Seth, clout and online influence

Seth summarises the primary lure of online measures of influence (which I’m equating with his term ‘clout’). If someone was able to parse the trillions of data points online… If someone could identify which people had influence… If we knew where the big idea would come from…

Aye, there’s the rub. The strength of online sources, the sheer volume of data, is its greatest weakness. The difficulty is searching the data for the needles in a haystack the size of a planet.

There’s no doubt that the promise of online measures of influence is hugely tempting. But my sense is that it is also unobtainable, at least in the short term.

This over-stated and under-delivered promise is worrying me increasingly, as it’s being pitched as a shortcut to understanding influence. At bst it shos the tip of the influence iceberg. The real danger is that it creates a skewed view of the totality of influential people, ignoring offline influencers.

Influencer50 will be issuing a white paper shortly discussing these issues in more detail – watch this space.

Influence doesn’t scale

Influence is not about scale – it’s about focus. Unfortunately, marketers are usually of a mindset that drives them towards ever larger numbers of people, as Seth explains.

One of my clients is obsessed with market reach – how many people can we get to? This ignores what happens when you get to them, and if you mess that up the scale becomes your enemy.

There are plenty of people with big market reach and little influence. Most bloggers and many journalists are examples of this. There are also plenty of people with low reach and lots of influence. Academics and sourcing advisors are examples here.

Understanding influencers is about using a rifle rather than a shotgun to target the key individuals. Scattershot approaches may be more familiar and comforting but they are measures of activity, not effectiveness.

Social real-world engagement

Bit of a continuation from my earlier post on Marketing Obsolescence. It continually bothers me that so much emphasis is being placed on engagement via social media technology, to the exclusion of debate and discussion on engagement in the real world.

Now, there’s no doubt that social media (such as this blog) provide a means to engage to a wide audience, and for some it has made all the difference (Seth, Hugh, James Governor, etc). I like to think that the successful bloggers would have been successful consultants or journalists or artists or whatever. In other words, social media happens to the media of choice for talented people. (It’s also the media of choice for untalented people, which is why the majority of blogs are lousy…)

Successful bloggers are successful because they say intelligent, insightful or sensible things. Their ability to communicate effectively is the core competence. The medium is blogging, but it needn’t be.

I guess I get concerned when social media gets colonised by those seeking shortcuts to a mass audience. Seth blogged on this very subject recently. It’s the very lack of friction that makes email and twitter so usable, and so quick to be colonised by spammers.

Forrester raves about the growth in social media marketing, yet I think marketers are missing a trick by not focusing on social real world engagement in parallel. Often the attraction is scale – you can certainly contact many more people by email than you can talk to face-to-face. But ask any sales person if they’d rather sell by email or by looking in their prospect’s eye, and there’s no competition. Face-to-face contact will always win.

Similarly, professional advisers are most effective (ie most influential) when they deliver their advice face-to-face. Importantly, this means actually looking into the eyes of the adviser, not just seeing their face on stage or a projected screen.

I’m absolutely in favour of social media, as this blog, our email newsletter and the new LinkedIn group testifies. But let’s not let the pendulum swing too far away from real world engagement.

Decision-making

I’ve been away, hence the lack of posts. But there’s nothing like a Seth pearl of wisdom to reinvigorate my blogging. His recent post on making decisions quickly is spookily mindful of the book I’ve just read (at the poolside). The Decisive Moment by Jonah Lehrer describes how, in certain situations, it’s better to decide quickly*. Strangely, these situations are often the high value ones with multiple criteria to consider.

That’s what Seth alludes to – making decisions that otherwise stop you from acting are high value (to your career, business, etc).

Lehrer says that decisions involving many data points actually confuse decision makers, so they focus on relatively unimportant issues. Like cup holders in cars, rather than mpg or emissions. That extra bedroom in a new prpoerty, rather than the hour-long commute (been there, done that…).

What Lehrer also says, however, is that there are decisions where knowledge, expertise and analysis is required.

The trick is knowing when to use what approach.

*The front cover has a raised plastic button with the words “Don’t Press” on it. Everybody presses. Why is this?

The opposite of influence…

…is demonization (according to Seth).

Seth in London – photos

Believe me, I’ll shut up abut Seth soon. Just need to get it out of my system…

Here are some photos taken by the official photographer, Claes Gellerbrink. We also took some more informal photos, which are on Flickr, and in the side bar of this blog.

Sethisms – 3

“Shun the non-believers”

This has been my personal mantra for the past two years, and which has seen me and Influencer50 deal with detractors and naysayers of the ‘Influencer’ model. Sometimes it’s easier to shun the non-believers than to try to convert them. Our market has never been “everyone” – we’re only interested in those that recognise the need to change.

(Seth used “Shun the non-believers” in his London Session, and referred frequently to the concept in Tribes. I first read it in a Seth post here – one of those moments when someone else writes the words to express exactly how you’re feeling).

Sethisms – 2

“People get angry because I’m not on Twitter. I’d lose 6 hours every day if I was on Twitter.”

I was there..

… at the London Session.

Duncan Brown, Seth Godin, Nick Hayes

Sethisms – 1

Marketing: “Getting someone to do something that, afterwards, they’re happy they did it.”