I have written about online influence earlier.
Today, I stumbled on a post by Shonali (On influence in public relations and social media) on this topic where she refers to 3 specific points,
- it’s not how many people or who you know – it is who knows you
- most current influence scores are numbers without context and
- merely following numbers is pointless.
I agree with her points completely, but would like to add some context to that. In a way, these points are an evolution in my own thought process on what I wrote about online influence, earlier – The holy grail of online influence vs. our current measurement limitations, while accepting those limitations, allowing for a fair degree of generalizations and looking at things from a different perspective.
1. Real world influence vs. online world influence
Increasingly, I believe we need to differentiate between the way we define influence in the real world and in the online world. Why do I say this? Because, in the real world, influence may not be scaled up in massive proportions due to several limitations – the same thing goes massively huge online since most of those limitations are overcome.
Picking the phone and having a conversation with someone to get something done is perfectly fine, but that is essentially a one-to-one communication. At best, humanly, we can scale it up as many people we have the contact numbers of and as many we can speak within the time we have in hand. Is that influence? Of course, it is.
But, can the same be compared to a tweet? Of course not – you do not tweet to each person, individually. If you do, your followers would consider it as spam; there’s a reason why email spam exists. You can always DM all of them, but that is nothing but using DM in place of a phone call.
The point? That influence may need to be seen differently in a predominantly one-to-one situation vs. one-to-many and many-to-many situation, online.
You may ask – what about public speaking? Isn’t that one-to-many, in real life? Don’t politicians demonstrate their influence during a public address? Yes of course, they do, but consider the other HUGE difference – the online medium allows for two way conversation. Obvious question – don’t people ask question during a public address? If the crowd is manageably small, perhaps yes – otherwise, it is bound to be an insanely impossible task.
2. Who we know in real life vs who knows us in the online world
I could make a list of people who I know, in real life. And, I can make a reasonably calculated guess about the kind of people who know me in real life.
The same thing online? The former – I can still make that list, but it is bound to huge – it could perhaps be an aggregate of the people I follow on assorted social networks. The latter? That’s where the real world limitations set in. I have absolutely no idea how many people read my blog or my tweets. My follower count is only a small starting point. I had written a post to illustrate this fact, in my other blog, where I’ve been reviewing Indian film soundtracks for about 5+ years and where I seem to exert a LOT more influence! So, the ‘it is who knows you’ part, while being perfectly valid, becomes all that more difficult to quantify.
And when it comes to quantifying such topics, we naturally tend to depend on past data – so, that seems like a fair assumption to extrapolate future/overall influence. Where I do have a problem is the fact that most of these are way too heavily dependent on Twitter. What else can explain my Klout being higher than Seth Godin’s?
3. The marketing need for influence is vastly different from human needs of influence
Human influence needs could largely be about ego. Marketing needs could be more about a transaction, involving money, in many cases.
Let me explain with an example. If I have a friend looking for employment, I could most definitely connect her with an appropriate person in an organization where I seem to extert influence at the right level and help her out. Do I get something in return? Nothing…except gratitude and happiness, for my friend.
What would a brand need, ideally, out of influence? Spreading the word, recommendations and testimonials, if you ignore the most obvious, buying their product/service. Those 3 may not involve a transaction, but just think about why brands need those. Simple – it is to put them to further use and display it to people who know me and get them converted through me. Advertising did it using one-way communication, but, in the two-way social medium, brands are forced to create ways to enable one-to-one communication in the fastest and easiest way to make them scalable to reach large numbers. Result? Facebook ‘Like’ and ‘Retweet’, just to quote two examples. So, it’s no wonder current influence mining players depend more on those metrics to deduce online influence.
We have no doubt trivialized influence, from what it used to be, to what it is, in the aftermath of social media. But that in itself is not all that bad…it just is different from what we know of that word. It’s purpose has perhaps changed, quite understandably.
It is all about scale and scaling up, now – scale changes and dilutes a lot of things. And is also about the awareness of who is likely to perform things for the sake of demonstrating influence and consciously want to increase influence (that should explain why Justin Bieber is more influential than Dalai Lama), as a result. Those traits are, if you still haven’t noticed, are marketing’s holy grail.
That lovely Pied Piper art is from FineArtAmerica.