[1] The document explores issues related to developing standards around terminology and approaches for measuring influence flows in organizations. It discusses defining influence as a change in opinion or behavior rather than something an individual possesses. [2] It notes that influence is a complex system with many interactions between components, and that changing one's mind or actions is the result of many stimuli over time rather than single causes. Identifying who or what caused influence is challenging. [3] The document proposes terminology around influence, influencers, and influencees to distinguish between potential, key, and actual influence as well as different types of advocates, ambassadors, and professionals who may exert influence. It seeks input on these definitions and issues related

1. Influence
Influence
A provocation ahead of the AMEC European Summit, 5th-7th June 2013
http://ameceuropeansummit.org
Philip Sheldrake
Social Media Measurement & Monitoring conference
London, 27th March 2013

2. Influence
The Conclave
Context.
Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication
The Chartered Institute of Public Relations
The Institute for Public Relations
The Public Relations Society of America
The Council of PR Firms
The Global Alliance for Public Relations
AMEC and the wider ‘Conclave’ The International Association of Business Communicators
The Society for New Communications Research
have a working group on the topic The Digital Analytics Association (previously the WAA)
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association
of influence. Its output and The Advertising Research Foundation
recommendations will be presented Federation Internationale des Bureauxs d'Extraits de Press
at the AMEC European Summit The Conclave's #SMMstandards initiative also includes:
The Media Rating Council
this June. The American Association of Advertising Agencies
The Association of National Advertisers
is document explores some main The Interactive Advertising Bureau
and the following "client organizations" – Dell, GM, McDonalds,
issues. It’s not a working group Ford, P&G, SAS, Southwest Airlines, Thomson Reuters.
document... it’s simply my effort to Influence working group
provoke comment and input. Brad Fay, Neil Beam, David Geddes, Sean Williams and
Philip Sheldrake. With occasional steers from Barry Leggetter,
Katie Delahaye Paine and Richard Bagnall.
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3. Influence
Our goal.
We are trying to develop a standards approach to the
terminology of and approach to influence flows – how
influence goes around comes around – for the useful
application by organizations seeking to encourage various
stakeholders to think or behave as the organization would
like and seeking to be influenced reciprocally.
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4. Influence
A Measure of Influence, Sheldrake, Communication World magazine, Jan/Feb 2013, IABC – http://eulr.co/Wnb88F
Above all.
e best way to exert useful influence
remains to deliver great products and
services so that your customers evangelize
your brand to others, and to be a well-run
organization so that your employees and
partners evangelize working with you.
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5. Influence
Influence & Influence.
e English language is ambiguous. Influence is apparently
both:
• e ability one is attributed to change another’s opinion
or behaviour, and
• e very changing of that opinion or behaviour.
e first describes the source of or contributor to a change in
the system, the latter describes the result.
is ambiguity is causing confusion in our context here.
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6. Influence
Possibility ≠ Probability.
Social media actions – retweets, reblogs, +1s, likes, etc. – are
(mis)interpreted as:
influence having happened
and therefore the individual
having had more influence than otherwise,
and therefore
having more influence.
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7. Influence
Time.
It is unclear on what basis we might assume
influence decays or grows with the passing of time.
e zenith of Milli Vanilli’s influence on the music scene is past, but the
full impact of the Reverend omas Bayes’ mathematics (in machine
learning) has only played out more than two centuries aer his death.
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8. Influence
+ e complexity of influence is a challenge – and an opportunity, Sheldrake, e Guardian Media Network, 15th Feb 2012. http://eulr.co/14lHfuD
* something that can be “operationalised” on a continuous and commercially sensible basis.
We don’t know.
ere is currently no scalable facility* to ascertain
or infer who or what caused someone to change
their mind or behaviour.+
Influence is complex.
In other words, changing your mind or actions is
the result of many stimuli over time and entails
conscious and subconscious processes.
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9. Influence
Complexity. Simple?
Or complex?
Many appreciate that the weather is complex, that • Oprah made him buy the
book
stock markets are complex, and that city traffic flow • The ad made her buy the
is complex. However, attributing relatively simple sneakers
• The recommendation from
cause and effect in the business of influence appears her sister made her
vacation in Italy
too tempting for many.
• The latest anti-smoking
campaign made her quit.
While complexity science doesn’t rule out the
instances in which a single stimulus suffices, it also In fact...
recognises that this is the exception rather than the she’s romanticised an
Italian vacation for years,
norm. and for many reasons she
herself can’t tease apart.
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10. Influence
[1] G. Weng, U.S. Bhalla and R. Iyengar Complexity in Biological Signaling Systems Science 284:5411 (2/4/1999) 92-6. DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.92
[2] D. Rind. Complexity and Climate Science 284:5411 (2/4/1999) 105-7. DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.105
[3] W.B. Arthur. Compexity and the Economy Science 284:5411 (2/4/1999) 107-9. DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5411.107
[4] Professor Henrik Jeldto Jensen, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College. https://www2.imperial.ac.uk/~hjjens/
Complexity.
It’s a system in which there are
multiple interactions between
A complex system is one many different components[2].
that by design or function
or both is difficult to Complex systems constantly
understand and verify[1]. evolve and unfold over time[3].
Complexity bridges the gap between the individual and the
collective: from psychology to sociology, from organism to
ecosystem, from genes to protein networks, from atoms to materials,
from the PC to the World Wide Web, from individuals to society[4].
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11. Influence
When you’re stuck in traffic, do you ask:
“Which car
started it?”
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12. Influence
* Is the Tipping Point Toast? Fast Company. 1st Feb 2008.
Ready to be influenced?
One of many parameters for the spread of influence is the readiness of
individuals to be influenced. In my experience, this is too rarely studied.
"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost
anyone can start one – and if it isn't, then almost
no one can." Duncan Watts.
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13. Influence
* e Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, 2011
Defining influence.
Defining influence as something an individual possesses can therefore be
misleading in our context. I advocate this definition ...
Influence is a change in opinion or behaviour.
You have been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t
otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have
done.*
Influence is both the input to and output of a complex system.
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14. Influence
* e Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, 2011
Six influence flows.
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15. Influence
Influence, the outcome.
What is the intended outcome of your
marketing and PR campaigns, and the design
of your organization overall, if it’s not to get
stakeholders to think and behave as you’d
like, and to be sensitive to how they’d like
you to think and behave?
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16. Influence
W. Chen, Y. Wang, and S. Yang. Efficient Influence Maximization in Social Networks.
Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 199-208, 2009.
Influence maximisation.
So, how can we improve the effectiveness of an influence process?
Influence maximization is the problem of finding a small subset of
nodes (seed nodes) in a social network that could maximize the spread of
influence.
It is a discrete optimization problem in a social network that chooses an
optimal initial seed set of given size to maximize influence under a
certain information diffusion model.
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17. Influence
[1] D. Kempe, J. M. Kleinberg, and É. Tardos. Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. In Proceedings of
the 9th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp 137–146, 2003.
[2] K. Jung, W. Heo, W. Chen. IRIE: Scalable and Robust Influence Maximization in Social Networks. Proceedings of the 12th
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), pages 918-923, 2012.
Influence maximisation.
Computer simulations using real life social network data and various
simplifying assumptions show that selecting vertices (nodes) with
maximum degrees (connections) as seeds results in larger influence
spread than other heuristics, but is still not as large as the influence
spread produced by other algorithms[1].
Importantly, it appears that influence ranking – the process of trying to
score an individual’s network connectivity – is only good for selecting
one seed[2].
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18. Influence
M. Trusov, A. Bodapati, R.E. Bucklin, Determining Influential Users in Internet Social Networks, Journal of Marketing Research, August 2010.
Influence maximisation.
Seed selection isn’t as easy as picking the most connected nodes.
Not all connections are equal, and relatively few so-called friends are
actually significant influencers of a given individual’s behaviour, while
substantial heterogeneity across all community members exists.
Descriptors from user profiles lack the power to determine who, per se, is
influential, and friend counts and profile views also fall short of being
able to identify influential site members.
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19. Influence
Reciprocity.
To influence better, be influenced better.
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20. Influence
[1] Please Repeat: Influence is not popularity. A blog post. B. Solis. 11th August 2010. http://eulr.co/14tC38l
[2] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: e Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2000. http://eulr.co/Xb3uAm
Influence scores are not.
Critics point out that ‘influence scoring’ services quantify little more
than the propensity for an individual’s social media contributions to be
seen and shared. And irrespective of congruity with organizational
objectives.
Some claim such services confuse popularity for influence[1].
e phrase ‘social capital’ has been suggested instead, but this phrase has
been used for more than a century to describe the value of the network
rather than that of an individual participant in a network[2] and we
don’t want to introduce new ambiguities.
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21. Influence
Beware.
Black boxes.
See the 7th Barcelona principle.
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22. Influence
Complexity science.
Long may we have the for-profit motive to explore
complexity science and network science, let's just not mis-
sell or mis-use its capabilities along the way.
I’m not anti-network science, as some have implied following
my long-standing criticism of many “influence scoring” services.
uite the contrary. Heck, my company is named aer the chap
who invented a lot of the mathematics here!
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23. Influence
Terminology. So that’s all 7 billion of us.
is is important to recognise.
It’s a complex system.
Influence – a change in opinion or behaviour.
Influencer – anyone who contributes to someone else changing their
opinion or behaviour.
Key influencer – Someone who, following statistical modelling and
analysis, is considered with some degree of confidence to be part of a
cohort central to the efficacy of a program of influence.
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24. Influence
Terminology.
Potential influence – An influencer’s potential contribution to an
influence program as part of a cohort of influencers (seeds / nodes).
Influential – A descriptor applied to an individual deemed to have been a
key influencer and who might (but might not) remain one.
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25. Influence
Terminology.
Advocate – An individual who shows support for, pleads the case of or
defends a brand, cause, product or service while remaining formally
unaffiliated with it and unremunerated.
Ambassador – An individual remunerated by or otherwise allied with a
brand; their actions are, in some manner, endorsed by the brand with an
acknowledged and transparent affiliation that is mutually beneficial.
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26. Influence
Terminology.
Professional / occupational – Individuals who by definition of their job
function are in the position to influence others directly through
authoritative or instructive statements.
Celebrity – An individual whose name recognition commands a great
deal of public fascination (“celebrity status”) and has the ability to use
their status to communicate with broad effect, either as advocate or
ambassador.
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27. Influence
Terminology.
Influencee – a person who changes their opinion or behavior as the
result of exposure to new information.
• Type 0 – no exposure to the information, no influence
• Type 1 – exposure to the information yet no influence
• Type 2 – exposure to the information and influenced as the
originator intended
• Type 3 – exposure to the information and influenced contrary to
the originator’s intention.
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28. Influence
Influenced?
Have you changed your mind about any aspect of influence?
Do you feel compelled to do something differently?
Can you contribute knowledge, experience, comment?
Do you feel inclined to circulate this document more widely to those that
might (dis)like it?
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29. Influence
Let’s discuss.
Philip Sheldrake, CEng
Managing Partner, Euler Partners.
Ma drid?
In
+44 7715 488 759 I love measurement and
philip@eulerpartners.com evaluation when it makes the
skype:psheldrake world happier, healthier and
G+ wealthier.
LinkedIn
Author, e Business of Influence:
@sheldrake
Reaming Marketing and PR for
blog
the Digital Age, Wiley, 2011.
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ank you.
http://xkcd.com/815/
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