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InfluencePhilip Sheldrake

Managing Partner, Euler Partners

www.eulerpartners.com

@sheldrake Author of The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age, Wiley, 2011

Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 England & Wales License

The Future of Influence

Ketchum, London

with Traackr

16th April 2013

?A few questions for you …

What do you think of Adidas?

How will you vote at the next election?

Why did you see that last film at the cinema?

Where would you really like to go on vacation?

Which company would you really like to work for?

Why did you select those items at the supermarket?

You’ve been influenced, right?

You’ve been influenced when you think something you wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

reputation management ≠ managing reputation

brand management ≠ managing a brand

They mean actively attending to the business of influencing and being

influenced such that the resultant beliefs or opinions held about us and our products are

conducive to our achieving organizational objectives.

And lest we forget the Excellence model of public relations, or indeed common sense:

To influence better, be influenced better.

The best way to exert useful influence remains to deliver great products and

services so that your customers evangelize your brand to others, and to be a well-run organization so that

your employees and partners evangelize working with you.

Fundamentally …

We have no scalable facility to ascertain or infer who or what caused someone to change their mind or behavior, without falling into some kind of last-click attribution trap, so how then can we pretend to score an individual’s likelihood to exert that influence, and as if they did so with apparent Newtonian simplicity?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/feb/15/complexity-influence-challenge-opportunity

Influence is complex.

Vehicles => phenomenon of traffic

Molecules of air => phenomenon of weather

Population of Cairo => phenomenon of political uprising.

Which car started it?

When you’re stuck in traffic, do you ask:

Nearest and dearest

We are more influenced by the 150 nearest to us than by the other six or so billion combined.

Full Gesture Communication™ in Unaugmented Reality™

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

H.L. Mencken

Influence maximisation.

… the problem of finding a small subset of nodes (seed nodes) in a social network that could maximize the spread of influence.

It is a discrete optimization problem in a social network that chooses an optimal initial seed set of given size to maximize influence under a certain information diffusion model.

We can simulate complexity.

We can simulate influence / contagion in social networks.

We can learn how to identify a “subset of seeds” / a cohort of individuals, that will help

maximize influence flow.

The Six Influence Flows.

AMEC* / Terminology.

Influence – a change in opinion or behaviour.

Influencer – anyone who contributes to someone else changing their opinion or behaviour.

Key influencer – Someone who, following statistical modeling and analysis, is considered with some degree of confidence to be part of a cohort central to the efficacy of a program of influence.

* Work in progress. http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/03/influence-request-for-comments/

So that’s all 7 billion of us. This is important to

recognise. It’s a complex system.

If you procure such analytical services

with all this in mind, you’ll do better than

buying ‘scores’.

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Wiley

May 2011

ISBN 978-0470978627

OUT MID-MAY 2013See www.attenzi.com

Follow @sheldrake