5 Big Things to Remember About Influence—No Matter How You Measure It

Can’t See the Forest for the Tweets?

Other articles about influence in this issue of The Measurement Standard include:

• 15 Years Measuring Influence: Lessons Learned While Herding Chickens
• Your Guide to Influence: Tools, Techniques, and Recent Conversations

And, if you just want to learn how to determine the top 100 most important news sources for your business, here you go: “How to Determine Which Influencers Matter to Your Business.”

by Katie Delahaye Paine

With all the recent talk about measuring influence in this way or that, sometimes people aren’t seeing the forest for the tweets. No matter how you measure it, here are five things to keep in mind about Influence:

#1: Influence is more than social media.

Read Jon Berry and Ed Keller’s The Influentials and learn about how and what really influences behavior. It’s a wonderful data-driven analysis of who influences what. 

#2: Influence is not reach.

The leader in this misnaming contest is Klout, who says it wants to be the Nielsen of new media. Essentially, what they are calling “True Reach” is their version of impressions—and just as worthless. 

I applaud their ambition, but that assumes that their magic number will tell everyone how “important” a particular outlet is. The problem is that any given outlet may be important to me, but impotent in a different marketplace. And an outlet with anemic Klout scores may be incredibly influential in a niche marketplace. (Never mind the problems Klout has with bots that game the system, see “Klout Is Broken”.) For a list of recent posts discussing Klout, see  Your Guide to Influence: Tools, Techniques, and Recent Conversations.

#3: Behind all influence is action.

Influence, according to dictionary.com, is “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.”

Please note that the operational words are “produce effects.” In other words, Justin Beber may have millions of fans on Twitter, but it’s a pretty good bet that he’s never going to produce any effect on my business. The point is that influence is not reach, it’s the ability to cause action: the power to produce an effect or an outcome. 

So if you are a defense contractor and there are only 200 people on the planet that can legally buy your product, chances are it’s not the number of followers you have on Twitter that matters. What matters is that you are in some way, shape, or form reaching those 200 people and the 2000 or so people that influence them. 

#4: Behind every influencer is a real live human. 

Influence is not a list. It can’t be used like those old Bacon’s directories or MediaMap lists. Influence implies a personal, persuasive relationship between the individual and the audience being influenced. 

No IR or AR professional would dream of relying on mass emails to explain a new strategy to a financial or industry analyst. Today’s influentials are no different – in fact they are frequently the same people you used to try to influence when they were in their old media jobs.

So why suddenly, just because technology enables it, do people think they can substitute personal relationships for electronic ones? I’m not saying you necessarily have to have person-to-person or voice contact, but at the very least you need to read what the person has written or posted, and understand what gets them excited. 

If you just rely on words, you will assume that, just because this blog is called The Measurement Standard, I’m going to be interested in your new more accurate mechanical probing device. And you will get marked as spam and derided forever in the Bad Pitch Blog.

#5: Influence is not the Holy Grail. Not even the Golden Goose. 

Influence is not some magical metric that will help you measure all your results. It is not going to get you a raise or a gold star or a place on The Measurement Standard’s Honor Roll of Measurement Mavens. If defined and used appropriately it can help narrow the amount of chatter that you need to be paying attention to and help you focus your outreach efforts. For more on this, read Don Bartholmew’s excellent post Measuring Influence in Social Media.

Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements.

Comments

[BosDawg513]

Dear Measurement Standard:
Your RT functionality references @MeasurementStd which is not the correct account - yikes! The stuff you are putting out too good for this! Worse, I've come to realize that this error applies to all your articles!
Best regards,
Kevin

[Dana Todd]

#

[Dana Todd]

Sorry, slippy fingers today. I meant to say bravo Katie for calling out the truth, as usual. #5 resonates a lot, but I think it's an under-explored area. I think my issue is with the idea of "measuring" influence in general. It's more helpful, in my opinion, to *observe* influence patterns to figure out what's really going on. All of these tweet and impressions and so-called reach do count towards exposure of brands and ideas, but they're deeply insufficient for understanding actions - as you pointed out. My heart goes out to today's marketer, though, because they're incredibly overworked and under-resourced. So I can easily see them saying, "Screw it" and walking away with just the measurements that will make the CEO happy.

[Bill Paarlberg]

Thanks, Kevin. I think I fixed that. OK now?

[Ryan Peeler]

Interesting article!

Over the past few years at Lnx Research, we've been spending some time thinking about influence and the way information spreads through networks. It is truly sad to see how many people don't consider your #1 and #2 and #3 to be critically important. We agree - vast quantities of connections (friends, contacts, tweeple, etc.) mean a lot of folks may see what you write, hear what you say, or consider your thoughts, but it doesn't amount to anything if the signal to noise ratio is off. The important thing in spreading a message is to work with the signal and not the noise. In our experience, though, it's a pretty significant effort to properly clean noise and extract signals. Most marketers aren't prepared for that level of effort or cost - they'd prefer to use free and simplistic measurements like Klout and call it "done". We use social network analysis on significant but meaningful data sets, and we find that the reward is worth the heavy lifting in all cases. Your comment about lists really resonates for us; we have found repeatedly that lists are merely a byproduct of good influence analysis - the real value is in seeing the relationships and understanding how to leverage them in a strategy.

I'm linking to two of our whitepapers that describe what I'm talking about in more detail. Networks actually tell you who's important to the flow of information, and like you say, once you know who those people are, it's all about real human relationships and understanding where to go in a network to get the strongest signal. I hope these are beneficial to you and your readers, and we invite you to look outside of social media into "the real social network" of human capital:

http://www.lnxpharma.com/whitepapers/using-social-network-analysis/
http://www.lnxpharma.com/whitepapers/large-scale-social-network-analysis/

[Pswiergosz]

This was awesome. Basic, intuitive - yet many people seem to ignore these principles.

Thanks for posting