We define an influencer as a person who, through writing and being read, affects the opinions of peers within a community around a certain topic. For example, Chris Brogan is an influencer of the Social Media Marketing community. He is influential because he writes and shares content that is widely disseminated throughout the community, and because that content largely affects or reflects the feelings of that community.

Some of our competitors have a different definition. They look at the popularity of certain sources across all industries, then try and correlate  that to their ability to drive “action”. But influence is relative. You can’t take the expert social media advice of Chris Brogan and say that his word will affect or reflect the car enthusiast community just because he happens to mention cars a lot.

Influence in eCairn Conversation™ is ranked by analyzing the connections and the level of networking between blogs over time. The primary variable which affects influence rank is the number of times other blogs within the community link back to posts from the target blog. eCairn Conversation’s algorithm then ranks the blogs and determines whether the blog’s connectivity is statistically significant enough to be considered a high, medium or low influencer or if they have no influence at all. There are a few other factors which help to determine influence level, but they don’t carry as much weight. Below you’ll see how the sources in a community tend to appear in an influence graph:

You’ll notice that the influencers found using eCairn’s method are the true nodes of communication between bloggers. These people act as the links in the community who both build and transmit a majority of the content that affects the community and drives action. It’s most apparent when you look at a map of the influencers and highlight the high influencers:

Above I’ve colored the high influencers blue in the video gaming blogger community. Notice how they act as the centralized nodes of conversations.

There are several benefits to this method:

1. It is less easy to “game” this system.
2. You’re going to be sure that the targets are both influential AND relevant.
3. There is little room for noise from irrelevant sources and bots.

Why Blogs?

Blogs provide their users the ability to broadcast original, in-depth and insightful content for their readers. When compared to the paltry character count of alternative social networks, we can see how blogging provides a better avenue for developing insight in the community. (Also, let’s face it, most of the best tweets link to a blog, right?)

But this doesn’t mean we can completely discount these other social media channels. In fact, it’s definitely a good idea to leverage these other channels to maintain your relationships in different circles. This is integral in any social media campaign, and it’s the reason why our application also supports aggregating the feeds from, and managing engagement with, these sources as well. Today, blogs are the core of the system. In the future, we’ll expand our algorithm to take inputs that also make sense of twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Why use eCairn’s method?

By not relying on factors which the blogger has control over, we make it more difficult for the blogger to game the system. Other existing methods of influence ranking use factors like follows/subscriptions which can be artificially increased through the use of bots, fake accounts and collusion with other users. Post count is another easy variable to skew as well. It’s easy to create a content bot which can constantly publish or re-publish content that can be relevant and interesting, but in no way original or worth following.

Building your influence rank by starting with the community ensures that you find influencers who are relevant. Say you’re trying to find the experts on movie production. You don’t want their interactions with the music recording community to affect your influence measurement of the movie developer community. You’re trying to find the most influential people on a specific topic, not the most influential people who happen to have an interest in that topic. Since you build the community, you control the level of noise that can come from irrelevant sources and can manage the objectivity of the ranking.

So, how do you rank influence?

Most of the time, you knew you’d just waste another 30 minutes talking to an under-payed offshore agent, sweating on his/her 100th call at the end of a long day.

2011. You still have problems with who knows… ATT: you  tweet for help and someone in a distant country tweets back, “@dominiq Hi my nam is Eddy, what can i do for u” …

The same people are now working for less than $3 per hour as Social Media Assistant (job postings like these are  just insane) with the same goal: Help you get rid of your problem and forget about you as quickly  as possible. Time is an expense.

This is clearly not the social web that most of us have been dreaming about and – I’m going to make a  statement -

if this is Social CRM then we (eCairn) will never ever do Social CRM.

Reasons for hope have come out lately. In the last weeks, two very important yet different organizations, the Pentagon and the New York Times, have departed from a centralized approach to social media:

• Pentagon has shut down its social media office.
• New York Times firing its social media manager

In both cases, the move can be summarized as follows:

“management realized that they don’t need one manager being responsible for social media any more.  They have decided that it is the job of all …”

This clearly contrasts with the uber-centralized-tower-control-NSA approach we’ve seen with some major brands, like Dell and Gatorade, which are garnering a significant level of buzz in the social media community.

• Brian Solis on Command Center , clearly taking side with this type of approach / organization.
• Jeremy Owyang on Social CRM .  Jeremy’s points  (4,5) on Life Style content (versus support) and  Long term relationship are well taken. But the maths does not work:  6 people at Gatorade /millions of athletes,  what kind of relationships and trust can come out of this?

Going back to customer  support, i.e. CRM or Social CRM, I’m still wondering whether, as bigMETHOD suggests, this is something companies should not do at all, or whether this is just an evolution of what was called “peer support” in the last century, which they should facilitate.

During my (long) R&D years  at HP Support, “peer support” (i.e. the ability to find an answer by asking your neighbor) was always a source of healthy debate.  And yet, no one was really sure whether this time spent helping your co-workers was something that should be encouraged or whether it should be fought as invisible costs.

We never really reached any conclusion about that. We also did not have Twitter and Yammer at the time. One thing for sure, however, is that getting help from the guy/girl from the next cubicle was always a great social experience.

The presence of social media is not something that big developers and publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision have ignored. Just last week, developers of the highly anticipated Starcraft 2 announced that they will be adding Facebook integration into their upcoming title. Big players in the video game industry always play on the bleeding edge of developments in technology, marketing and business models; social media is no exception. So, if social media is the new marketing frontier, where do game developers stand?

Let’s take a step back first; before the social media boom, publishers were already creating online forums and moderating feedback from users. You would easily find feedback from users on what features they liked the most, and what features they hated. Sentiment was as simple as collecting and organizing feedback from magazines and website reviews. Marketers and producers who were tech savvy enough would post forum polls and track discussions from commercial and independent forums. User feedback on the internet was manageable, and located in pockets of communities that the astute marketer would easily find.

Today, the widespread presence of syndicated, published and independent blogs, news about upcoming titles spreads faster than publishers plan for. Biased news leaks and raw speculation leave poor impressions in the minds of discerning gamers. It is difficult to predict and find key community influencers who spark the strongest opinions. This puts developers in a position where they have little to no control of community sentiment before the release date. There are so many different influencers and communities that affect sentiment about a product; it is beyond the control of marketing directors and community managers to find the right one.

The video game blog community is large and extremely active.

Looking at all the buzz and $ injected in Enterprise 2.0, I’m wondering whether Enterprise 2.0  is not becoming the Canada Dry of Social Networking.  “It’s like social media, it has the taste of social media but it’s not”.

One of the major promises of the blogging and social networking phenomena is to open the walls of enterprises and connect work-groups, engineers, marketers with the relevant communities of clients and experts in order to co-develop, co-brand, co-market with the open world.

Yet, these Enterprise 2.0 solutions are  leveraging technologies that have been invented for social networking to create “gated corporate communities”. One might argue that  customers and prospects are welcomed in these gated communities. However, very few people will go,  set up  and maintain a profile in the private communities of all their prospective suppliers. It’s already difficult to keep up with  LinkedIn , Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare…

Looking back:  Corporations have succeeded in taking over people’s email and most employees have now their professional emails as primary ones. Will this be the case for social profiles ? Will Facebook and Linkedin become obsolete and lose the battle against the Jive, Lithium, Telligent of the world?

I’m not sure.  For many functions within enterprises, building walls kills the value of social networking. This is the case for sales, marketing, innovation, hiring, just to name a few.

The net is that the challenge is not in technology and that enterprises need to embrace both the technology and the paradigm shift of “social media”…. as scary as this is.

So what’s next ?

What about Microsoft buying more of Facebook and bringing it to the enterprise level ? It could have the same feature set as Jive, Lithium, Bluekiwi and others while leveraging the Facebook infrastructure. Such a system would rule out the need for employees to create profiles  on their employer’s portal … and to do  it again every time they change job.

What about Google doing the same, with a better version of Buzz, a few acquisitions and a similar agenda.

I’m  betting on the last two. Whoever owns the social profile owns a major entry point to the internet and both Microsoft and Google are too big to fail.

For the last three years, we’ve been listening to the same old song and success stories from Social Media Marketing experts on the why and how of SMM.

The story is around:

• People are talking about your brand so you should be listening.
• Look at what happened to J&J (Motrin), Domino Pizza, now Pampers (i.e these are the bad guys) and look at how great companies like Comcast, Zappos (these are the good guys)  are doing it.
• Now that listening has become easy, marketing is dead or should be everybody’s routine (a few weeks ago SVAMA event).
• Everyone employees should rush and spend most of their time in TweetDeck, Facebook, on Social Media Monitoring tools or on the new Social phone.
• Brands should put their $$ where their followers and fans are and this is where the strategy should begin.

At the same time, more and more business executives question the value and ask the defining question: Where is the ROI?

I think it’s about time to step back, revisit the  marketing basics and look for a different response or at least open the dialog!

There is value in communities and conversations. There is also junk and noise and all sort of time traps in social media and listening (or should I say monitoring). Broad Monitoring as a strategy won’t work and shouldn’t probably be the initial step. It is very time consuming and if not backed by a sound marketing strategy (Targeting,  positioning, value proposition) and a committed organization, it’s just a waste of time.

While listening is key – don’t get me wrong on this- it’s important to consider things such as:

• Who should I listen to? Who should I engage with? How do I optimize my interactions to create value?  This is often a make or break for small business.
• Whose responsibility is it and what and how can we manage and provide a minimum level of control? I don’t want my call center or marketing interns to mess up a 6 figures sales!
• How do all the functions work together as a team? Social media and communities is an opportunity for every part of the organization: PR, product marketing, customer research, community managers, customer support, engineering, sales, HR, compliance departments, R&D, legal  … all can get benefits in engaging with the right communities and can also screw things up.
• While there is a tremendous amount of valuable data in the social web, it has to be translated to fit the entreprise data model. I don’t want to know who’s following xyz but who influence our profits.
• What should we do about employees blogging on their own and how can we as a company get some benefits out of it?

If I’m in a middle of a crowd and I tell my 5 year old to listen, she will ask me “to who?”.
If I answer “everybody”  she’ll tell me she has only two ears.

There is no difference in social media and for people that want to get into numbers, the “Dunbar” number is a good place to start.

eCairn, as a small business engaged in social media, has to answer questions like:

• How do we coordinate our sales outreach and our marketing efforts to focus on the same communities, who should we engage with?
• When should sales take over the outreach effort?
• How to ensure consistency in communicating our value proposition to (in our case) two distinct audiences: marketers and agencies?
• What’s the objective of our Facebook page versus our LinkedIn group, versus our blog?
• What is the value of our  followers? What’s the objective of having Twitter followers that are out of target … or non real persons?
• How do we target communities that are a real good fit for our value proposition and stay away for those that will just eat up our time and never purchase?
• How do we cherry pick the thought leaders we’d like to co-create / co-design with?
• Where do we spend our “social media” time?

I would not say that we’ve cracked the code but we’ve learned a lot in three years.

We use social media (should I say communities) for Customer Research/ Content Marketing and Lead Generation. Our initial task is always translating our sales and marketing strategies into “who matters, what community” and the kind of objectives that we should set for these communities (positioning, messaging).

We’ve switched our focus a couple of times already, which I understand is quite typical of startups .
Our own software helps us map and maintain the organized list of people in our target communities. We also use it to listen and discover what’s going on in these communities (marketing). We leverage our research/discoveries to analyze what the current trends are and build our own content plans around these trends.We have a specific focus on “our customers”  and “middle magic” people. Our brand recognition and our finances are not at a point where we can get traction engaging with top influencers in our field.

As a result, we listen and engage a specific amount of time (1h per day max each) in listening, buzzing, outreach and content development, we track everything we do and everything and everyone we find interesting and we wrap-up at the end of each month to measure progress, spot people that we should more actively contact.

For our community effort which we just began, we’ve set qualitative metrics based on  the # of people on specific profiles and volume of participation… and we’ve been growing one step at a time and not with random followers. (Btw if you’re a marketing professional interested in communities and tribes, you should join us in Facebook). In terms of results… most of our leads come from our buzz/outreach effort and we do see a huge difference response rate when we take the time to build up relationships and do blogger outreach.

So, engineer your social media marketing activities so that:
- you know WHO to listen to
- and WHY you are listening to those WHO.

(*) side note on Comcast. I tried, without success,  to comment on several high profile social media blogs that I don’t see  Comcast a model for being consumer friendly (poor customer service, promotion for new subscribers not extended to user base …) . To me they have mainly succeeded in marketing to social media marketers.

They just rebranded to xfinity and , as far as I can judge, their social media effort is not extended to xfinity …

• Money CNN (end of the article)
• and this older one

This may be counter intuitive but actually should come at no surprise to marketing savvy people.

Here are 4 main reasons:

1- Trust

When all comments are positive, people start to wonder whether the business owner had his wife, friends and his dog writing all the reviews or whether the system can be gamed for a few dollars more.

2- Positioning

Not all consumers are the same and what’s negative for  someone may be positive for somebody else.

As an example, if an airline gets negative reviews because everything has to be purchased, from peanuts to drinks to access to the toilets (yes, Ryanair was said to be thinking about it). Well, it you’re a budget traveler and you want to pay only for what you need, it’s actually a plus. You know this airline is the right one for you.  (better to cut this than security).

3- Purple cows

I remember Pr Larreche at Insead presenting a case study on Benetton and its very offensive advertising messages. The truth is that in fashion, 5% market share is huge and it’s OK to “piss off” 95% of the people if the other 5% are really moved and engaged by your message.

You may argue that the negative comments are then not an issue with the product or service but a targeting issue for the messaging.

4- Community re-inforcement.

If you’ve raised or are raising teens , you know that they love it when you loose your temper and make negative comments on how they behave … or dress.

Many communities are built “against” majorities and  strengthen in adversity.

Isn’t that the very driver of Mac versus PC’s, Linux versus Windows … and many others.

Contrast is what makes something visible and known.

SMM Rolodex

From a 2000 feet prospective,  social media solutions are all the same. They more or less enable brands to listen and engage with communities.

In practice, it’s way more subtle and one analogy I’d like to propose is that you’ve providers that build Yellow Pages and others that build Rolodex (we fall into this category).

Both are useful and there are differentiated benefits from both type of solutions. What is critical however is for brands and agencies to clearly articulate their business needs and select the appropriate tool-set for the task at hand. It’s also very important to think beyond the first use of the solution selected.

Social Media Monitoring Solutions tend to be easier to setup and to operate. You just plug in your brand keywords and bingo.  (This, provided of course,  one can find the appropriate set of queries to search the Social Yellow pages).

Rolodex approach requires more work, more thinking around how a brand wants to organize its Social Rolodex and how it wants to structure its listening and engagement in different communities.  This is even more important if the Rolodex is a shared Rolodex within a mid-size/large company.

Again the analogy works very well. It takes minutes to open the Yellow Pages whereas one may spend several hours a week organizing and maintaining its Rolodex.

What’s key with Rolodex is that it enable people to build a differentiated asset that will deliver value over multiple enterprises functions and systems.

Let’s take a not-so-fictive example of an IT company that’s delivering services & product for Cloud Computing.

Using a Yellow Pages approach, it can get some pretty solid indicator relative to share of voice and (with rating) sentiment. However, without any qualification of the sources of the information (expert, influencer, audience, position in the community, analysis of what this person says over time, level of connection with the company or with competitors), it ‘ll be very difficult to transform this into actionable knowledge.

Using a Rolodex approach – and spending the time to built it-, this company will be able to:

• Build a common repository of people that constitute the community of  “Cloud Computing”  & listen to them wherever they  write, tweet and comment (blog, twitter…),
• Perform targeted sentiment analysis on these key stakeholders.
• Spot whether any of these stakeholder are over time more positive or negative about them. Build action plans to change perspective.
• Influence specific clusters through outreach, buzz and content development.
• Thru regular participation in the conversations,  build up trust.
  
• Prevent crisis, making these influencers  more careful propagating rumors or false information about the brand i.e people that they know and trust.
• Perform deep qualitative analytics. Since the “river of news” is built from similar sources and is noise free, it can be mined with greater results.
• Spot candidates for virtual focus group, crowd sourcing of new ideas (btw, I’m amazed that people embark in crowdsourcing without targeting. If a brand makes a strategic decision to focus its solution for small business, wouldn’t that make sense that it restrict s the crowdsourcing of new ideas from the specific small business community ?).
• Develop communication strategies that leverage community and influencers
• Socialize their corporate web site with the voices of these trustable sources and their audience.

and so on…

From a strategy standpoint, these approaches also differ widely:

On the Yellow pages one: the goal is to spend as less time as possible in social media, while grabbing as much as what can be learned with a Google Search like interaction. But there is no social engagement. People even dream of automating sentiment and are totally adverse to the idea of reading conversations.

One can even say that here, brand uses technology to mitigate the risk of not participating in the conversations.

On the Rolodex one: the goal is to capitalize every minute spent in social media and putting this capitalized knowledge at work for maximum benefits.

Here, listening and engagement is view as an asset and an opportunity, not as a liability.

Two paradigms, Two solutions … and so many opportunities.

So, we’ve witnessed “lists of influential people” (including our list of Top 150 Social Media Marketers) popping up all over the place as if the world could be drawn with a bunch of influential graphs.

Not that easy… and here is a couple of things marketers should think about when approaching influence.

Let’s pick a practical example. You’re launching a new designer shoe and you’re planning to do a blogger outreach campaign to spread the word about the cool features this new “social shoe” has.

Obviously  you would start by identifying the top blogs in your target.
First problem you’ll experience is that most of so called “blog search” are actually post search engines. Techcrunch, for instance, may have covered the Zappos web site recently; it is certainly a very influential blog in Technology and Business but its influence is very low when it comes to fashion or shoes.

# 1: Unless you can address relevance, influence is pointless.

Let’s say then that you’ve been able to identify all the relevant people in fashion, i.e your target community. What we have measured is that some influencers tend to be more influential on the long tail (should be that called popularity ?) , other looked more influential on their peers.

# 2: Influence means influence over a group of people, not only on a topic

Some also seem to reach out more people in the community with “light” binding, whereas others will be the center of small cohesive sub nets.

# 3: Influence is a multi-dimensional variable with at a minimum “reach” and “depth” attributes

At this point you may have a pretty good view of what your target is and for instance, which blogger you can send samples to get reviews.

You still have to maximize your chances of the free pair of shoes not to be thrown in the trash! The thing is you may be completely unknown in that market and sending just another sample to people on the top of the list may be… useless.

So you decide to start influencing the magic middle and to build your way up to key influencers over time. That way, you have a pretty good chance to get coverage within 3 months. More on this from Dave Fleet.

# 4: Influence is a strategy and a process, what works for Zappos may not work for yetanothernewbrandintown.

OK. You’re still with me and are not giving up that easily. Let’s end with a positive note. Chances are high you’re already a member of that same community you want to influence (if not: start blogging now). Why don’t you leverage your existing trust and relationship and start reaching out your immediate network?

# 5: Influence is a process you’re a part of. That’s what we call actionable influence ™.

Have fun !

Before jumping in  … some data point about Charlene:

Charlene Li:

• one of the top blogger in social media (rank # 114 today in our top 1000 list)
• her share of voice in the Social Media Marketing community  is:  0.4 % ( which is quite good)
• the trends for her brand is here
• her best “days”  in the period came from  “2009 Social Media predictions” (Dec 15th 3%) , followed by “Future of Social Networks” (March 20th 1.36%)
• the turnaround of her blog is 7K , page rank is 5
• her frequency of posting is … variable ( two posts  in April)
• the people that refer the most to  Charlene’s name and brand are:

1. J Owyang ( the Forester network)
2. B Kanter ( the Women network ?)
3. K Hawe
4. G Livingston ( the “Strategy first” network ? )

My notes from the conference – SVAMA – ( Some of the slides:Convince The Curmudgeon ).

Charlene started with a very funny video: Advertiser versus consumer: The Break-Up

Key points

• Need to start with the corporate goals, aligned with the marketing strategy
• On the ROI question: Come back to marketing goals and dive into how social media marketing can contribute to these goals.
• Focus on Net Promoter Score and Customer Lifetime Value.
• Learn, then Dialog, Help and Innovate.
• Pyramid of where to find help ( from agencies to PR  to social media boutiques).
• Company can make some small changes like making it easy for  consumer to bookmark and promote their content (delicious, twitter, digg). This can have significant impact.
• Recently met a company that just wanted to dialog with 5 bloggers! Programs have to be more ambitious.
• Company should try, understand and accept mistakes and retry until they get it. Great example is Walmart that just got a success with its checkout blog initiative.
• Provided typical profiles from enthusiast to curmudgeon ( I’ve improved my English last night   ) and tactics to bring them on board.
• Sells 700 copies  of Groundswell a week.
• From the panel, noteworthy that the 3 panelists (Joel Nathanson from Wells Fargo ,  Larry Nelson from HP and  Scott Wilder from Intuit) mentioned advertising on social media is something they are walking away from and gave lots of great insights on how Social Media makes its way into  Corporations.