It’s hard not to get a bit excited about accolades. I’ve been on lists before. It’s always an honor to be curated amongst others whom you respect deeply. But being ranked #22 on The Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers list definitely made me say, “Wow!”

But it’s important to put into context what is really happening here. Forbes contributer Haydn Shaughnessy curated a list of “social media power influencers” using some interesting new tools as part of a study he’s conducting:

The study is supported by PeekYou who have given me free access to their software, Leximancer, who have allowed me to use their semantic analysis platform for free, and Global Dawn who have met some of my wages while I do the work. Thanks to all.

 

He made it clear from the outset that this was his list, and not some “official” Forbes ranking.

But none of that really matters in today’s social media realm. His list was inevitably shared around as the “Forbes Top 50 Social Media Influencers” — a massive accolade that leverages the reputation that Forbes as spent decades building. This went nuts on Twitter and Facebook. Nobody bothered reading the fine print–that’s just the way it is with these things. I received far more comments and likes from a far wider range of people than I would normally expect for finding my name on a list. This was white hot social currency. It was the same for all of the others I checked with whose names were on the list.

Why such an sudden out pouring of congratulations? Why so many people from our pasts coming out of the woodwork to say, “I knew him before he was famous!” It’s truly an amazing phenomenon. My guess is that high accolades have some sort of halo effect. Anyone who feels close enough to offer congratulations somehow share in the glory–and in the social media world, so they should.

My first reaction was to thank my online community of friends and colleagues. It is they who give me whatever stature I have. They deserve the praise more than I.  In fact, there are no doubt many who deserved to be on that list more than I. I was ranked well above many people whom I admire greatly, and whom I think are far more “power influencers” than me. In fact, I’m sure that many people looked at the list and scoffed at where Shaughnessy’s tools had ranked us.

While I’m going to do a follow up with him on the study and methodology, now is a good time to restate the first rule of measuring influence: online influence scores often misrepresent people. Sometimes they err in your favor, other times they err against you. No algorithm can truly capture real influence. (In fact, increasingly I believe that most only measure presence.)

The ultimate gauge of influence still remains the human heart. My thanks to all those who touched mine with their praise and adulation.

Thoughts On Making The Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers List via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

A fantastic post from Geoff Livingston taking us on a tour of all the influence theories that have been floating around since Gladwell’s Tipping Point came out back in 2000. A decade in, and the debate still rages as to what influence is and how it works online (click the image to see full size). But Geoff has dug up one of my favorite media expressions “The Fifth Estate” to try to bring order to the influence chaos:

“Leaderboard systems such as Klout and Empire Avenue can quantify individual social media capabilities and strength. Using these gamified leaderboard systems, companies and nonprofits can build lists of high-scoring voices and target them as influencers.

Many would argue that understanding your community’s dynamics and building relationships from within a community as a member of the Fifth Estate is a more reliable strategy than using a leaderboard list. Getting an idea embraced by those who can best spread the word often requires subject-matter expertise and accessibility, stronger grass-roots within a community.”

The most influential thing you can know about influence is that we all still have a lot to learn about influence.

There are more great visualizations of all the various influence theories at Jess3′s blog:

Influencer Theory via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

Loyalty programs are going to evolve rapidly to take advantage of new customer data, in particular you influence score.

With airlines, those with Klout may find themselves moving to the front of the plane. While upgrades are the goal, for now it won’t hurt to be “friends” with your favorite airline and interact with them more.

Click here to see the full infographic.

Facebook May Someday Get You Upgrades Faster Than Air Miles via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

The concept of humanizing business is something I’m a big believer in. It might be better thought of as re-humanizing business though. Social media is taking us back to the Mom & Pop era, where you had to care about your community if you wanted to have a healthy business.

The shift now is away from mass media, mass marketing and mass production, towards something, as Maddie Grant who just finished writing Humanize with Jamie Notter describe as more human:

Social media succeeded by abandoning the traditional mindset and assumptions of our machine-based organizations, and instead embracing ideas that are much more consistent with what it means to be human. In social media, relationships matter. So does trust. So do things like meaning, humor, transparency, authenticity, and creativity. Social media is built on the principle that control is a thing of the past, and that the results you get are not always the ones that you were seeking when you started. Those principles are much more aligned with what it means to be human, than with what makes machines work well. That is fundamentally why social media has been so explosive. We like being human. We can’t help it. When we get access to something that lets more of our humanity come out, we are drawn to it. That is why we are flocking to social media.

There is more social than media in social media. Humanization is a term to get used to hearing.

The Humanization of Business: Currency of Caring via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture.

“Influencers” belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience.

influencersfilm.com
facebook.com/​influencersfilm

Influencers: The Documentary via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

Our stories are told not one-by-one, but in concert. We all share simultaneously to provide a more holistic narrative.

Vancouver Riots As Told Through Social Media via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

An important part of re-telling stories through curation is linking to the original source. I see this as essential, but the following debate raises a few interesting counterpoints:

Why Do We Link In News Stories? via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

To Be a Part of This Story Requires Acts of Selfless Generosity via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

Way back in 2008, Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everyone hit the shelves. That’s where my copy has been sitting collecting dust ever since. But I’ve taken it down and been re-reading some of the chapters this week. Even though the book is barely three years old, it’s like looking into a time capsule–an archeological dig to discover how our ancient ancestors in Social Media lived. This passage from Chapter 3 about how “Everyone is a Media Outlet” triggered a realization of the convergence of two trends I’ve been watching:

Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.

What Shirky observed as mass amateurization in 2008 has now evolved into a mass professionalization in 2011. Every business is now a media business.

Shirky also gets credit for that line, as it too is in his book (I added the word ‘now’). As prescient as that insight was in 2008, it would have sounded much more like an abstract theory back then in contrast to the 2011 competitive imperative many businesses now face to sustain an ongoing social media content strategy that continuously engages the customer. Something that is still easier said than done.

But that seems to be changing after years of struggling with the notion. The best solution comes in the form of empowering many more employees to solve the business’ new content problems, says Social Media Explorer:

Doesn’t it seem odd that folks who work for you are expected to answer the phone, greet customers when they walk in the door and handle customer service issues, are somehow not trustworthy enough to tweet several times a day on behalf of your brand? Do you trust them to post to the company Facebook fan page regularly? What about shoot and edit a video or write a blog post?

…As business owners and managers, we can’t add on more tasks for employees to do without letting go of something else. We must analyze some of the crazy things we think they should be doing (that have little to no impact) to allow room for building our branded media assets. (Hint: Once you begin to view your digital footprint, your digital reach and your  branded media as an asset, its overall priority rises exponentially.)

Simply put: an increasing number of employees must now become “media professionals”. But what does this mean for the true media professionals?

If brands are the new broadcasters, then it stands to reason that, conversely, the old broadcasters (newspapers as well as TV channels) have to learn to sell something other than advertising space or, worse, the content itself.  However, the media industry has been struggling to find something to sell, just as goods & services businesses have struggled to create content.

That struggle may too, finally, be at an end — thanks to the fastest growing business of all time: Groupon.

Media businesses are suddenly racing to adopt the group buying model. Early examples include Cox Media Group’s DealSwarm, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Steals, the TorStar chain’s—which publishes the Toronto Star and a series of regional weeklies—WagJag. Other’s like McClatchy group (MNI) have chosen to partner with Groupon instead of reinventing the wheel.

The only question is: Why has it taken so long to figure this out? GigaOm had a great piece of analysis on this:

But if anyone was in a position to [take advantage of group buying], it should have been the newspaper industry; after all, who else already has relationships with hundreds, or even thousands, of local merchants and businesses? The problem for newspapers was seeing those relationships in a different way: not just as a static provider of banner ads and full-page color spreads for the advertising salespeople to harvest on a semiannual or quarterly basis, but as a resource the papers could connect directly to customers for a fee…

The problem now is that Groupon and LivingSocial have become such behemoths in the email-marketing business that they can offer a size and scale newspapers can’t hope to compete with. There’s arguably still an opportunity for the NYT to target its own niche readership for high-end offers, but it’s a much smaller opportunity than it might have been if the paper had launched TimesLimited a year or two ago.

Both sides, media businesses as well as goods & services businesses, are racing towards a social media middle ground. Two different sets of problems with social media solutions that are driving a convergence of business and media.

Yes, Mr. Shirky, finally, here comes everyone…but they’re now in their business suits with pockets full of coupons.

Every Business Is Now A Media Business (and vice versa) via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.

Welcome to my new site. My goal is to provide useful tips and insights for businesses looking to build sustainable online influence.

I’m breaking this down into three key muscle groups: story, audience and influence. Everyone from big brand marketers to company bloggers, from sales executives to customer service reps, can benefit from exercising these muscles.

Story

Story is the currency of social media. Without a steady flow of stories to trade, you’ll soon be social media bankrupt.

The problem with most blogs / Facebook Pages / Twitter feeds is that they begin with great intentions but soon run out of steam. For many, the effort required to create yet another post becomes harder and harder.

To overcome this, it’s crucial to understand not just the overall story you are telling, but also the greater narrative that surrounds you. This master narrative is different for everyone, depending on what sort of business/lifestyle you are involved in. Learning to tap into the ongoing story of your industry, profession or passion will give your own storytelling the endurance to stay the course.

For business this means looking not at the product pipeline, but at the brand values, and the industry thought-leadership. For individuals, this means learning to balance content curation of those you admire, along with your own original voice.

I’ll be introducing lots of new tools over the coming months that help us monitor the master narratives that surround us, as well as tools that help us plan our content calendar well into the future.

Audience

They used to say: “On the Internet, no one can hear you scream.” That was before they started to collect “friends”. Do you remember when you first signed up for social media platforms like Twitter? If you are like most people, including myself, it was hard to see the value at first since none of us were connect to anyone. But as the number of connections grew, so did the obvious value of social media.

Building an audience is essential. The audience provides the reason to continue telling your story. They provide the feedback that keeps you sharp. They unlock new opportunities by recommending you to new friends or informing you of new stories to share in.

But how do you build a bigger audience? And how do you build a better quality audience that’s more engaged? These will be the topics discussed here as we share methods and strategies for winning the hearts and minds of the masses (and hopefully making a bunch of real friends along the way).

Influence

This has been one of the hardest areas to define as influence comes in many forms. Yet, it is quickly becoming the ultimate measurement of your online presence. From Klout Scores to Twitalyzer metrics, we’ll look at how influence is being measured and what the benefits can be for you.

We’ll look at how to establish authority and how to stay authentic.

So please join me for this exciting journey to get fit and build our social presence muscles together.

Welcome to the New JayOatway.com via JayOatway.com - Story. Community. Influence.