Discovering influence: It’s more than a single influence score

This is a guest post from Gary Lee, CEO at mBLAST

I tweet.  I blog.  I update my status on Facebook.   I write articles in various online publications and from time to time I am even quoted by others, largely for my views on influence and measuring influential voices around the Web.

I am a voice on Twitter, the blogsphere, Facebook and the Web in general, and what I write can be tracked and measured to determine the impact I am having in various market segments and communities.

I am one person, but I have many voices across many different topics.   And because of that, if you are marketing to me, you need to measure my influence across ALL the communities and markets you are trying to reach to determine if I’m influential in your area of interest.

As I’ve written before, there’s nothing really new about the influencer concept – we’ve always been marketing to influencers. What’s different today is that your influencers have moved beyond the easy-to-identify handful of traditional media and analysts that you meet at every trade show and brief every quarter. Now anyone with a computer or smartphone can be an influencer, whether they’re mainstream reporters, freelancers, subject matter experts with a Twitter account, or even your customers. There are no longer a dozen people talking publicly about your market, company, and products in a handful of magazines. There are now potentially thousands talking all across the Web and its myriad of blogs, social networks, and other places to hang out.

Many emerging tools on the market today try and discover these influential voices, and assign a single score that marketing and sales can use to determine how influential the people behind these voices actually are.   I’ve tried these solutions, and while I am enthusiastic to see that my score is rising across many of these tools, I can’t for the life of me understand how this approach has real value to anyone in marketing,  be they in advertising, PR, product marketing, or any other discipline.

I am more than just a single score.  I have influence in many different market segments and communities, and just as importantly, I have absolutely NO influence over a far larger number of market segments and communities.    In marketing, that matters – a lot.  And to ignore this is, in my opinion, to ignore the entire reason the study of influence has been ongoing for almost 100 years: to find and work with those voices that are moving particular market segments/communities.

As an example, those who know me know that I blog and tweet a fair amount about my own company (mBLAST), product set (mPACT), and the world of influencers in general.   I also from time to time talk about politics, the world economy, my family, life as a dad with four kids, and other more “real” topics.

Conversely,   I never talk about “fuel injection systems.”   I have no voice whatsoever in the communities and markets surrounding this as a topic, and thus no voice and no opinion.   So my influence in these market segments is zero, NADA, non-existent, or as my teenage kids might say with their thumb and index fingers stretched across their faces, “LOSER.”   I’m OK with this.  I’ll concede the markets for fuel injection, brain surgery, daylilies, and many other topic-centric communities in which I have little interest or participation, and virtually no authority or voice.

Anyone who blogs, writes articles, or tweets can and will have many different influence scores reflecting their ability to move a particular market.  Using my example, my level of influence and impact can be measured across the Web as I blog and tweet about my company, its products, influencers as a topic or even my own kids.   I have a “score” as my voice is carried across the Web and amplified by others.    I have no score, and thus no influence, on the topic of “fuel injectors” since I never write about it and thus never influence those market segments that care about it.

Generic, or single-score, influence systems on the market today really do not help a marketing professional understand any of this, and these solutions do not identify who is having an impact within the specific market segment a marketer may care about.  A single score just can’t do this, because by its nature it only covers the broad and generic “raw” influence of a voice on the Web. Single generic scores do not really measure the impact and influence that a person has within any particular market segments (i.e., your market segments) because they don’t measure and grade influence based upon on the things (topics, subjects, market segments, products, etc.)  an influencer talks about and the impact they have when they do.

Single-score influence systems are really just fun and games.   And fun and games do not really help in the hyper-competitive world of business and marketing today, where influencers can be a major factor in the success of your product or services.

To measure influence and find influencers, you have to first focus on the market segment or “communities of interest” in which you are trying to find influential voices.  And that means identifying and monitoring the voices that are talking about the things that matter to that market or community of interest, and only then measuring the impact and influence of those voices when they speak topically about that market or community.

Gary Lee is the CEO at mBLAST, a software-as-a-service suite that provides companies with an array of services that can keep them abreast of their audiences and ahead of the competition. For more from Gary, check out the mBLAST blog site and follow him on Twitter @gary_r_lee.