Influencing what?

I've used the term Influencer throughout a lot of my postings. These are the people who, by their conversations, comment and other interactions, not only have something to say but additonally have something to say that others will listen to and potentially act upon.

For me, they are the social catalysts, partly (but not entirely similar) to those people mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point book.
Note: I actually disagree with his definition that only specific people are responsible for causing sways in opinion, buying patterns and trust. Instead I think that these people could be anyone, even potentially collections of people. However as I've mentioned before, surely the interesting bit is the 'who' and 'why'.

So what exactly do they influence? Well, assuming they are all talking about their effect on your company, then these people will all apply different actions or factors to your Corporate Social Graph.

Here's my suggestions on what some of those influences could be:

1. Influencing sentiment
   They have an emotional opinion about your company (and the secondary effect of telling others). This sentiment could either be positive or negative and can have an indirect affect on your company.
   Examples: Brand advocates


2. Influencing behaviour
   They have an effect on the sales or take-up (negative or positive) of your products/service. This therefore directly affects your revenue (& profits).


3. Influencing links
   Assuming you already have a website, then links to your site will improve your positons in the key search engines (e.g. Google). What's more, these links can still positively contribute to your SEO efforts, even if the sentiment or behaviour they create isn't.

Proof that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about.

Tipping Point and Influence

In a recent post about Influencables in Andy Lark's blog, he discussed the Fast Company article where Duncan Watts debunks the Tipping Point concept of social influence.

My comment to his article was:

I agree with you that the two concepts put forward by Watts and Gladwell are not mutually exclusive. What I believe we have with any person that originates or takes up an: idea, trend, campaign, etc. is a weighting or 'factor of influence' on another. This can vary depending upon a number of variable s(and not just the ones measured by Watt, etc.) For example, the tipping point of a particular idea could be a single person, a number of people, or a specific sub-set doing a number of things over time...
the problem (and the fun) is, its always slightly different.

Having read this same article a few times since, I'm less concerned with the opposite ideas of key influncers vs anyone being an influencer.... I'm more interested in why different influencers at different times are able to exert more or less influence and how you would possibly model and report on a real-world scenario. This would possibly have the aim of predicting or changing the outcome. In other words... the "fun" bit.