Influence

InfluencePhilip Sheldrake

Managing Partner, Euler PartnersLinkdex Think Tank event, London, 27th June 2013

Influence

Context.AMEC and the wider ‘Conclave’ have a working group on the topic of influence. It presented recommendations at the AMEC European Summit, June 2013.

is document explores some main issues.

The ConclaveAssociation 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

The International Association of Business Communicators

The Society for New Communications Research

The Digital Analytics Association (previously the WAA)

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association

The Advertising Research Foundation

Federation Internationale des Bureauxs d'Extraits de Press

The Conclave's #SMMstandards initiative also includes:

The American Association of Advertising Agencies

The Association of National Advertisers

The Interactive Advertising Bureau

and the following "client organizations" – Dell, GM, McDonalds, Ford, P&G, SAS, Southwest Airlines, Thomson Reuters.

Influence working groupBrad 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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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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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.

A Measure of Influence, Sheldrake, Communication World magazine, Jan/Feb 2013, IABC – http://eulr.co/Wnb88F

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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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Possibility ≠ Probability.Social media actions – retweets, reblogs, +1s, likes, etc. – are (mis)interpreted as:

influence having happenedand therefore the individual

having had more influence than otherwise,and therefore

having more influence.

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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 aer his death.

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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.

+ 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.

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Complexity.Many appreciate that the weather is complex, that stock markets are complex, and that city traffic flow is complex. However, attributing relatively simple cause and effect in the business of influence appears too tempting for many.

While complexity science doesn’t rule out the instances in which a single stimulus suffices, it also recognises that this is the exception rather than the norm.

Simple?Or complex?• Oprah made him buy the

book• The ad made her buy the

sneakers• The recommendation from

her sister made her vacation in Italy

• The latest anti-smoking campaign made her quit.

In fact...she’s romanticised an Italian vacation for years, and for many reasons she herself can’t tease apart.

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Complexity.A complex system is one that by design or function or both is difficult to understand and verify[1].

[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/

It’s a system in which there are multiple interactions between

many different components[2].

Complex systems constantly 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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“Which car started it?”

When you’re stuck in traffic, do you ask:

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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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* Is the Tipping Point Toast? Fast Company. 1st Feb 2008.

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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.

* e Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, 2011

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Defining influence.e WOMMA Guidebook definition:

“the ability to cause or contribute to a change in opinion or behavior.”

With the caveat: “ere are two distinct states of influencer measurement that are relative to the point in time an influencer marketing program begins: 1. e potential to influence (before); 2. Actual, observed influence (during/aer).”

* http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/05/influencing-influencer-marketing

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Six influence flows.* e Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, 2011

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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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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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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.

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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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[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.

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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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M. Trusov, A. Bodapati, R.E. Bucklin, Determining Influential Users in Internet Social Networks, Journal of Marketing Research, August 2010.

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Reciprocity.

To influence better, be influenced better.

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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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[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

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Beware.

Black boxes.

See the 7th Barcelona principle.

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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.

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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 aer the chap

who invented a lot of the mathematics here!

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Terminology.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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So that’s all 7 billion of us. is is important to recognise.

It’s a complex system.

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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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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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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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Types of influencee?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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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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Measuring PR.

e Business of Influence, Wiley, 2011.

With foreword by Robert L. Howie, Jr., then

Managing Director, CMO, Palladium Group,

Inc., Director, Kaplan Norton Balanced

Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy.

Measuring PR.

And if good old-fashioned storytelling

is more your thing, you might like

Attenzi – a social business story.

A free ebook, with foreword by Adam Pisoni,

Microso Yammer co-founder and CTO.

May 2013.

Influence

Let’s discuss.www.smmstandards.com/category/influence-relevancewww.womma.org/influencers www.philipsheldrake.com

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I love measurement and evaluation when it makes the world happier, healthier and wealthier.

Author, e Business of Influence: Reaming Marketing and PR for the Digital Age, Wiley, 2011.

+44 7715 488 759philip@eulerpartners.com

skype:psheldrakeG+

LinkedIn@sheldrake

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