your audience.
Gary Lee
CEO, mBLAST
mPACT Produce page: https://www.mblast.com/mpact
Our Blog: https://blog.mblast.com/mbwordpress/
Gosh, darn. I had a whole reply and then I went to look at your site and now I need to try and capture my thoughts again!
Thanks for coming here, Gary! Not only are “vendors” valued but highly necessary to the discussion about online behavior, successful measurement and “mpact!” So, please always consider this a “friendly” for you!
Am wanting to invite your permission to repurpose your comments here on my other blog The SMB Collective. You raise some great points, and when I see someone taking such time to post an in-depth comment as you have, I’d like to kind of pay it forward, if you will. Please advise if that’s OK?
To the matter at hand — influence. We’re at the tip of the iceberg, I believe, on this topic. Looks to me you’re highly aware, otherwise you’d not have created your product around this theme. I’m going to look deeper into it — if you’d like to guest post to the PR people who follow me here, please consider it, too.
Scoring influence is different than measuring it. How we rate an influencer should be more like it…this week, many peoples’ perspectives are being offered — some think it’s an emotion; others think it’s a cause and effect. Either way, it’s reality.
Thanks. I would be honored if you wish to re-purpose what I wrote for your blog. And I would welcome a guest post. Contact me please at glee AT mblast.com to discuss timing.
Welcome a chance to continue the discussions. This is a very fascinating area for PR, Marketing, etc. There is unfortunately some hype, but the more I have a chance to talk to professionals and we really dissect what is and is not influence (and how you measure, score, rank, rate, tattoo scores (joking)) I find there is far more common ground and roots in things we’ve done in marketing for a very long time that are proven. So let’s talk, blog, debate, etc. I welcome it!
grl