Your Guide to Influence: Tools, Techniques, and Recent Conversations

This issue of The Measurement Standard includes two other articles on social media influence:

• 5 Big Things to Remember About Influence—No Matter How You Measure It
• 15 Years Measuring Influence: Lessons Learned While Herding Chickens

As Katie Paine says, influence is the buzzword for 2011. There has been a lot of new writing on the topic. To bring you up to date on who and what is influencing influence, here is a cheat sheet to lists of tools, resources, and conversations. This is not an exhaustive review; there are just too many tools, opinions, and posts. But these links are the best place to start.

Table of Contents:

• General References
• How to Measure Influence
• How to Get Influence
• Lists and Comparisions of Tools to Measure Social Influence
• Klout and the Recent Kerfluffle About its Alleged Problems
• Other Social Influence Tools in Particular
• Influence is More than Just Tools and a Number
• General Influence-Related Insights
• From The Measurement Standard

General References:

• From the 2010 IPR Summit on Measurement: Influence: What It Is & How to Measure It
•  Another list of tools, references and posts, (a lot like this one) at Doodles: Social Influence Measurement -- Tools, Resources & Commentary
• Jon Berry and Ed Keller’s book: The Influentials

How to Measure Influence:

• Katie Paine on how to determine the top 100 most important news sources for your business: How to Determine Which Influencers Matter to Your Business
• Tom Webster at Social Media Explorer: Five Ways To Improve Online Influence Measures
• Radian6 (with Chuck Hemann) ebook: Defining and Measuring Influence
• Chuck Hemann: Dazed and Confused: The Story of Online Influencer Identification 
• Don Bartholomew at Metricsman on Measuring Influence in Social Media: “...determining who has influence should be part of your audience targeting strategy, determining whether or not you are creating audience influence should be part of your measurement strategy.”
• A recent study that investigates influence in 90 million Twitter posts by 1.6 million users: Everyone’s an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter
  
• Your tweets anonymously rated by your followers: Who Gives a Tweet?

How to Get Influence:

• Marketing Profs—Content Quality (Not Quantity) Builds Social Media Influence: “Fully one-half of surveyed marketing execs say creating, posting, and sharing compelling content is the single most important action people or brands can take to increase their influence online...”
• Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, a summary: Yep, it’s a classic from 1936, but this bullet-point summary includes timeless advice, remarkably applicable to social media as well as your next cocktail party.

Lists and Comparisions of Tools to Measure Social Influence:

• Jason Falls at Social Media Explorer: The Landscape: SME’s List Of Influencer Identification Tools
• JD Lasica at Socialbrite: 14 free tools to measure your social influence
• Comms Corner— Twitter Influence Tools: Are They Useful? : “While it's fun... to analyse your Tweeting 'talents' with these tools, you're probably better off analysing the impact your brand / clients are having via this medium... as that's where the real insight / value lies.”

Klout and the Recent Kerfluffle About its Alleged Problems:

• Adriaan Pelzer at RAAK: Klout is broken: “A bit more than a month ago, I asked the question: Can you become influential on Twitter, and get a high Klout Score, merely by Tweeting a lot?”
• Geoff Livingston on 5 Primary Problems with Klout and Thoughts from Conversation with Klout CEO Joe Fernandez: “Klout certainly has its hands full... Perhaps Mr. Fernandez said it best when he said the very word influence is a lightening rod, and Klout’s algorithmic approach to determining it will always attract debate.”
• Valeria Maltoni at ConversationAgent—Why Everyone is Now Talking About Klout: “Will Klout the brand suffer the long term repercussions of succeeding in being on everyone's mind so quickly, while trying to be all things influence to all people and organizations? Will you or your business suffer because you're focusing too much on one data point and how to game grow it?”

Other Social Influence Tools in Particular:

• Jason Falls at Social Media Explorer: About mBlast: Influencer Identification Just Got A Kick In The Pants
• Shel Israel: Twitalyzer: How does it measure up?
• Twitalyzer blog on Twitalyzer and Klout

Influence is More than Just Tools and a Number:

• Valeria Maltoni at ConversationAgent— 5 Influence Traps you Must Avoid: “All this talk about tools is a major distraction from the conversation about influence. Because while tools can track what someone does, they most certainly cannot tell you why -- and why is a fundamental piece of information you need to have to understand what moves people to act....” 
• Lauren Fisher in Simply Zesty: When Bieber tops the list, is influence dead?: “...established concepts including fame, popularity and influence don’t necessarily cross over online... This means that we need to look beyond the numbers and for something more, something that truly takes into account all that we can see, track and follow through social media. It’s not about lists and numbers, it’s about actions.”

General Influence-Related Insights:

• Marc Meyer at Social Media Today On Influence and Bad Blog Posts: “Today’s online influence is overblown, overrated and diluted and can be gamed.”
• Shel Israel on Curation, Influence & Lethal Generosity: “I'm still pondering how people are influenced on the Web and I'm seeing curation as just about the most effective way to do it. Curation can guide people through the perfect storm they face when looking for stuff that is valuable and interesting to them at a particular point in time.”
• Katie Paine: Just because you are popular, doesn't mean you have any influence
• Don Bartholomew at MetricsMan on Social Media Measurement 2011: Five Things to Forget and Five Things to Learn: “...there is a big difference between motivating someone to action (e.g. retweeting your content) and motivating someone to purchase which is ultimately the type of influence many companies and brands are most interested in effecting... Creating influence – effecting someone’s attitudes, opinions and/or actions – creates impact but may or may not create ROI in the short-term.”
  

And finally, a couple of influence-related posts in The Measurement Standard:

• Charlie Osmond: “Michelle Obama’s $2.7Bn Influence”
• Influencers, Social Networks and PR Measurement

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.