The basic idea behind online influence is familiar to all communicators. It’s the reason Tiger Woods is paid, at conservative estimates, £20 million a year by Nike to wear its swoosh on every possible item of clothing; it’s also why you’d consult your Top Gearmad cousin about a new car purchase, rather than your granny. We subscribe to the opinions of certain people on certain topics, and we’ll allow their views to influence and guide our own.

 

Online, it can be harder to identify who these key figures are. Indeed, one of the problems brands often encounter with digital comms is that there are so many voices out there, it’s difficult to know who’s listening to whom – and if anyone is actually really listening at all – because online measurement seems still to be regarded by many companies as a mystery.

 

“In the past, organisations have often had a defined, ‘go-to’ list of KOLs and influencers, developed largely based on gut feel and experience,” says Louise Burwood, client services director at media research and technology specialists Commetric. “But in today’s rapidly evolving media environment this can quickly become stale and may not provide the complete picture.”

 

It’s still hugely important, however, for brands to know who the most relevant and significant influencers are for their shareholders, because it adds depth to engagement and helps companies to look towards the future.

 

When looking at the most influential people and online channels for a large healthcare organisation, Echo Research turned to mapping techniques.

 

“The first step is to zoom from satellite view, which includes everyone online with even a tangential trust in the topic, down to helicopter view – the usually smaller core audiences interested in the right topics,” explains Nigel Middlemiss, knowledge director for Echo. “We follow that with a typology splitting the influencers into groups, which allot them markers for how they interact, their geographical influence, their relevance and popularity online, all of which wraps up into a sort of mini-ID card.”

 

Even still, there’s only a certain amount that can be measured. There’s a huge amount of intangible value connected to online influencers which brands won’t be able to define accurately. But Paul Miller, head of digital at Cision UK, believes that brands can learn a lot about how online influence works from crisis communications. “Measuring online influence is like a mirror image of risk assessment,” says Miller.

 

“Companies will predict how quickly content can move through online spheres, either from feeder channels through to major hubs, or outwards from major hubs to users with less influence. It borrows a lot from studies of technological virus outbreaks – hence the idea of ‘contagion’ in thought leadership, which you can reverse engineer to predict how influencers will help propagate a message.”

 

Online services such as PeerIndex and Klout claim to measure the influence online users possess based on their social media activity – both services examine influence by means of analysing social media and blogging activity. These measurements are based on sociometric analysis, which examines the ways in which others respond to and talk about a certain person, as well identifying hubs in online networks.

 

“A company that invests in finding out who the influencers are around their business is then able to leverage that knowledge into conversations about their brand and industry, as well as identify their critics and endorsers, listen to what is being said about their competitors, and see emerging issues and ideas,”

 

Burwood believes that it’s key when identifying influencers to map them in their media relations context. “In addition,” she says, “the sentiment of influencers towards a particular product, brand, policy or issue is shown in Commetric’s patented methodology, as well as how they are networked to various sub-themes.” Commetric’s Influencer Network Analysis methodology is based on several elements, but includes a proprietary algorithm based on the same principle as Google’s page ranking. This converts visual maps to numbers and provides rankings of the people, ideas and reporters that are most central to the discussion being analysed.

 

“A company that invests in finding out who the influencers are around their business is then able to leverage that knowledge into conversations about their brand and industry, as well as identify their critics and endorsers, listen to what is being said about their competitors, and see emerging issues and ideas,” says Burwood.

 

But what can you trust when it comes to reporting on opinion leaders? Middlemiss thinks that qualitative research still has a part to play here. “Sometimes the profiling is best done through interviews to find out where influencers get their information, what their criteria are for trust in the client or a company like it, what would enhance their trust in the brand, and their appetite for different social channels,” he says.

 

Flemming Madsen, chairman of insight solution provider Onalytica, believes that it’s important to pay attention to the topic around which you’re trying to measure influence, as that affects the relative importance of online stakeholders. When measuring opinion leadership around childhood obesity, Onalytica found that while Jamie Oliver was one of the most vocal commentators on the topic, the most influential voice for stakeholders in the debate was the comparatively little-known (to the general public) National Obesity Forum.

 

Moreover, size isn’t everything when it comes to online influence. The trust that followers have in opinion leaders is crucial, according to Azeem Azhar, CEO and founder of PeerIndex: “Someone who has 100,000 Twitter followers might still have a low PeerIndex score – because the people they engage with don’t consider their comments and links worth sharing. Opinion leaders have active communities of whatever size.”

 

“It’s certainly not about massive numbers,” agrees Miller. “But there’s a mythical ideal of a blog that is extremely influential, even though it’s only read by ten people, because those ten people happen to be world leaders – I’ve never come across that. It’s certainly important though that influencers are able to connect with the right stakeholders. Brands need to be aware of this, as well as the context surrounding influencers.”

 

Once the communications function has identified who its brand’s key influencers are, however, the issue arises of what to do with them. Incorporating peer influence into an overall comms strategy can be tricky, and it’s key to get the timing right, so that new information about online leaders aligns with looking afresh at wider strategy.

 

Moreover, the positioning of a brand’s online influence strategy in relation to that of its competitors can be distorted by what Burwood calls the internal ‘lens effect’: “Objectively understanding what competitor influence actually looks like is too often a sensitive area. The ‘lens effect’ means that a client’s position within a given issue may be over-stated, or a competitor’s position of leadership underestimated.”

 

Burwood recommends that an open-minded approach is necessary here. Media conversations are best viewed in 3D, and in analysing online discussions around a particular topic, policy or brand it’s a good idea to identify and rank all the influencers present, rather than letting a pre-established subset of competitors or peers define the discussion. “Seeing where an organisation stacks up against its peers is a critical starting point for any communications strategy. It may also help identify potential opportunities for leadership, show up competitor weakness, and will provide immediate outreach to those media and journalists with proven interest in the space.”

 

Brands must be careful not to get seduced by the seemingly free-and-easy nature of the online sphere when it comes to engaging with influencers. “A brand that is savvy about the value of social media in a B2B environment can reap immense benefits from an ‘engineered’ approach to online influencing,” says Middlemiss, “because they’re having conversations that are less happenstance and ad hoc-ery, and more intelligence- and evidence-led. This absolutely doesn’t mean a lack of speed or intuition or personal style, though – these are as much at a premium as ever.”

 

 

When it comes to integrating influencers into overall communications, brands should take their lead from their traditional media relations. “If your company is already communicating directly with major leading media sources, such as broadsheet newspapers and national broadcasters, then you’re ready to connect directly with the major influencers in your industry,” comments Miller. “But if you’re talking to smaller publications, then you need to start by approaching the ‘feeder’ influencers. Those outlier networks reflect the same patterns as major networks, and the content makes its way through ‘feeder’ channels towards the major influencers.” Cision calls on a media-neutral perspective when applying models of influencer interaction for brands to enable them to develop their networks of opinion leaders.

 

Azhar believes that peer influence should be central to any communications strategy. “If a product or service is genuinely good, people will want to tell their friends about it. Sharing information is natural human behaviour - smart communicators know that if they introduce the right influencers to their product, the rest will happen organically.”