The Myth of Digital Influence

THE MYTH OF DIGITAL INFLUENCE

ROHN JAY MILLER

THIRSTY?

The Most Interesting Man in the World must be very influential, yes?

The Big Influencer TheoryBernardo Huberman, Director of HP’s Social Computing Lab:

“Businesses have a finite amount of money and time; therefore, they must identify the most connected people they can to help expand their reach.

In social networks, brands can connect with everyday people who are the celebrities of their networks. The value to businesses is that they can have access to the respective Rolodexs of consumers and reward them as a result.”

(source: The Rise of Digital Influence, by Brian Solis with Alan Weber, Altimeter Group, March 2012)

YOU ARE THIRSTY

As old media fragments “reach and frequency” have been replaced by the hunt within social networks for “scale” by reaching “influentials.”

Research is beginning to find that “big influentials” theory doesn’t work. We share in many small networks of 5-10 people—not massive waves influenced by “influentials.” Oops.

Source: AdAge 3/7/12 Digital Next, Steinberg and Krawczyk

Source: “Influence and Passivity in Social Media,” by Romero, Galuba, Asur, Huberman 8/2010 HP Social Computing Lab

Big shot “influentials” reach many people, but with little influence. And look at the list below who really has influence—re-tweet contests, Twitsdraw, yada, yada

HOW DO WE MEASURE INFLUENCE?

Klout is for Clowns. It says people who tweet and are re-tweeted are “influentials.” But there’s no science to back this up.

I’ve got strong opinions on Klout because of the publicity (and credibility) they’re getting. The mission of Klout is to have a $500 million IPO using a simplistic proxy for “influence.” Influence about what? With whom? Where’s the attribution model? BTW, when I post at Social Media Today in the first hour I’ll get 400 “reads” and 325 re-tweets. What’s happening? People are RT’ing without reading just to pump the value of their Twitter feed—and get a better Klout score. OMG.

Klout’s “influence matrix” describes the 16 types of influencers in its model. But there’s *no* reward for creating, only for passing along other people’s stuff and getting others to RT that.

RADIAN 6Real social “listening” platforms like Radian6 are working with keyword analysis, and beginning to add early forms of sentiment analysis. Still early in the game.

Source: Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010

DACHIS

A big step up is the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index, which is using NLP to evaluate a massive “big data” scale of social messages for 30,000 companies, including 40% of the Fortune 500

DACHIS

Here you can see the social behaviors that distinguishes between public, the company, employees and so on.

We live in a society obsessed with measurement, but the act of measuring often means that the thing being measured becomes illusive..But what's happening here isn't just measurement: it's trying to leverage measurement to do something.

That's where it loses its role as a measurement process.

--danah boyd, Microsoft Research(source: The Rise of Digital Influence, by Brian Solis with Alan Weber, Altimeter Group, March 2012)

HEISENBERG’S UNCERTAINTYPRINCIPLE

DIRECTION

POSITION

We measure what we can measure, not necessarily what is valuable to measure. And it’s hard. Really hard. Sometimes we can really measure social memes, but can’t attribute them. Other times we can see people are popular, not to what effect.

TIME CONTEXT MOOD RELATIONSHIP

Look at all the variables!

IT’S ALL HIS FAULT

Source: “Visualizing The Tipping Point,” David Armano, Logic + Emotion blog, 2006

“The Tipping Point” has become the dominant marketing ideology. When social media rose, we naturally transferred Gladwell’s model into social media, without knowing if it was really true. OMG.

(source: The Rise of Digital Influence, by Brian Solis with Alan Weber, Altimeter Group, March 2012)

Brian Solis has done some serious thinking found in his recent “The Rise of Digital Influence.” Here’s his model. The center post is labeled “resonance,” which I think really is another way of saying “greatness.”

This should be

“GREATNESS”

SEXY

TREND

ZEITGEIST

NOVELTY

ARTISTICQUALITY

SOCIALSIGNIFICANCE

PERSONALSIGNIFICANCE

HUMOUR

EMPATHY

AFFIRMATION

Here’s a short list of qualities that make a person—or a tweet—influential.

What’s great, resonant messaging? It has the qualities I just listed. Usually 3-4 of them at the same time. Here’s an example. I think we have this “influence” problem backwards. We focus on the architecture of the problem, measuring it, Influentials Theory, trying to make it a system that will scale. We need to focus on resonant (great) messages that engage people. I give you Jerry the Dog, and his 7.5 Million views on You Tube: (Click to see his video.)

Think & discuss

• Measure digital social influence

• Affect digital social influence

• Coordinate between digital & offline

• Create resonant brand communications

rohnjaymiller.com