Audience by Adam Hawkins http://anodiseproductions.com

How influential are you? (really?)

I got into trouble recently because I was having a rant (as I do from time to time) about people making a fuss about how influential they are on Twitter according to a dubious tool called Klout, (which, incidentally, recently gave a perfect 100 score to a celebrity I’ve never heard of who had had an account for only a week).

What got me going was this whole idea of ‘influence’.

You see, in my book, and that other more famous one, the dictionary, to influence means to be a compelling force on the behaviour or opinions of others.

Now, I am often entertained, informed and helped and sometimes, even provoked and infuriated by people on Twitter but I don’t think I’m often influenced by them to the extent that I’ll change my opinions or alter my behaviour.

Do you make a difference?

Getting excited about being recognised as an ‘influencer’ is understandable. Most of us want to make a difference in our own way and using social networks to influence behaviour and opinions has worked really well in a number of cases like the backlash against The X Factor at Christmas, the subversion of the Daily Mail ‘hate’ polls and most famously, the way emergency services were mobilised by Twitter participants in the plane in the Hudson crash.

However, in these cases it was the medium and the viral nature of the message that was important and not the person who started the campaign.

Becoming a real influencer takes more than gathering followers, fans or arbitrary scores. It’s not about the transitory nature of celebrity or seeming popularity but about establishing a reputation and becoming the person that others turn to when they want information they know they can trust.

In business, its probably the most valuable thing we can achieve but influencers don’t set out to deliberately become influencers, its something that happens as a by product of the ‘real’ work they do, when others start to seek them out or recommend them and they gain very little from it directly.

Are you an influencer or a manipulator?

When someone asks your opinion do you give it honestly or are you afraid of upsetting people? Do you only give your best when you are being paid for it?  Do you deliberately build a large following so that you can brag about it and use it to your own advantage? (This is the opposite of building a following organically because people are interested in what you have to say.) Do you do deals for commission before recommending a product or service? If so, you’re a manipulator rather than a real influencer.

If you feel the need to try and measure your influence, you’ve already lost the plot. If you need to shout about it on a social network that touches a tiny fraction of the 6 billion people on the planet, there’s no hope.

Influence is about the number of people who trust your opinion, not the number of people you collect and those who join social networks as a vanity exercise are missing not only the point but most of the fun.