The most important question about influence

It’s not about who has the influence.

The question is, influence on whom?

Most studies of influencers are lists of important or high profile people. Fair enough, except there is no discussion on the scope of their influence. What decisions are impacted by their influence? How can you tap into their influence? Are these influencers influencing my customers?

Here’s another example of a nicely researched and presented example, this time looking at the top 50 influential bloggers (allegedly). Have a look through, then count how many bloggers on list do you think are influencing your target market today. My prediction is, not many.

If you start Influencer Marketing by looking for people you think are influential you end up missing the point. It’s not for you to decide.

Instead, put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Who are they listening to? What do they read? Who are they following? My expereince is that you can only do this by asking them.

Otherwise, you’re just guessing, and probably guessing wrongly.

Top 50 Influencers in VoIP – Not!

There are two ways to identify influencers. You can guess, or you can conduct a thorough market research exercise. No prizes for spotting the one with credibility and accuracy.

The trouble with market research is that everyone thinks they can do it. There’s scant attention paid to sample sizes and confidence intervals. (There’s a funny example of this on The World’s Leading… ). But it’s better than guessing.

The result of guessing will look something like that which VoIP-News has developed – there’s a copy here.

Some fundamental mistakes are made – I thought use VoIP-News as an example to explain why guessing misses the mark.

There is no sense of how the ranking has been arrived at. In fact, it’s not really a ranking at all. Instead, groups of influencer types are listed, with important (but obvious) firms or individuals within each grouping. So if you wanted to prioritise an influencer outreach program, where would you start? This list gives you no clues.

The list contains firms and people that influence the VoIP industry. It is a supply-side list. So what? The people that influence a market most are buyers – they fund everything else. Where is the buyer orientation in the list? It’s completely absent. There are no end-user firms represented, or user groups.

What’s the subject of the study, anyway? Is it enterprise-strength VoIP or consumer focused? They are two different markets, with different technologies and different customers. Cisco would blanch at being compared with Skype.

Who would buyers buy from? Big companies buy direct, but most buyers buy through channel – which are not represented in the list. Channel players are often huge influencers in technology markets.

There are no independent trusted advisers. Where are the analyst firms? Where are the management consulting firms and niche consultants?

There’s no representation from academia – I’d have thought VoIP would be under study, to research its productivity and low-cost claims.

When the list reaches number 40, desperation creeps in. Wikipedia as an influencer? Oh please.

Finally, there are no surprises. Research usually springs a couple of outlyers that are counter-intuitive (at least on first analysis). VoIP-News’s list is predictable, which means it’s incomplete.

This kind of list can be positioned as a bit of fun – fair enough. Or it could be used to inform a marketing and channel strategy, in which case it’s dangerous.

Silicon’s Top 50 CIOs

I’m not a fan of top 50 lists. I think they are usually meaningless and pointless, naming obvious people in obvious companies.

Not so the silicon.com Top 50 CIOs. This identifies the top IT executives in the UK, across private and public organisations. The list makes interesting reading, including less obvious organisations such as Oxfam and Hampshire County Council.

As I recall, the average tenure of a CIO is around 18 months, so the chaps (and they’re almost all male) must appreciate some profile-building to aid the hop to their next post.

In the meantime, I pity them. The number of unsolicited calls from eager salespeople will reach industrial proportions. The CIO community is the most sought-after group of prospects. But appearing on the list means that these CIOs are even less likely to respond to marketing in traditional forms.

silicon.com agenda setters – A pointless list?

An email from silicon.com arrived in my inbox today. The first line read “Who are the most influential individuals in the technology industry?” You can assume it got my attention.

Silicon.com publishes an annual list of agenda setters, those folks that drive the technology industry forwards. It’s always an interesting exercise, probably fun to compile and debate, much like The Times Rich List, Time magazine’s Time 100, and your own list of all-time favourite songs.

It is also, like the other lists, ultimately pointless. What decisions will be made based on the silicon.com list? Will anyone do something different, or create something new? You can’t even use it as a predictor of stock market value. The agenda setters list is irrelevant to most IT professionals.

I doubt whether I’d have bothered to blog on the list if it wasn’t for the more subtle problem with the list. It’s to do with the focus of influence. That is, who is being influenced by the influencers on the list. The answer is, most probably, other people on the list. Meg Whitman is influenced by Jack Ma, and buys Skype. Ray Ozzie is influenced by Steve Jobs, and launches Zunes. Jonathan Schwartz is influenced by Steve Jobs, and restores the fortunes of a failing company (we’ll have to see whether that story ends happily…).

Your average IT decision maker, on the other hand, is unlikely ever to make contact with Messrs Ma, Ozzie, Jobs and the other top execs named on the list. The typical IT Director is more likely to be influenced by an independent consultant you’ve never heard of. Or a trusted reseller. Or an influential blogger.

It’s the people with low profiles that carry influence at an everyday, practical level. They may not make a very exciting list. But they make the IT industry work.