The question of Influence at #dellB2B

Influence is long recognised as being important. Back before this explosion of social media and micro-publishing, a small amount of people were considered to have a lot of influence. Or at least they were the ones that could be seen. PR teams would take them out for lunch. Wine and dine and hope they say nice things so people would flock to their brands. But this method, wasn't connected across the company or through communities.

Blogger outreach was used by a lot of companies to find the 50 people that would be influencers. But more and more professionals are now online so there are a greater number of people in the middle who may not have global influence but have influence within a specific community or area. With Twitter, LinkedIn, etc there is a movement of more individuals who are more influential in new areas and new platforms than ever before.

Companies now need to find who is relevent in your area and on the topic you are interested in reaching. This is about moving programmes from targetting 50 people to 500 or 1000. The good bloggers curate their twitter streams really well - just as journalists did in the past. Where they took from trades to put in nationals, they do this with Twitter now.

By the time it's reported, we've already talked about it online. Getting to the magic middle makes it easier to get to a larger, more targeted group. But if we think influence can't be scored, why are we interested? Someone in the audience uses it as a quick indicator and another uses it as it's embedded in some twitter clients.

But numbers? Why do we need one? For example, footballers are ranked on a Sunday in a score out of 10. If it's bad, you wouldn't have Alex Ferguson say "hey Wanye Rooney, you have 7.6" but to someone that is important - a way to mark the changes on performance. But are we moving to something that retail businesses may use a score to give an upgrade or special deals? Are they using you as you are influential in a community that they want to reach? Or, on the otherhand, call centres may not put you through to a VIP service if your score isn't high enough. Is that right?

Peer Index looks at areas of influence while Kred looks at influence and outreach - so they reward people for the generosity. It shows how authentic they are. The rockstars are the ones in local communities and not necessarily global.

500 influencers may have a reach of 5 million and they may be more influencial as they have a smaller network that trusts them.

I think the area of influence and scoring is an interesting one but it is still gamable and is still very much in it's infancy. The race is really to find the greater integration, the true data underneath it all - I can see the future to be more about credit scores and spending data being integrated with social footprint.

But until we can extract the full influence, I think we will be missing some of our greatest influencers and therefore our greatest customers. Influence is not just about chatter or overtweeting/autotweeting/spending our lives on Twitter. It links back to trust in a community and that's not just found online.