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Matt Ridings

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Influencers and Change Management

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Importance Of Adoption

Most of the conversation about understanding 'influence' these days revolves around the work taking place in the Social Media arena.  I've spent an inordinate amount of time on that particular subject over the last several years.  However, my interest in identifying influencers evolved not out of social media but rather understanding the internal social structures of organizations for the work I'd been doing in change management.  One of the most intractable problems where large scale change management is concerned is 'adoption'.  In Social Business, that may be getting employees to utilize a new collaboration tool, having them leverage a new process or methodology, or simply evolving a new cultural mindset within the organization.  But participation, and creating the proper incentives for doing so, is always the toughest challenge.  It's also one of the most overlooked.  You'd be surprised how many initiatives (CRM anyone?) fail because the focus is on deploying the technology instead of the people who would be using it.  Setting a budget and spending it on a 'deployment' is much simpler than worrying about all that messy 'cultural stuff' so it often becomes an IT exercise.

 

Influence Characteristics

So what does that have to do with 'influence'?  When you're trying to break down communication barriers, or silos, in an organization one of the most effective ways to do so is to seek out internal influencers.  Much like we would search for them in social media, we can seek out those employees whose voice already carries across departments and business units.  Perhaps surprisingly, they can be found at virtually all layers of an organizations hierarchy not just senior management.  While it's too in-depth to go into here, you will find that there are different 'types' of influencers as well.  More accurately, influencers whose influence is derived from different characteristics.  Some garner their influence due to their passion, some through their ability to communicate effectively, some through their widely acknowledged capabilities/genius.  Every organization invariably has a pool of individuals that defy the norms and influence others well beyond their station and expected audience.  It should be noted that the most effective influencers for change management purposes are rarely those forceful individuals that may typically come to mind.  Yes, sometimes you need people who can just 'make it happen' through their force of will and their empowered position, but where lasting change is concerned those being asked to change must see purpose and meaning in that change if they are to truly adopt it for the long term.   I'm fond of saying that the best organizational change is one which you never realize is occurring, in other words it happens so organically that it doesn't feel like it's being directed.

 

Spread Horizontally, Don't Disseminate Vertically

Once the pool of influencers is selected they should be brought into the change management process at an early stage and made formal members of the team.  Their input into deriving the proper incentives for adoption, and assistance in the communication planning should be given the highest level of consideration.  Unlike todays more typical top down planning by a committee made up of the heads of business units alone, you'll find your long term outcomes much more successful (vs. the typical 1/3 success rate of large scale initiatives).  You'll also find that you've created a platform from which some of the strongest talent in the organization is viewed as an example of the type of culture you value.  One of the most valuable artifacts of this approach comes not from the explicit engagement with those influencers, but from the fact that they then organically spread information, passion, belief, and 'purpose' throughout their influence ecosystems via their day-to-day communications.  It's building that underlying perception that is so difficult in any change management initiative, and why internal influencers can be so critical to your success.  Obviously you still have to know methods of properly identifying and filtering these individuals to arrive at the right mix for the team, but I'd wager you're already nodding your head thinking of people who fit the kind if influencer profiles I've described here.  Word-of-mouth is as good a tool as any when it comes to finding these internal influencers, but if you'd like to discuss more formalized approaches feel free to contact me.

 

Cheers,

 

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

 

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Giving Substance To Online Influence - BlogWorld LA 2011

Here's the presentation audio and slides from the talk that Chuck Hemann and I gave at BlogWorld Los Angeles in November 2011.  Chuck and I split about the first 20 minutes or so with him going first, the rest is Q&A and in my opinion the most valuable part as usual.  There were lots of great questions from Tamsen McMahon, Tom Webster, David Armano, Michael Brito, Indra Gardiner, Dave Fleet, Jay Baer, and more.  They are the ones who really add value here so a hearty thanks to them.

You can also pick up my portion of the slides from SlideShare here: http://www.slideshare.net/mattridings/giving-substance-to-online-influence

 

 

It’s one of over 100 recorded sessions from BlogWorld Los Angeles 2011. You can get all of the videos—plus nearly 100 bonus interviews and other bonus content—by picking up the “Virtual Ticket.”

 

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

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Giving Substance To Online Influence

You can find my slides from the BlogWorld L.A. 2011 talk below.  

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
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Influence Measures of Tomorrow

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As I think through the next evolution of Klout and its kin I'm struck by some of the categorization and prioritization difficulties they will face when trying to decide how to weight activity.

I'll spare you most of my ramblings on what that far term vision looks like and instead focus on those shifts nearer to release.  The coming changes (and rest assured they are coming, whether publicized or not) will fundamentally change the 'influence' landscape.  The mistake most people make at the moment is in evaluating what these services *are* versus what they *will be*.

Today I'll focus on just two (related) shifts, but I think they are enough to illuminate my point and move the dialog forward.  Those shifts are Blog and Comment System integration.  Move forward through time a bit with me and envision Klout now integrated into Blog platforms like Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, etc.  as well as their comment systems or 3rd party ones like Disqus, Wildfyre, and so on.

One of the complaints about Klout is that it doesn't actually measure those things that matter most like conversions.  For example, "it's great that your link was retweeted 100 times but who actually *clicked* on that link?".  That would obviously be a more important metric to measure and speak to a deeper layer of influence.  There's also a contingent that argues that your ability to generate comments on a blog post is a deeper layer of influence, so being able to measure that as well would be pretty important right?

I'll pause here for a second and say that these shifts are a great leap forward in the usefulness of an influence measure.  But just wait until plugging in a simple piece of influence code into *any* website, commerce or otherwise, is as straightforward and ubiquitous as that of Google Analytics (actually, if I was Google I would be acquiring Klout, but that's another story).  But the focus today is on some of the complications that arise from these shifts.

Today, Klout measures what is easy.  Who are you, what did you say in social media, and did someone respond/react to it in a visible way?  The word 'visible' there is key.  Like it or not, what they measure today makes for a level playing field (and yes, also allows it to be gamed).  But what happens when they start measuring the 'less visible' stuff like clicking links, leaving comments, etc.?  This is where I think they are going to have some difficulties trying to weight values.

For simplicities sake I'll divide influencers into four categories.  Creators, Curators, Amplifiers, and Thought Instigators.  Creators are the bloggers of original content, Curators are those who aggregate original content (or links to it) on their own blogs, Amplifiers push links to Creators/Curators sites but not their own, and Thought Instigators don't post links but have dialogs directly in Social Media about topics.  Now obviously most of us are not defined by a single one of the traits but instead some combination, for now however we'll separate them for ease of discussion.

When you integrate influence measures into blogs and comment systems an interesting dilemma arises.  How do you weight these different categories of activity?  Because the attempt is to measure *influence*, shouldn't the Creator of the original content get much more weight than a Curator?  After all, the Creator influenced the Curator to host or link to their original content.  In effect, each action taken on a Curators tweet, including any comments left on a post that references something created elsewhere, should also be crediting the Creator.  Today that is a non-issue because all Klout cares about is what *you* posted, and whether it was reshared/retweeted, regardless of who actually created the content you may have linked to.  

What about Amplifiers, those people who simply retweet the links of other?  How much credit goes to the person they retweeted vs. the Creator/Curator of that content (assuming it was someone else)?  And finally, what about Thought Instigators?  Those people who could care less about blogging or tweeting links but have influential conversations directly within the social media platforms themselves?  These folks, in the long term, are in the toughest spot where influence measurement is concerned.  Without sophisticated language algorithms that can not only determine contextual relevance of the conversations, but also the 'direction' of influence taking place (who influenced who in the conversation) they are at a disadvantage.  

On the one hand, you could argue this is fair because they aren't creating something of 'permanence' like a blog that can be found after the fact through other means such as a search engine and thus continue to influence people long after that transient conversation of the Thought Instigator took place.  On the other, perhaps this Thought Instigator is really the primary influencer of all of those who *are* blogging.  I guarantee you that a Google engineer having a conversation on Twitter about how Google search indexing works is incredibly influential on all the SEO folks out there, whether she blogged about it or not.  There are ways of emphasizing this in your weighting, but the point is that at some point categorization and weighting become extremely tricky (although doable).  Particularly in this in-between point of evolution between basic measurement of explicit information and the eventual point of ubiquity where oddly enough things will become more complex but easier to accomplish.  I've already rambled enough in this post however so if you'd care to know why that is feel free to approach me in the comments or elsewhere.

Speaking of ubiquity.  What does that look like at a basic level?  In the world of online influence, the simplest way is to imagine Klout is integrated into Google and can find every reference made about you that can be found via search.  It can then weight and categorize you by type appropriately.  If you're a public persona like a politician, movie star, etc. then *volume* for example becomes weighted very differently than if you're a leading edge physicist.  For the category of physics they specialize in perhaps finding 1000 references means you're at the top of your field whereas for a current Hollywood movie star that equivalent number may be 1 Million.  Then there are the 'quality' of the references (who made them and how influential are they considered within your space).   On the commerce end of things, there's no reason those same tracking codes (just like Google Analytics uses) can't integrate Klout into eCommerce platforms thus allowing direct sale conversions to apply to influence.  And down the rabbit hole of algorithms we go.

The long term view of influence measurement is a ripe one indeed, and one that I'm still amazed detractors cannot see.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
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What You Need, When You Need It - Contextual Relevance In Social Influence

Context

We no longer surf the web, we shape the web.

Contextual Relevance.  The alignment of what you need when you need it.  

It's nothing new.  Targeted banner ads and recommendation engines have been trying to get more and more granular about figuring out the topics you're interested in for years.  And now with mobile smartphones and geolocation being common, contextual relevance has taken on a whole new level of meaning.  Want to know what restaurants are open of the type you like within walking distance of where you are right now?  Done.  That's contextual relevance.

In the world of leveraging Social Media Influence however most of the marketing efforts today do things exactly backwards.  Typically that means finding the most appropriate 'mass influencer' with the most followers/friends and having them praise your product or service in some way.

Singular Definition Of Influencers
There are exceptions to every rule, I've run those types of shotgun campaigns before very successfully.  But in most cases they are better suited to advertising objectives like awareness, not marketing objectives with a call to action. The problem we have is in the definition of an "influencer".  Or rather, in our singular definition of what constitutes an influencer in social media.  I have no issue with the idea that a rock star, a book author, a funny person, or someone who simply pumps out regurgitated information all day are 'influencers'.  What I do have a problem with is our incessant focus on them.  There are few products and services, and few matching mass influencers that can be put together to achieve the equivalent of putting you on Oprah's book club.

Why do we do this?  Have you ever seen the actual number of responses when these folks request an action out of their multitude of followers.  I have.  It can be disheartening to say the least (which is most of the time). Or sometimes, rarely, magic happens.   But chasing the storm hoping for lightning to strike you is rarely the best use of your money.

Easy Like Sunday Morning
I know why we do it.  It's easy.  It seems like a shortcut.  It's easy to measure potential reach and become enamored with those numbers.  They are easy to find.  Easy to segment to some broad topic that isn't time sensitive.  It's easy to treat it like an old school campaign and not worry about the long haul.  Those mass influencers stand out like sore thumbs against the backdrop that is the 'normal' user.  Want to know who they are?  Go to Klout, BlogDash, or any other number of other services.   Done.  Now you can go take a wad of cash, some free products, or just a good smile and begging methodology, whatever works for you.  Regardless, it's quick, and it's easy...it just doesn't work very well.

The reality is that what works, with a high percentage likelihood, is really hard to do.  Why?  Because success, particularly in social media, is derived from contextual relevance.  But in a relationship driven, real-time stream like Twitter or Facebook, that changes moment to moment.  Like the example I gave in my last post, the influence that a plumber has when your sink is clogged is profound, but on the days when it's not clogged?  Not so much.  So trying to segment in advance down to that level of need is impossible, or at least not cost effective.  But due to that 'relationship' angle in social media it's also difficult to just pop into someone's stream and say "Hey! I heard you need a plumber" without any prior relationship or third party testimonial.

No Substitutes
So what's that mean?  It partially means that in all businesses there is no true substitute for the hard work of delivering a great product/service and then being directly involved in your community...online or off.  Big surprise right?  Influence is about trust.  You depend on leveraging the trust your customers have built up and advocating on your behalf.  I don't know about you, but most of my customers don't have a million followers.  But what I *can* do is figure out who my most likely customer  base is (you should already know this anyway) and then use a lot of listening, a lot of parsing, and a little sideways intelligence to filter down those people to a manageable group and develop relationships with them.  Genuine, true relationships.  Reacting to someones 'point of need' (help, I need xxxxx) will garner you a very small percentage of the success that others reacting on your behalf will (you should go talk to xxxx, he's a good guy/company).  Besides, directly reacting yourself doesn't scale very well.

I Apologize In Advance
So, who are your *real* influencers?  When we're talking marketing objectives they are those people with their measly little 400 followers for the most part.  Joe and Jane public.  Those are the people you should be spending your time building relationships with,  not Lady Gaga.  I prefer to call these 'Advocate Programs' not influencer programs, but it's really one and the same.  Doing it this way takes time (sorry).  Doing it this way is hard (sorry).  Doing it this way requires thinking ahead of the point of need (sorry).  Doing it this way works.  

It's just a good sized piece of Word of Mouth Marketing combined with a dash of Relationship Marketing and a smidgen of listening tools (don't forget to season properly).  Ok, maybe that's not the simplest concept in the world, but unlike Influence Marketing in social media there are a ton of great books and articles out there on those other topics and they are completely relevant.  You could do worse than picking up Brains on Fire as a starting point (just don't tell Spike Jones I said that, his head is already big enough).

You Need Both Sides Of The Coin To Spend It
I was recently having a brief conversation with Chris Brogan which led to a larger one with Amber Naslund in regards to how this industry is divided amongst the perceived 'Fluffy Cheerleaders of Social Media' who only talk about relationships and engagement, and the 'Stick In The Mud ROI Contingent' who only talk about how something doesn't exist if you haven't measured it.  The reality is that to maximize your return you have to be, and do, both.  It's a long tail activity that requires a lot of effort, both to do and to measure (CRM anyone?).  Get used to it.

Long story short, if it's easy, you're probably doing it wrong.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

*Photo Credit: Automania
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