influence in the age of the social web

1

INFLUENCE IN THE AGE OF THE SOCIAL WEB

2

Philip Sheldrake

Meanwhile

Blog

LinkedIn

Twitter

CIPR TV

___________

EUPRERA, Lisbon, 4th March 2011

www.andmeanwhile.com

www.philipsheldrake.com

/in/philipsheldrake

@sheldrake

www.cipr.tv

___________

#euprera #ess11

http://www.andmeanwhile.com/

http://www.philipsheldrake.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/philipsheldrake

http://www.twitter.com/sheldrake

http://www.cipr.tv/

4th March 2011 / Philip Sheldrake / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales3

1. Communications complexity and My Channel

2. A clean sheet / Influence and other definitions

3. The Six Influence Flows

4. Contrast to traditional emphases; the 2nd flow debate

5. The social Web and beyond

6. The Balanced Scorecard – business performance management and ROI

7. The Influence Scorecard – influence performance management and ROI

8. Influence-centricity – influencer-centricity is flawed

Coming up…


This presentation is based on the

The Business of Influence –

Reframing Marketing and PR for

the Digital Age, Philip Sheldrake,

Wiley, April 2011.

Book


What exactly are we

dealing with here?

Let’s paint the picture for the content / media side of things…

Communications complexity and My Channel


Content – an illustrated history

Blog post: http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/content-an-illustrated-history

Hi-res long-form image: http://bit.ly/content-an-illustrated-history

Slideshare version: http://bit.ly/hPYjnd

http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2011/01/content-an-illustrated-history

http://bit.ly/content-an-illustrated-history

http://bit.ly/hPYjnd

7

Prehistory

8

Ancient Greece

9

Ancient Rome & Middle Ages

10

Victorian Era

11

1930s

12

1950s

13

1960s, 1970s & 1980s

14

1980s

15

1990s

16

2000s

17

2000s /2

18

2000s /3

19

2010

20

2011

21

The Future


It’s impossible to fake it.

Real-time social marketing and PR must, by nature, be authentic.

Real-time PR marks the death of the persuasion / ‘spin’ school.

Long live two-way, symmetric PR fostering mutually beneficial

relationships between an organisation and its publics.

Reality is perception

Real-time PR is one of those facets of the modern PR discipline that separates

the 21st Century PR professional from the 20th Century practitioner.

23

A CLEAN SHEET / INFLUENCE AND OTHER DEFINITIONS

4th March 2011 / Philip Sheldrake / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 2.0 England and Wales


Rethinks are best started by jettisoning baggage.

Some words and phrases come with the ‘baggage’ of historic and

current use and misuse and are likely therefore to confuse or

narrow our thinking.

Words like “advertising”, “publicity”, “promotion”, “marketing”,

“comms” and “public relations”.

My book is a rethink


Organisation – an organized group of people with a particular

purpose

Stakeholder – a person or organisation with an interest or

concern in our organisation or something our organisation is

involved in

Competitor – an organisation with objectives that clash with our

own either directly (eg, fly with us not them) or indirectly (eg,

don’t fly, video conference instead).

I adopt the common distinction between competitors and stakeholders.

The entities


Customer – pays with money or attention; includes “consumer”

Prospect – a potential customer

Client – under our care

Partner – eg, supplier, reseller, retailer

Citizen – a legally recognised subject or national

Employee – includes dependents, and dependent retirees

Shareholder – owner of shares or similar interest

The stakeholders


– to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour

of someone or something.

You have been influenced when you think in a way you would not

otherwise have thought or do something you would not otherwise

have done.

I always use influence to mean influencing and being influenced.

Influence


The Six Influence Flows


Relevance – closely connected or appropriate to the matter in hand

Resonance – the power to evoke enduring images, memories, and emotions

Accessible – easily understood or appreciated; friendly and approachable

Reputation – beliefs or opinions generally held about someone or something

Trust – firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something

Significance – the quality of being worthy of attention; importance.

Definitions in this influence framework


The task at hand is influence. The resulting perception in the

near-term may be described in terms of relevance, resonance and

accessibility. The outcomes in the longer-term are reputation,

trust and significance.

The task at hand

Shorter-term Longer-term

Relevance

Resonance

Accessibility

Engagement

Curiosity

Reputation

Trust

Significance

Authenticity

Authority

31

THE 2ND FLOW DEBATE



It’s probably too simplistic but not too wide of the mark to consider

the historic focus of marketing and PR practice as being

predominantly on the 1st influence flow (our influence with our

stakeholders),

…with a bit of the 3rd (stakeholders influence with us), eg, internal

circulation of news clippings; marketing research to improve one’s

understanding of consumer preferences, attitudes, and behaviours;

and best practice PR; so long as you systematically make sure these

have an influence of course.

Contrast to traditional emphases


The 2nd flow is stakeholders influence with each other with respect

to us.

James Grunig continues to support the validity of the two-way

symmetrical model in the digital age.

In Paradigms of Global Public Relations in the Age of

Digitalisation, he specifically responds to Brian Solis and Deirdre

Breakenridge, and David Phillips and Philip Young.

The 2nd flow debate


“The Web has changed everything”

Putting the Public back in Public Relations: How Social Media is

Reinventing the Aging Business of PR.

“... it is hard to avoid making the claim that ‘the internet changes

everything.’ ... for public relations the unavoidable conclusion is

that nothing will ever be the same again”

Online Public Relations: A Practical Guide to Developing an Online

Strategy in the World of Social Media.

The assertions


“The bold claim that emerges from the arguments put forward for

‘the new PR’ is that the fundamental vector of communication

that shapes reputation and an organization’s relationship with its

stakeholders has flipped through 90 degrees. Now, the truly

significant discourse is that which surrounds an organisation,

product or service, a conversation that is enabled and given form

and substance by the interlinked, aggregated messages that

emerge from internet mediated social networks.”

Phillips and Young


“In one sense, I agree with these assertions. For most

practitioners, digital media do change everything about the way

they practice public relations. Other practitioners, however,

doggedly use the new media in the same way that they used

traditional media. From a theoretical perspective, in addition, I do

not believe digital media change the public relations theory…

Rather, the new media facilitate the application of the principles

and, in the future, will make it difficult for practitioners around the

world not to use the principles.”

Grunig’s response


“I do not believe that the ‘internet society’ or the ‘new PR’

challenges the Excellence paradigm, as Phillips and Young

argued…

They seem to believe that ‘an organisation and its publics’ are

distinct from ‘internet-mediated social networks’. Instead, I

believe that an organisation and its publics now are embedded in

internet-mediated social networks but that public relations is still

about an organisation’s relationships with its publics.”

Grunig’s response /2


“Organisations do not need relationships with individuals

who are not members of their publics even though these

people might be actively communicating with and building

relationships with each other.

Organisations simply do not have the time or resources to

cultivate relationships with everyone – only with individuals

or groups who have stakes in organisations because of

consequences that publics or organisations have or might have

on each other.”

Grunig’s response /3


– isn’t just a new media form in my opinion.

It has unprecedented emergent behaviour, a scientific term used

to describe how very many relatively simple interactions (eg,

blogging, tweeting, sharing) can give rise to complex systems,

systems that exhibit one or more properties as a whole that

aren’t manifest for smaller parts or individual components.

“Internet mediated” communication


What are these “relationships” that Grunig refers to?

Relationship – the way in which two or more people or things

are connected, or the state of being connected.

But with our blank sheet approach we’ve freed ourselves from

such constructs. All we have are Six Influence Flows that may or

may not be based on “relationships” with “publics”.

Relationships


So instead of saying that “organisations do not need relationships

with individuals who are not members of their publics” we can

say that organisations will find it advantageous to maintain

awareness of all Six Influence Flows regardless of the genesis or

properties of the influence that flows therein.

Organisations can prepare for the expected and

unexpected emergence of influences that might warrant

attention.

Monitoring the influence flows


Our new stakeholder is the individual who did not know herself

that she was a stakeholder until… hang on, there, look, she just

shared that link.

And she added a little comment too. Atoms of influence.

She is the modern manifestation of the netizen.

A new stakeholder


Netizens are not ‘online publics’ – those are just the usual

stakeholders with Internet access.

Rather, netizens are stakeholders because they are online and

because they are willing to act in ways that represent their moral

compass so to speak, their feelings for what is right and wrong, or

good and bad. Or perhaps they act simply on what makes them

happy or sad. Excited or chillaxed.

Netizens, not ‘online publics’


The netizen is a most complex being whose responses boil down

to a synaptic-like mouse click, or not.

And given that humans are unchanged, some act apparently

rationally and some have no regard for logical discourse

whatsoever, and most lay some place in between.

Synapse


So instead of saying “organisations simply do not have the time

or resources to cultivate relationships with everyone” we can say

that organisations will find it advantageous to wield

information technologies to ‘relate’ to the use (both

directly and programmatically) of information

technologies by others.

Relate

46

THE SOCIAL WEB AND BEYOND



Social media – Facebook, Ping, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogging,

debate at news websites, social news at Slashdot and Digg, etc.

+ Applications – Outlook, Wordpress, Tweetdeck, Flipboard, My Taptu,

the Facebook app, Foursquare, iTunes, Spotify, LinkedIn toolbar, Xobni,

instant messenger, Skype, Shopkick, Blippy, Layar

+ Services – email, Delicious, StumbleUpon, friend location information

from Foursquare and Facebook Places, socially augmented search, etc.

+ The network of devices…

Defining the social web


The Internet of Things refers to a network of objects not historically

connected. We can consider four kinds of objects:

Electronic devices (washing machines, air conditioning units and cars)

Electrical devices (lighting, electric heaters, and power distribution)

Non-electrical objects (food and drink packages, clothes, and animals)

Environmental sensors (measuring such variables as temperature,

noise and moisture)

The Internet of Things


Estimates for the total number of things connected to the Internet

of Things in 2020 vary from 16 billion to more than thirty times

this number.

If emergent behaviours stem from 2 billion+ connected humans,

we can expect similar from the ‘real world’ interacting with tens

of billions of things.

The manifestation of the Internet of Things, the Internetome,

might become an organisational stakeholder of sorts.

The Internet of Things /2


Web 1.0 – the web of documents

Web 2.0 – the social Web (user generated content, participation)

Web 3.0 / The Semantic Web

the Web itself understands the meaning of that content and participation

the Web as a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange

Manifold ramifications for the influence / PR professional.

And beyond

51

THE BALANCED SCORECARD, STRATEGY MAPS AND ROI

Plugging influence into business performance management.


52

The cascade

CASCADE Mission – why do we exist?

Values – what guides our behaviour?

Vision – what do we want to be?

Business objectives – to get from A to B

Strategy – the plan to get us from A to B

Strategic objectives – wholly necessary and sufficient

to execute the plan

Tactics – activities to achieve the strategic objectives.



To win, organisations must approach this cascade with

professional rigour.

7 out of 10 organisations simply fail to execute their strategies1.

The Balanced Scorecard is the most popular approach to BPM…

1. Balanced Scorecard Institute

Business performance management (BPM)


“The Balanced Scorecard transforms an organization’s

strategic plan from an attractive but passive document

into the 'marching orders' for the organization on a daily

basis. It provides a framework that not only provides

performance measurements, but helps planners identify what

should be done and measured. It enables executives to truly

execute their strategies.

“It is a management system (not only a measurement system)

that enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and

translate them into action.” – The Balanced Scorecard Institute

The Balanced Scorecard


Perspective

Financial Lagging

Customer

} Leading / performance driversInternal processes

Learning and growth

The Balanced Scorecard Perspectives


The learning and growth perspective entails sustaining the ability

to change and improve to execute the strategy and achieve the

vision across each type of capital:

• Human

• Information; and

• Organisation.

Learning and growth


“The strategy map provides the visual framework for

integrating the organization’s objectives in the four

perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard.

It illustrates the cause-and-effect relationships that link desired

outcomes in the customer and financial perspectives to

outstanding performance in critical internal processes.”

– Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes, Kaplan and Norton

Strategy Maps


“The strategy map identifies the specific capabilities in the

organization’s intangible assets – human capital, information

capital, and organization capital – that are required for delivering

exceptional performance in the critical internal processes.”


Intangibles


“Economic justification of these strategic investments can be

performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is

on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’,

or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’

But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the

bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic

justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire

portfolio of investments in intangible assets that will deliver the

ROI from [the strategic imperative].”


Return on investment

60

THE INFLUENCE SCORECARD AND ROI

Plugging influence into business performance management.


The Influence Scorecard is both part of and an augmentation to

the Balanced Scorecard.

Influence performance management (IPM) is the ease and

effectiveness with which we can manage and learn from influence

flows; integral to the process by which customers, citizens and all

stakeholders interact with organisations and governments to

broker mutually valuable, beneficial relationships.

The Influence Scorecard


The influence strategy is the set of influence activities in which

you must excel in order to help create a sustained difference in

the marketplace. It facilitates organisational coherence,

coordination and effectiveness of influence.

The Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Maps ensure that

investment in intangible assets has ROI built in by design.

The Influence Scorecard ensures ROI is similarly built-in to all the

influence activities identified in pursuit of the influence strategy.

Influence strategy and ROI

63

INFLUENCE-CENTRICITY



Maturity Characteristics

High Trace the influence (the action) back to source. Focused on business

outcomes, as we should be. Best practice, intelligent and you could say scientific and professional marketing and PR, and associated activities.

Influence-centr

ic

Medium It’s quality not quantity. Not how many people you interact with, but how and in what context?

Low Number of followers, friends, subscribers, circulation. Empirically supported network science. Akin to column inches

and AVE – measurement because you can, not because you should.

Influencer-centr

icPitiful Obfuscating compound measures

of non-contextual trivial variables. No empirical evidence.

Maturity of influence approach


More of us are more influenced

more often by the 150 nearest

and dearest than the other six

billion people combined.

The evidence against influencer-centricity


Researched the influence of known peer influencers, social

influencers and key influencers.

Known peers “top the list”, and social influencers come next.

… One is left wondering how “key influencers” got their name?!

Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, 2009, http://fluent.razorfish.com

Razorfish

http://fluent.razorfish.com/


We trust information most when it’s generated by friends, or

people we know regardless of content form.

Facebook and blog posts by companies were either "trusted

completely" or "trusted somewhat" by 41% and 36% of

respondents respectively.

Few participants rated length of participation (15%) and number

of fellow fans, followers and participants (12%) as extremely

important.

Consumers Pushing Companies into Social Media, Invoke Solutions, August 2010,

http://www.invoke.com/index/08-04-10

Invoke Solutions

http://www.invoke.com/index/08-04-10


What influences your choice of company, brand or product?

71% – reviews from family members or friends

46% – reviews in newspapers or magazine articles

45% – reviews from friends or people they follow on social networking websites

33% – reviews on blogs and message boards

10% – reviews by celebrities.

Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Tweets, Harris Interactive, 3rd June 2010, Table 5

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/HI-Harris-Poll-Opinions-In-Social-Media-2010-06-03.pdf

Harris Interactive

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/HI-Harris-Poll-Opinions-In-Social-Media-2010-06-03.pdf


The role of ‘influentials’ is over-estimated.

After The Tipping Point became a bestseller… Some studies

concluded that there are in fact people in society who have great

influence over others. But most research studies concluded that

other factors play a much bigger part in how people are influenced.

Whether someone can be influenced is as important as the strength

of the influencer. We’re most influenced by the people around us.

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/bridging-the-gap-between-our-online-and-offline-social-network

slides 131-140. And his upcoming book, Social Circles, August 2011.

Paul Adams, user experience researcher




…relatively few so-called friends are actually significant

influencers of a given user’s behavior (22% is the sample mean),

while substantial heterogeneity across users also exists. The

authors also find that descriptors from user profiles … lack the

power to determine who, per se, is influential.

… friend counts and profile views also fall short of being able to

identify influential site members.

Determining Influential Users in Internet Social Networks, August 2010, Journal of Marketing

Research.

Drs. Trusov, Bodapati and Bucklin


Influentials don't govern person-to-person communication. We all

do.

A trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on

how susceptible the society is overall to the trend – not how

persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is

easily persuaded.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html?page=0%2C1

Dr. Duncan Watts

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html?page=0,1


Two significant elements of influence-centricity are:

1. Focus on the influenced

Related to the emphases of Net Promoter Score

Outcome oriented (eg, promoter score and revenue growth, securing insights into and understanding of current customers and other stakeholders) rather than output oriented (eg, column inches, ‘opportunities to see’, feedback forms completed).

Influence-centricity


And:

2. Tracing influence

Influence-centricity

74

IN CONCLUSION



Media has most definitely evolved, as have the ways in which we

contemplate, design, communicate and execute strategy. And

rather than technological evolution, we’re plainly in the midst of a

technological revolution.

We have no choice then but to reframe marketing and PR in the

context of 21st Century technology, 21st Century media and

disintermediation, and 21st Century articulation of and

appreciation for business strategy.

– The Business of Influence, Philip Sheldrake

Fit for the 21st Century


Are you ambidextrous of mind (left- as well as right-brained)?

Are you fluent in public relations best practice and other influence

disciplines? Can you effect change in the face of entrenched

organisational resistance?

Then this is your perfect storm. You might be the new breed of

influence professional, and perhaps Chief Influence Officer.

________________________________________

Thank you for your attention.

Thank you

77

Philip Sheldrake

Meanwhile

Blog

LinkedIn

Twitter

CIPR TV

___________

EUPRERA, Lisbon, 4th March 2011

www.andmeanwhile.com

www.philipsheldrake.com

/in/philipsheldrake

@sheldrake

www.cipr.tv

___________

#euprera #ess11

http://www.andmeanwhile.com/

http://www.philipsheldrake.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/philipsheldrake

http://www.twitter.com/sheldrake

http://www.cipr.tv/