The 6 Factors of Social Media Influence: Influence Analytics 1

This makes good sense to me, emphasizing from the target's point of view that influencers need to have credibility and to deliver relevant information at the right time and place, for the target/s to take action. What you've written about influencers also accords what what I've read recently, that it's not necessarily the size of the influencer's network, but their passion which is key (which I'm guessing may relate to their perceived credibility). Bearing these points in mind I've asked in a recent blog as to whether community managers should themselves be regarded as key influencers (& therefore a potential revenue driver), despite the risks involved in turning them into "glorified marketeers" if not done correctly.

There are many social networking websites where we  can share our blog and get traffic for the blog. Now a days social networking websites are very famous for the business also.Here you mention some good information about social media influence..Thank you for sharing .

Hello Stuart,

Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment to reaffirm the validity of my model.

I definitely agree that a user's passion is very important, and their passion probably result in a higher bandwidth in some social media channels. This could which may increase their visibility and therefore increase their perceived credibility, which is what I am calling "confidence" in this article. But this may not be the true credibility of the influencer.

The issue of "turning community members into a glorified maketeer" is a touchy one and must be handled carefully. This is a topic that I will cover in a later post of this blog miniseries. So stay tuned!

Hi Michael,

Thanks, I like the distinction between passion/confidence & overall credibility.

I look forward to your post on the delicate subject of using community managers to influence members around their purchase of products & services.

Cheers,

Stuart

Ni hao Mike, (thanks to Nick Jr.   lol)

What a great start...!

I'm a new fan ... but I'm here for the duration of the miniseries (at least) ...  (grin)

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Of the introductory 4 factors of the targets, I agree that confidence in the influencer is very significant ... part of that confidence may also stem from similar experiences in the lives of both. I believe given two influencers with similar advice to a single target, one of the discriminators the target might use is how similar each one of the influencers' experiences mirror the target's ... we tend to trust those who have lived in the same part of the country or had similar rites-of-passage experiences, no?

* * *

This sort of analysis simply fascinates me ... as well as discovering all the significant nuances that are commonly overlooked that influence people to behave the way they do. . . and especially online.

Keep it up ... you have a new loyal fan...

Until that time...  Earl J.

Ni hao EarlJ

Thank you for the nice comment. I'm so glad to hear that my analysis resonated with you.

What you said is definitely true. At then end of this miniseries, we will have to deal with the confidence of the target. That is the last bottleneck that we must overcome in order to be successful in influencing the target. And depending on what data you have, you can potentially boost the confidence of your target, by making the target aware of the similarity between him and the influencer.

This is precisely what I meant when I said that even though we will be working with influencer's data, we must not forget the target. Even though we are finding influencers, we must also make sure that we find one that is similar to the target in some ways. At the end, there is a tradeoff among the 6 factors that we will need to optimize.

I look forward to hear your comments on my future poosts. Thanks again for dropping by.

Michael - 

I'm very much enjoying the first in your series - which focuses on the dialectic of Social Media.   I agree with all of your model's components.   For me, it raises two elements and a question.  

First, I think about translation to the medium.  In order for bandwidth and relevance to be effective, the communicator needs to be able to translate their concepts into the channel's available format.  A video or a 140 characters in Twitter have very different contextual carrying capacity

Second, the timing also depends on the channel.  Twitter only provides the last 5 days of data, but blog posts from 2007 are still driving traffic to my web site.   So again, the nature of the medium impacts the factors you've identified ... and different people's communication styles are suited to different media.  

Finally, my question is on metrics.  You mention analytics at the end, but some good examples of tools that measure such factors as Credibitlity, bandwidth, timing, influence, etc. would be very helpful. 

Looking forward to your other posts on this topic!

@skipshoe

Hello Skip Shuda,

Thanks for the thoughtful and inquisitive comment. There is definitey differences in expressive power for different social media channel. That is why bandwidth is defined "The influencer's ability to transmit his expert knowledge through a social media channel" in the article and it depends on the particular channel, or what you called medium in your response. This is also why I included the alignment of channel as the 5th factor. Very good observation :)

As you mention, timing is also channel dependent. I would imagine that if you need to do analytics on twitter data, you probably find some ways to save and aggregate the tweets first. But if you do it directly from twitter search, then the temporal sensitivity (timing) would be very narrow. However, twitter follower/following data are persistent over a much longer time range, and that seem to be a metric that lot of people like to user to determine influence, where in fact they can only fine high bandwidth users that may be, not credible in the domain of interest, irrelevant and have poor timing sensitivity.

For your question, the next article in this miniseries is already out, and it explains the various types of metrics or data for determining a influencer's bandwidth and credibility.

Finding the Influencers: Influence Analytics 2

For timing and relevance, it is more difficult to simply have a metric because it depends on the target as well. That means we cannot derive a metric for the relevance or timing of an influencer. We can only have such metric for a influencer and a particular target in mind. However, in the following post (part 3) of this miniseries, there are data manipuations that we can perform to accomplish relevance and good timing. So stay tuned!

Hello, Mike -

Another relevant  facet of the influencer is the breadth of their knowledge and the breadth of their audience/targets.   A well known celebrity such as Stephen Fry doesn't have any particular credibility on specific topics, but is followed because he is so generally intelligent, humorous, and well spoken.   A number of TV news broadcasters carry an outsized ability to influence their viewers because of the nature of the broadcast channel.   Again, they're not packing credibility in any specific topic, but are given credence due to the frequency and nature of their communications to their audiences.

I suspect these factors can be fundamental characteristics of an influencer taxonomy as well.

On to the next two articles,

Dave

Hello Dave,

The breadth of knowledge and breadth of their audience are indeed important, but they are more suited for influence that are not social media (ie, offline influence). We can certainly put them in a social media context, but if that is the case, then I would argue that both of the factors you mentioned are subsummed in the 6 factors already.

1. Breadth of audience is essentially a social equity metric (see Finding the Influencers), and it is a measure of his bandwidth. Bandwidth as defined in this article would include his network, audience, reach, etc.

2. The breadth of knowledge, the fact that he is generally intelligent, humorous, well spoken, etc., essentially gives the target more confidence, which is also a factor that we will cover this week. In fact Your example of Stephen Fry is an example of a respected authority figure that the targets trust. This will be discusee in the last article of this miniseries.

The next 2 articles of this miniseries is already out. The last one will be posted sometime later this week.

Thanks again for the comment.