Influence

Beyond Social Scoring – The Situational Factor of Influence

If you thought influence marketing was a hot topic at the moment for marketers and brands, it?s only just beginning to really take shape.

While much of the conversation both here on this blog and across various networks has concentrated on where social influence is today, this is a just the prelude to where influence marketing will be tomorrow and beyond.

In the next few weeks,?our book will be released?and we?re excited to share the concepts and methodologies that we?ve come up with in both our research for the book as well as real-life case studies we?re documenting with our clients, using our framework.

Our goal with the book is simple ? while early movers in the social influence space have provided a starting point for brands to understand this tactic, the real business value requires actions and solutions that go deeper than a score and an ?influencer? based on amplification and popularity.

Additionally, online influence is just one component of a very large picture, and only paints a small part of that same picture. Let?s talk about that a little more today.

Decisions Based on Limited Information

Social influence data as it stands today is based primarily on one core metric: public social profiles and footprints. So if you have your Twitter account set to public, then companies like Klout and Kred will create you a ?profile? and allocate you a score, based on their algorithm.

If you sign up and connect your other accounts, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, the score will change, since these companies now have more information about you. So far, so good.

The problem comes when the accounts aren?t set to public, or you have different privacy settings for different accounts. So, Twitter and Google+ may be public, but Facebook may be primarily for friends, so your sharing method on that network is very different.

But let?s say it?s these private conversations where the decisions on the majority of the choices you make are made, when it comes to making a purchase.

These choices are the ones that are defining the influence factor at that time:

Is it situational, where your current situation (financial, need for a product or service, etc) comes into play?
Is it emotional, where the desire for something outweighs the logic of not actually needing it?
Is it personal, where your partner/wife/husband puts the foot down and says no?

These are three simple factors that can?t be measured directly ? and yet they have a direct impact on you as a person, because they influence your decision.

Because this process isn?t measured by public scoring algorithms, it can lead to distortion of data when measuring a brand influencer program.

You may have initially shown positive signs of interest in a new product launch, as featured on an influential blog, and that would go down as a success metric. But the truth is, the real influence was exerted when the situation came into play in your private conversation(s).

It?s this missed data that (currently) limits the reporting metrics on some of today?s platforms.

The Offline Influence Equation

Another part of this equation is the fact that most influence platforms don?t take into account what happens offline ? they simply measure online noise and conversations.

While this approach still allows for a lot of data to be collated about someone and their influence, as well as who and what influences them in return, it?s still only half the big picture.

As Pierre-Loic Assayag mentioned when we interviewed him about?the approach his Traackr platform takes, imagine trying to decide a large bank loan with only half the financial information about a person available to you ? you just wouldn?t make that call.

In fairness, this limitation is being recognized by the influence platform developers. Kred, for example, allows you to upload your offline achievements (although they don?t validate them so you could still upload false information), while Appinions measures reactions and opinions from traditional media as well as online publications.

However, as much as we try and measure how offline decisions impact measurable public conversations online, there?s still the question of what truly impacted the decision to take an action or decide to pass at this moment in time?

To get to that stage, we need to move beyond just public personas when it comes to influence, and begin to look at the macro and micro influencer level, and where they sit in the influence circle around each of us.

In the next few weeks, we?ll be doing just that. We look forward to sharing with you.

A version of this post originally appeared on the official Influence Marketing blog.

Moving Influence Beyond Public Personas

If you thought influence marketing was a hot topic at the moment for marketers and brands, it’s only just beginning to really take shape.

In the next few weeks, our book will be released and we’re excited to share the concepts and methodologies that we’ve come up with in both our research for the book as well as real-life case studies we’re documenting with our clients, using our framework.

Our goal with the book is simple – while early movers in the social influence space have provided a starting point for brands to understand this tactic, the real business value requires actions and solutions that go deeper than a score and an “influencer” based on amplification and popularity.

Additionally, online influence is just one component of a very large picture, and only paints a small part of that same picture. Let’s talk about that a little more today.

Decisions Based on Limited Information

Social influence data as it stands today is based primarily on one core metric: public social profiles and footprints. So if you have your Twitter account set to public, then companies like Klout and Kred will create you a “profile” and allocate you a score, based on their algorithm.

If you sign up and connect your other accounts, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, the score will change, since these companies now have more information about you. So far, so good.

The problem comes when the accounts aren’t set to public, or you have different privacy settings for different accounts. So, Twitter and Google+ may be public, but Facebook may be primarily for friends, so your sharing method on that network is very different.

But let’s say it’s these private conversations where the decisions on the majority of the choices you make are made, when it comes to making a purchase.

These choices are the ones that are defining the influence factor at that time:

Is it situational, where your current situation (financial, need for a product or service, etc) comes into play?
Is it emotional, where the desire for something outweighs the logic of not actually needing it?
Is it personal, where your partner/wife/husband puts the foot down and says no?

These are three simple factors that can’t be measured directly – and yet they have a direct impact on you as a person, because they influence your decision.

Because this process isn’t measured by public scoring algorithms, it can lead to distortion of data when measuring a brand influencer program.

It’s this missed data that (currently) limits the reporting metrics on some of today’s platforms.

The Offline Influence Equation

Another part of this equation is the fact that most influence platforms don’t take into account what happens offline – they simply measure online noise and conversations.

While this approach still allows for a lot of data to be collated about someone and their influence, as well as who and what influences them in return, it’s still only half the big picture.

As Pierre-Loic Assayag mentioned when we interviewed him about the approach his Traackr platform takes, imagine trying to decide a large bank loan with only half the financial information about a person available to you – you just wouldn’t make that call.

In fairness, this limitation is being recognized by the influence platform developers. Kred, for example, allows you to upload your offline achievements (although they don’t validate them so you could still upload false information), while Appinions measures reactions and opinions from traditional media as well as online publications.

However, as much as we try and measure how offline decisions impact measurable public conversations online, there’s still the question of what truly impacted the decision to take an action or decide to pass at this moment in time?

In the next few weeks, we’ll be doing just that. We look forward to sharing with you.

Can the Everyday Influencer Still Exist?

Earlier this month, Twitter published an article on their developer blog, about new metadata being added to the Twitter API. There were two additions – one to help identify the language of a tweet, while the other was the ability to allow developers to “rank” tweets.

This second addition is of particular interest when it comes to influence marketing, and how we identify influencers, since – in our opinion – it offers the potential to further dilute the ability to truly connect relevant influencers and advocates to the brands that are looking to work with them.

Now, in fairness, Twitter hasn’t divulged exactly how the ranking ability may work, apart from the option to possibly gauge tweets by a “none”, “low”, “medium” and “high” rank. It may be there’s a lot more context to the way the API will identify these tweets.

However, in the meantime, the worry is that true influence, yet again, is being demoted to nothing more than an algorithmic rank with no real context behind it. When this happens, it takes us back to the “influencer elite” we’ve talked about on here previously.

Which begs the question, can the everyday influencer still exist?

The Grading of the Social Web

It’s not just Twitter that’s taking this approach. Take a look at Google and the importance they’re placing on their Authorship Markup algorithm. Or Facebook with its ever-changing algorithm that places more emphasis on paying for a Sponsored Story to have your content seen, versus organic appearance in a feed.

There’s no doubt that the social web is becoming an arena of rank and perceived import – yet questions remain as to the validity of the import when it’s based on how well you play with a platform’s rules.

For example, let’s say you don’t have Google Authorship enabled on your blog or website, yet you write a fantastic white paper on the origins of mankind that challenges everything we’ve believed until now.

When someone searches for “the origins of mankind” on Google, your expertise would (should) probably be the one that people should read. Yet because someone with less expertise utilizes the Authorship Markup script, they actually appear more reverential than you for that particular search.

The same goes with Twitter’s new API. Let’s say they base their authority score on the amount of retweets and engagement a tweet receives. While this is a good starting point, it lacks the more important aspects of context, perception and situation at the time.

This is particularly true when large events are happening.

Let’s say someone uses the hashtag for the Oscars to post an asinine comment about the price of popcorn at their local 7-Eleven. It gets 1,000 reweets and 500 favourites. That may appear as a high scoring tweet based on the new API.

But does it have the context of an Empire Magazine journalist in the UK only getting 20-30 retweets as he/she live-tweets from the UK? Doesn’t their expertise in the movie arena make them more authority-driven?

This is the problem with grading importance based on reactions versus instilling a true action – the sign of an influential impact. It also changes the very fabric of influence – no bad thing on its own, but when it comes to trying to clear the muddied waters of the last few years, it can add to the confusion.

Which brings us back to the topic of this post.

The Everyday Influencer and Where They Fit Today

One of the criticisms levied at influence marketing today is the lack of results for brands using the medium. And that’s a fair criticism.

This can be attributed to several things – generic social scores with no real relevance to the brand in question; lack of understanding and education on the brand’s behalf; and the gamification of social media channels to be seen as someone of influence.

Whatever the reason, influence has undergone some drastic changes in the last few years when compared to Carnegie’s view, and not always for the better. The biggest impact this has had is in nullifying true individual influence, the kind that brands really want – and need – to connect with.

Activity and popularity online has led to people being seen as influencers, when the true influencers – the ones not worried about social scoring and perceived ranking – are the ones that should be the ones being identified.

These “everyday influencers” are finding themselves marginalized because they’re not playing to a computational score; nor are their hands being tied by a search engine’s goal of making you use all their products to be seen as relevant.

The problem is, these are exactly the people brands should be connecting with. They’re the advocates; the consumer marketers; the people who truly have the ear of those that make a difference when it comes to the purchase cycle of their friends, colleagues and peers.

As public scoring and authority plays continue to evolve and find bigger footholds across the web, the question becomes:

Can the everyday influencer still exist, when the games being played to “be” one nullify results based on much deeper questions?

We believe so. In May, we’ll show you why and, more importantly, how.

Influence Marketing Survey for Marketing and PR Pros

Social media has opened many opportunities for businesses, such as direct communications with customers and prospects, peer-to-peer support groups, improved customer service channels and real-time reputation management.

This new communication channel has proven valuable to the sales, marketing, customer service and PR functions of businesses large and small.

Yet, as more consumers grow their social graphs, access social networks through mobile devices and engage in more brand discussions online, the increased noise has also added many new challenges.

Influence Marketing Today

Among the social media marketing tools created to better manage and drive greater value from this over-populated communication channel are social influence scoring applications.

They?re designed to collect and analyze a person?s social media activity in order to determine the influence he/she has over others on various topics, and then use that person as a conduit to deliver a recommendation or brand advertisement to prospective customers.

As the public?s penchant for social media communications grows, these tools have become more popular with new start-ups joining the fray every few months.

Yet this growth has not been without a fair amount of criticism regarding the accuracy, methodology and ethics of those providing the service and those who participate in their scoring programs.

However, both advocates and pundits agree that we?re just at the beginning of this growing marketing practice. A lot of growth is still expected and required among software providers and marketers alike.? Still, the question remains: in what direction will it go?

The Next Wave of Influence Marketing

Sensei Marketing and ArCompany have partnered on an initiative that seeks to better understand the attitudes and forecasts of surrounding this hot topic.

The first part of this effort is survey of international marketers and public relations professionals, which will provide additional data for a planned whitepaper on the future of influence marketing.

If you work in marketing or PR ? as a consultant, for an agency or employed by a brand directly ? we invite you to participate in this short online survey.

It?s completely confidential and takes less than 5 minutes to complete. The data collected and the subsequent analysis will be shared publicly in a whitepaper to be released this spring.

Go to the survey >>

Note: No personal information collected during the completion this survey will be sold, shared or made public at any time.

Influence Marketing: A Business Book for the Next Wave of Influence

This is a cross post with the Influence Marketing blog.

Since Sam and I announced our book at the end of last year, many people have asked us one primary question about it:

Is it for people looking to increase their social score, or is it something different?

The one sentence answer to that is fairly simple:

This isn’t a book about improving your social score; instead, as you’ll see below, this is a business book around the topic of influence and how it shapes marketing as well as other business verticals.

While today’s influence market is (arguably) led by social scoring platforms, we see things very differently.

We’ve already shared where we see the future of influence marketing and which platforms will be leading the way.

With regards the audience best-suited to the book and what it offers, below is the full overview.