Future PR Skills 2008: Identify and Engage Influencers Online and Off

This is Part of a series: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Professional of the Future

We need to rethink who we consider influential and how we assess that influence. There are a lot of new influencers out there whose voices are amplified by technology. Understanding how that all works is critical for the communication pro of tomorrow. My graduate class at Johns Hopkins has just been exploring influence from theory to practice. We re-read Cialidini's book on Influence. That gets us back to human psychology - an area of knowledge that the PR pro of the future needs a deeper knowledge of. What motivates each of us to listen and act based upon what others do and say? That path is the key to developing new, more meaningful metrics than what the entire advertising industry, itself, is based upon (e.g. "reach x frequency" as in the HeadOn ads)

Traditional Influence

Communication experts have always been good at understanding who is influential on a particular subject. Some of that comes from gut, contextual understanding of who community members turn to for guidance on whether the cross county road will actually be good for the community or a mere boondoggle for developers. Some of that comes from careful analysis like the Influencer Quotient mapping analysis and tool that my colleagues, Jamie Moeller and Dr. Jenneifer Scott developed - mostly for offline influencers. That actually asseses influence via a scoring system to leave you with a managable "map" of who is influential on a particicular topic. These are the KOFs or KOLs (Key Opinion Formers/Leaders). This is the traditional assesment of influence. It helps tremendously to focus a corporate or public affairs program on those individuals that can really become allys.

Things are different in the Long Tail of social media. Once you step back from a strategy of engaging those niche influencers to trying to assess the core set of influencers for an organization, issue or brand, you will survey a broad number of folks against criteria like this:

• Prominence within organization
• Prominence of organization
• Reach in mainstream media
• Reach in digital media
• Level of investment in the issue
• Level of authority/ connectedness
• Grassroots reach

It's Not Just Reach (nor inbound links...)

Who is influential in our lives today? When marketers and communicators ask this question they often mean who is influential to a lot of people or who "reaches" lots of people. The easiest answer is anyone extremely popular or who commands some type of audience like a celebrity, public official, captain of industry (what a quaint term) or someone at the top 10% of their game - whatever that game can be.

Long Tail Influencers
But the Long Tail offers a different answer. Social media and Web 2.0 have turned anyone into a publisher or a 'stranger with expertise.' In the new book, Crowdsourcing, XX mentions the old adage that on the Internet no one knows your a dog and then updates it in regards to authority - on the internet, no one knows you don't have a medical degree or PHD or other common form of social certification. His point isn't that the Internet is filled with lots of poor information from know-nothings. Rather, the Internet fuels a new meritocracy where everyday people can develop scientific solutions inside say, Innocentive, the crowdsourced solution marketplace for science. Their old school identities don't matter.

Criteria
Niche influencers are everywhere: blogs, social networks, message boards, review sites and more. If you want to decipher who is influential online, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and look for the data. The data infers behavior and reflects some of the fundamentals found in Cialdini and other experts. here is a sampling of what we look for:

Blogs & Microblogs

• Number of inbound links
• Frequency/timeliness of posts
• Followers & subscribers
• Number and content of comments
• Affiliation of author
• Search engine visibility
• Traffic
• RSS feed subscriptions

Videos & Photo Communities

• Number of views and downloads
• Number and content of comments
• Ratings/peer assessment
• Relevant groups
• Number of subscribers
• Number of inbound links

Message Boards & Forums

• Breadth of boards
• Quantity and timeliness of activity
• Search engine visibility
• Affiliation
• Membership numbers
• Traffic

Social Networks

• Membership numbers
• Types of community features present (e.g., profiles, blogs, video, message boards)
• Activity level on features
• Affiliation
• Search engine visibility

Be A Geek
The communications pro of the future will need to be equally adept at understanding inlfuence at the Head of the Tail and along the Long Tail. You will benefit from being a bit of a geek as you will need to turn the knobs on some seemingly arcane software to completely understand influence online (Brian Williams from Viget Labs reminded me during his talk on my panel at Interact 2008 that being a "geek" is a good thing)

How do you assess inlfuence? (and how do you train others on this model) 

Comments

[Alison Byrne Fields]

I was there with you guys when these metrics were created, so I thought I'd share some additional thinking since then.

With blogs and microblogging, the metrics you list are relevant to individuals (unless, of course, it's a group blog), while the metrics for social networks are for the overall social network.

So, suggested metric to add to the blogging/microblogging list would be the individual's presence elsewhere within social media, including social networks.

As an example, I tweet something on Twitter that captures your attention and you retweet it. It leads to a blog post on this blog, which is then fed to your Friendfeed account, which is auto fed to your Facebook account.

Not only is your reach broad, so the number of people who will see the idea is high, but your broad presence also gives you credibility, which means you might be a regular speaker at conferences, which means you might get a book deal . . .

In the end of course, WHO you have influence with is the only thing that matters to me -- and my client. But I think this additional metric should be added to your list.

[Robert Worstell]

Probably the easiest way to go this route: "Who do you listen to?"

Listening, as well as contributing great content - these are the two key elements to social media.

Whose name keeps coming up can be spammed (after a fashion) by interlinking the profiles on social media, as well as tagging/bookmarking your own stuff. So your name pops to the top of search engines and will get more attention. Using microblogs to "buzz" about your own main blog entry is another tactic.

It really is completely a personal view within social media - so attempting to apply external metrics seems improbable.

[warhammer gold]

suggested metric to add to the blogging/microblogging list would be the individual's presence elsewhere within social media, including social networks.