The Teeter-Totter of Influence

Defining influence isn’t an either-or proposition. And I’m tired of it being framed that way. It’s subjective, and it’s fluid, and it requires CONTEXT and BALANCE related to what you’re trying to influence and why.

The Numbers Hounds

These are the folks that will tell you that influence is about eyeballs. They subscribe to the notion that influence is a direct result of total reach in terms of absolute quantity. Numbers Hounds focus on things like number of blog subscribers, number of Twitter followers, Diggs, website hits, or what have you. For them, it’s all a numbers game. The bigger the number, the higher the likelihood that you’ll be able to move the needle on a conversation or get the right someone to listen to what you’re trying to say.

The Community Purists

These folks eschew any notion that quality and quantity have anything to do with one another. They’re of the mind that it’s not the number of eyeballs you capture, but their notion of the quality of said spectators (or participants). For them, you cannot put stock in numbers at all, but rather it’s the idea that small voices carry weight if what they have to say is valuable enough. Community prevails, and the quietest voice can still have a large impact. Numbers don’t matter.

The Reality

When it comes to business, neither of the above works entirely. The first is about casting the net wide and hoping desperately that someone will stop long enough to listen, the second is unrealistically thinking that you have the scale and capacity to do big things with forever tiny numbers.

The fatal flaw in either scenario is that influence is in the eye of the beholder. If I’m interacting with a company, their influence and the weight of their brand in my eyes is the result of several factors.

If they have big reach, they’d better have something important and valuable enough to say to me *personally* that I don’t feel like just another sheep in the flock. I need to feel like the company invested enough thought to talk to their big numbers in a way that engenders trust, even if that means creating more than one message. So in this scenario, quantity matters but only when quality follows.

If they don’t have big reach but they have something big to say, that message better be portable and personal enough (and backed by my trust for that brand) for me to have a vested interest in carrying it forward. In which case, the quality matters but eventually that quality will be directly responsible for growing a large following, and the eventual quantity doesn’t negate the value of the information in the first place.

If I’m either of those businesses, I’d better be considering WHY exactly I care about influencing anyone, what I expect to do with that influence if and when I earn it, and how it furthers my business goals.

You’re never going to have a solitary definition of “influence” because what moves the needle for me or my customers is NOT the same as what moves you or yours. And you’ll find failure on each end of the spectrum and everywhere in between.

The only constant in influence is trust. It doesn’t matter how big or small the numbers are or how “pure” the community is. It’s about context and balance, and anyone who says otherwise is digging their heels in the sand and being obstinate to make a point rather than evaluating each situation on its own.

So now that I’ve had my say, tell me what constitutes influence for you? Do you automatically laud the quality of a contribution if it’s backed by big numbers? Do you do the opposite and think an indie band is only cool until it goes mainstream? Why does your business care about influence, and how are you building it with balance?

Photo credit: cho45

Find more like this: Branding, Marketing and Advertising, Social media , Brand, Business, Community, Social media, Social network