Oh, What A Mess: If there's one single area where an overwhelming number of professionals (in social media) are flat out wrong, it's in the area of influence, and the related topics of trust and credibility. One reason this is the case is that there are few social media professionals with any understanding of Psychology or related disciplines that could be used to inform the endeavor to understand how influence works. And trust. And credibility. Hence we have the ridiculousness of companies trying to "measure" influence or identify who in the social media world has influence, and other companies adopting their ill-thought out ideas.
It's always possible to take an existing word, then redefine it to suit one's purpose. Such is the case with influence, where companies like Klout have redefined influence in terms of the variables that are possible to measure, rather than to measure meaningful variables. That mistake, coupled with a lack of understanding regarding the context boundedness of influence makes the whole thing worse than useless.
One solution: Stop talking about influence, and start being more detailed. Replace the one word with the phrase "Ability to influence people to..."
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Top : Influence - Trust and Credibility: Trust, influence and credibility are the foundation of any social media use for business. Learn more.
Articles:Tapping The Power of Persuasion - by KATHERINE BOURZACIf you compulsively check Facebook, you are not alone, and your behavior, says B. J. Fogg, is no accident. In his role as director of the Persuasive Technology Laboratory at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Fogg studies how technology influences behavior. As a consultant to corporations and organizations, he teaches how to design persuasive technologies, those designed to modify behavior without coercion. And as an educator, he's taught many people who now work at Facebook and Google or who have founded other Silicon Valley startups that rely in large part on the power of persuasion. (Added: 30-Nov-2010 Hits: 119 ) 10 Free Tools to Identify Online Influencers - by BEN COTTON Much of what is written about influencers on social media is wrong, something that will be explained in a series of articles on my blog, but if you want to get it wrong, and waste time, here's a good start (useful if you subscribe to a faulty set of assumptions.) (Added: 19-Aug-2010 Hits: 295 ) Social Media Influence: Disconnected Metric - by na Since "social media influence" is a poorly conceived concept, even better research about it is almost useless. In any event, this is interesting. "What is social media influence? Can it be measured? Daniel Romero, a Ph.D candidate at Cornell University, in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Lab, studied about five week’s worth of tweets and drew some conclusions, including: “Having a large number of followers does not imply having influence in news social media. Furthermore, not having a large number of followers does not mean lack of influence.” Romero’s piece, Twitter is Linked to Quality of Content And Not Quantity of Followers, appeared yesterday on Tom Foremski’s excellent Silicon Valley Watcher blog. Romero cites the changing role of mainstream media and the recognition that traditional media outlets must get into the social media game." (Added: 5-Feb-2011 Hits: 77 ) Why social media gurus should be trampled by elephants - by Alex Bom Several weeks ago I wrote that social media is not new. I only partially called out the pony, rainbow and unicorn practitioners though. I've been doing the Twitter' for years now and social media gurus there is what teenage girls once were to Myspace. Worse, these gurus claim to be offering professional services.If I had my say they would all be trampled by elephants. So, without further ado, here are my top 5 reasons your social media guy needs to be trampled by an elephant. (Added: 29-Aug-2010 Hits: 203 ) Why Social Media Metrics Are Dangerous - by Robert Bacal heoretically, if you COULD measure real influence, you'd have something. But you can't. The people talking about social media influence should really know better, because the concepts are simple. Influence, the ability to affect user behavior has TWO distinct components. (Added: 17-Aug-2010 Hits: 356 ) Measuring Social Media Influence Versus Popularity - by Jason Breed If you read this article, be alert to the confusion between online influence, and influence that causes changes in what people do offline. From the site: Am I looking for popularity or influence? It's almost a quality vs. quantity. Do companies or individuals actually understand the difference?Marketers have been conditioned to grow brands by popularity over the years. Show enough TV spots and billboards, add a catchy tagline and consumers will recall your brand when they are in stores. This has worked well for many consumer goods products for decades. Until now! In the world of push marketing where consumers had no choice but to trust what you were saying (it was your brand why would you lie?), popularity worked. If more consumers knew your name, the more you came up in general conversation, the check-out line and in your home." (Added: 26-Sep-2010 Hits: 230 ) Twitter Influence: Another Case Study - Guy Kawasaki - by Francis Unson You'd think this would be about the influence of Guy Kawasaki, and while it discusses some of what Guy does, including gaming the system to get around Twitter rules, it's not about influence at all. There is not a single reference to indicate Guy has ANY influence whatsoever in terms of reader behavior. Or anything. This is typical of the poor thinking by social media people. Atrocious. (Added: 17-Aug-2010 Hits: 297 ) White paper Influence Online - by na The catalyst behind this document was the publication of Edelman's Social Media Index in July 2007 with David Brain. This attempted to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the traditional' method of analysing a blog's inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.The white paper aims to address this issue. It is not written as a fait accompli but rather as a contribution to the conversation. In the true spirit of social media, the roundtable and consequently this white paper, discussed far more than the original question regarding how to measure online influence but also focused on the several complementary areas. (Added: 4-Sep-2010 Hits: 295 )
Pages Updated On:
16-Nov-2011
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