In today’s social media world there is a constant battle being fought by companies and individuals to become as influential as possible. The desired result in becoming an entity with major social influence is a big return on investment and drawing new customers to your product. Whether that be tangible product such as a bookcase from Ikea or something abstract such as humor is besides the point. What matters is that the ideas are getting exposure and circulating. But how does one measure their social influence? There are programs out there such as Klout that do exactly that, but figuring out how Klout manages to come up with the score factors in a great many things.
There are several methods of evaluating someone’s chances of being influential, from celebrity status to tracking of social media behavior, and all are highly relevant. But if we’re looking at this from the viewpoint of the marketer’s ability to engage influencers, then the critical factors actually have to be willingness, expertise and return.
On the willingness front,there needs to be a connection between someone’s behavior (fan counts, followers, Klout score) and their actual interest in engaging with a brand. As any decent marketer will tell you, past performance is no indication of future results. When it comes to social influence, just because you exhibit influential behavior at one point, say a tweet that gets multiple retweets, doesn’t necessary mean you’ll become a mainstay that can continuously drive return. The key first step is whether you can continuously convince someone to engage and whether they will raise their hand to get involved.
With expertise in mind, influence is a skill like any other. The more you practice it, the better you are at it. Someone who metrically appears influential and has the willingness to engage still needs to understand how to be effective. In today’s social media world, this means being authentic and aware of not shilling themselves out and only engaging with brands they actually appreciate. There’s also the necessity to understand which tools they can use effectively: which platform are they best at creating content for? Youtube? Twitter? A blog? As platforms evolve, so do the skills necessary to create influence that matters, and that means influence must be measured through people’s ability to get better at being influential.
Finally, there’s the most important component: return. After willingness and expertise comes the necessity to deliver value. Tools need to be developed not to just measure someone’s likelihood to influence, but then the result of their specific influence when it occurs. These measurements can be produced on the group level (these 10,000 people created this return), or the individual level (this one tweet created this much return) but whatever scale it’s at, it can’t be ignored. The ultimate guidepost is whether someone’s influence actually influences.