The Power of Influence

“Eavesdropping isn’t influence, engaging in a conversation is”…leaked a speaker prior to the start of “The Power of Influence,” an assemblage of eclectic panelists at the Social Media Club San Francisco / Silicon Valley’s late June gathering at Eastwick Communications in Mountain View, California. Sponsors included eCairn Inc, Eastwick Communications, DiGirono Crispy Flatbread Pizza, Amazon Consulting, and Krause Taylor Associates.

Moderator and Principal of Eastwick Communications’ Barbara Bates kicked off the evening giving the floor to panelists including Dominique Lahaix, CEO of eCairn; Jeremy Thomas, Partner and Director of Global Brand Planning at Collaborate; Scott Hirsch, VP of Get Satisfaction; Jennifer Leggio, ZDNet social business blogger; and Ryan Calo, academic fellow with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Eastwick Communications’ Jennifer Lindsay, Director of Digital Services and Social Media moderated the conversation on Twitter.

“We all know the old model of communication and the power of influence has changed dramatically, but whom and where are the new influencers, and how can you find them? How do we apply a scientific approach to identifying influencers online? How is brand influence changing? What is the power of peer influence? What is the role and influence of media/bloggers in the new communication world order? How can we use technology to persuade and influence?”

Ready, set, go.

ECairn’s Lahaix led talking about connecting with bloggers on a one by one basis, measuring how many times people talk about his Company and finding out what they (bloggers) are saying. Technology isn’t measuring human behavior – it’s measuring how people react to messages.

Get Satisfaction’s Hirsch profiled “Sally” who is in many places online, but still can be measured by her behavior across his entire network – by the Phd’s the Company hires to evaluate the complexities. The audience chuckled. Hirsch – personally – doesn’t think that Twitter is influential because its just another broadcast channel, and you can listen to your customers and broadcast out a response. Or, if conversations were threaded, Hirsch adds, you could track a conversation. Hear part of Scott’s conversation in this video shot by Rich Reader.

As “Social CRM,” influence could be a social layer around customer relationship management, realizing who’s out there online. If you could ask their permission to make their information transparent, then you – the company – could get something in return. Mint he said sells the private financial information of others, yet never reveals whose information it is selling. The Mint customer gets a lot in return for giving away private information, yet both Mint and its customers walk away as winners.

In terms of also “crowd sourcing,” Hirsch added, if you enable your customers to talk to one another, you’ll get value out of it by eavesdropping and so will the customers, but to get the best value you should engage in a conversation with them.

Social networks don’t do engagement well, Leggio stated. There are ways to engage with customers. There are true customers on Twitter. There are threaded conversations through the salesforce.com Twitter tool (soon to be released). However, there is too much focus on the tool – which is a really dangerous path to go down because if you get too focused on the technology, you’re not on the engagement.

It’s about the brand, Jeremy Thomas states. Brands do matter. “There’s an idea that eyeballs can be seduced and ‘how to build the brands’ have been forgotten in the process. The brand has to learn how to adapt in so many more contexts than before. How can an identity form itself? It is going to follow the conversation and be relevant. It will not just be noise. We can do more with brands because the canvass is larger. We’re doing a lot of educating on the principles of branding. The channels are taking the focus off of going back to the wisdom.”

“Big consumer brands are intuitively entering into the conversations via social media,” Thomas added. “Technology brands are pushing messages into conversations (B2B) when they do not flow into the conversation. It all comes back to human needs and desires, the conversation is still the same, back to face to face, understanding what your customers want and responding to that. Word of mouth is still our great friend, and what’s bad is really bad and what’s good is really good.”

The truth is out there.

“The conversations are happening whether you’re aware of them, participating in them, or not,” Leggio adds. For example, she told, a company wanted to launch a corporate blog, but not open comments. The company just wanted to field comments through email. Leggio calls that the “marketing page on the website.” You have to have those (comments) open. You can choose not to engage nor invite those conversations in, but are “really doing yourself a disservice, and you should take on those conversations.”

Lahaix says that the companies who win with social media are the brands that have built trust with their customers, especially after a crisis situation has happened. Leggio agrees, and says if you’re waiting to get out there, you’re too late (post crisis). You have to have a crisis communications program in place, so you don’t create those situations (where you will miss out).

Ryan Calo asks, what does technology really change? “It changes the circumstances under which you can get to a crisis,” he answers. “Technology changes who the influencers are and who the important people are. It also creates opportunities for control. It allows you to refine and change your message. The technology that allows people to target can help you get your message out to particular people. If you talk to people about their experience in social media, women say it’s very different than men. There are these techniques to refine your message, but ways in which consumers can also respond – in unique and different ways.”

Is technology short circuiting the conversation?

“We used to waste messages on 60 percent of the audience,” Leggio adds, “but today we can get that targeting right down to the nose, and the message has to be better.” Ads in the UK used to be shown in theatres as a “reward” and theatergoers would “boo” not because there were ads pre movie, but because they were bad ads.

What’s surprising about how influence is happening today?

Leggio just talked at a PRSA event recently, and shared that buying decisions are coming more and more from peer networks, and not from direction of traditional media. “When it comes to lead generation or getting involved in customer conversations – when they (customers) talk to one another – that’s not just for the sales team,” Leggio adds. “Regardless of your role in a company you need to get involved in those conversations or you may become ‘irrelevant.’”

“You’re trying to influence someone to do something,” says Calo. “Facebook saw Twitter coming and it wanted to get its status bar updating on a quick basis, and prompt people to respond to post their status. “You can do so much with queues and prompts. I worry that we’re moving in an opposite direction toward a perfection of design.”

Among many other questions asked across the hour, Bates closed with “how do you develop your own influence (as individuals)?” Leggio says she doesn’t think about developing her personal brand. She unapologetic about herself, and just lets people see who she really is, and let them in (though, not into her personal life). The role of authenticity is critical to influence adds Hirsch. “Community management as the new customer service. Treating people humanly unless they treat you un-humanly.”

Crediting the panel with stimulating dialogue, Social Media Club members and guests learned a lot on how to be influential with social media. Final takeaways included one must be versatile, share messages to teens with teens, define your targets, and behave yourself in your and someone else’s community.

Note: We shot a video of the event that is still being edited. Will post an update to this once it is ready.