This document discusses the complex nature of influence and challenges the traditional notions of directly attributing changes in beliefs or behaviors to any single influencer. It argues that influence arises from interactions within networks and is determined by many factors. The key points are: 1) Influence is complex and cannot be reduced to the actions of any single influencer. 2) We are most influenced by the 150 people closest to us rather than the billions of others. 3) Simulations can help identify groups that may maximize the spread of influence, but direct attribution remains impossible. 4) Understanding influence requires recognizing it as a phenomenon emerging from a complex system.

1. Influence
Philip Sheldrake The Future of Influence
Managing Partner, Euler Ketchum, London
Partners
with Traackr
www.eulerpartners.com
@sheldrake
16th April 2013
Author of The Business of Influence:
Reframing Marketing and PR for the
Digital Age, Wiley, 2011
Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 England & Wales License
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2. A few questions for you …
What do you think of Adidas?
How will you vote at the next election?
Why did you see that last film at the cinema?
Where would you really like to go on vacation?
Which company would you really like to work for?
Why did you select those items at the supermarket?

3. You’ve been influenced, right?
You‟ve been influenced when you
think something you wouldn‟t
otherwise have thought or do
something you wouldn‟t otherwise
have done.

4. reputation management ≠ managing reputation
brand management ≠ managing a brand
They mean actively attending to the business of
influencing and being influenced such that the resultant
beliefs or opinions held about us and our products are
conducive to our achieving organizational objectives.

5. And lest we forget the Excellence model of public relations, or indeed common sense:
To influence better,
be influenced better.

6. The 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.

7. Fundamentally …
We have no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or
what caused someone to change their mind or behavior,
without falling into some kind of last-click attribution trap,
so how then can we pretend to score an individual‟s
likelihood to exert that influence, and as if they did so with
apparent Newtonian simplicity?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/feb/15/complexity-influence-challenge-opportunity

8. Influence is
complex.
Vehicles => phenomenon of traffic
Molecules of air => phenomenon of weather
Population of Cairo => phenomenon of political uprising.

9. When you‟re stuck in traffic, do you ask:
Which car started it?

10. Nearest and dearest
Full Gesture
Communication™
in Unaugmented
Reality™ 
We are more influenced by the 150 nearest to us than by
the other six or so billion combined.

11. “For every complex
problem there is an
answer that is clear,
simple, and wrong.”
H.L. Mencken

12. Influence maximisation.
… 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.

13. We can simulate complexity.
We can simulate influence / contagion in social networks.
We can learn how to identify a “subset of seeds” / a cohort
of individuals, that will help maximize influence flow.

14. The Six Influence Flows.

15. AMEC* / Terminology. So that‟s all 7 billion of us.
This 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 modeling and
analysis, is considered with some degree of confidence to be part of a
cohort central to the efficacy of a program of influence.
* Work in progress. http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/03/influence-request-for-comments/

16. If you procure such
analytical services with all
this in mind, you‟ll do better
than buying „scores‟.

17. OUT MID-MAY 2013 Wiley
May 2011
See www.attenzi.com
ISBN 978-0470978627
Follow @sheldrake 
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