What is influence?

There are many different schools of thought on the topic, but the best definition I’ve seen pertaining to social media influence is by Brian Solis:

Influence is the ability to cause desirable and measurable actions and outcomes.

What is Klout?

Klout is an online tool that claims to measure social influence by defining it in the form of an influence score. They use a host of algorithms and it’s a recent change to those algorithms that has caused many to see a drop in Klout scores. The result is a lot of disgruntled Klout users.

Are you really less influential?

The short answer is no. But the better question is ‘were you really that influential to begin with?’

There is no single tool that will tell you who holds influence within a certain community – so even if you had a high score to begin with you might not have been that influential after all. Influence is social behaviour and can’t be defined by algorithms. Tools like Klout can measure data like the size of your social graph, the number of RTs you get, who RTs you, etc. But they can’t understand the intent behind these actions: how others feel about you and what motivated them to share your content.

Rather than focus on a score, think CREST:

• CREDIBILITY – How credible are you within the community.
• REACH – What is the size of your direct & indirect social graph: 1) The number of connections you have + 2) The number of connections your connections have + 3) The number of connections your connection’s connections have.
• EXPERTISE – Have you demonstrated subject matter expertise.
• STRENGTH – What is the strength of your connections. Remember, there are plenty of people with large social graphs that don’t invest on building relationships. These people are popular, but may not be influential.
• TRUST – How trusted are you within the community.

My friend, Jessica Levin, challenged her readers to think about better ways to measure success in social media and I echo her sentiment. Spend less time worrying about how a flawed system scores your influence and more time thinking about how you want to be known and how you’ll measure success. 

What do you think?

(Photo via Gipsy Art)

“Here’s to the crazy ones,

the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers,

the round pegs in square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules,

and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them,

because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones,

we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,

are the ones who do.”

I once read that these words from Apple’s 1997 ‘Think Different’ ad along with their powerful visuals made Steve Jobs cry. They summed up Steve’s vision of the brand and in many ways the man himself. I believe that Steve Jobs set out to change the world the way he knew how…and he did. He’ll be missed by many.

(this post was written on a MacBook Pro)

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