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The Online Influence Edition

There's a lot more to learn about online influence. This week we consider some new perspectives about influencers.

HRExaminer v3.01 January 7, 2012

If it Doesn’t Matter, It’s Not Influence by Heather Bussing

If it Doesn’t Matter, It’s Not Influence

Last modified on 2012-01-10 18:54:45 GMT. 20 comments. Top.

Heather Bussing, Editor, HR Examiner Editorial Advisory Board Heather Bussing is an employment attorney and is the Editorial Advisory Board editor at HR Examiner. Full Bio »

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I’m not drinking the algorithmic Kool-Aid of influence measurement.

Influence is not something that can be accurately measured based on counting digital breadcrumbs on the internet.

Tracking links to blog posts through social media and counting who retweets what is about as interesting as watching dye spread on paper. Yes, iIt moves. It goes places you can follow. It’s evidence that someone did something. But it doesn’t mean much. At least, not anything that matters to me.

Basing influence on how many people follow you doesn’t mean much either. They many never read your stuff. And they could all stop following you tomorrow. But most won’t because they don’t visit very often anyway.

Keywords don’t tell you anything either. Just because someone uses a word doesn’t mean they have something to say.

When people link to a blog post on Facebook or retweet a link on Twitter, it means that something caught their attention for a moment. That’s it.There is no way to know if they read it, if they agree or disagree, if they thought it was important, funny or stupid, or even if they knew what they were posting. The idea of tracking social media activity is based on the assumption that if it causes people to do something, it is important or influential. Nonsense.

For YouTube’s 5th Birthday in 2010, Time Magazine published the Top Viral Videos. They were:

For those of you wondering whether it’s improved in the last year, the Top Videos for 2011 list starts with Rebecca Black.

This stuff is funny. It’s entertaining. And sometimes it even makes a difference in the world. The United Breaks Guitars Video got a big corporation to pay attention to the damage it caused, and dropped United’s stock price by 10% in the short run.

Still, I saw the Breaks Guitars video, along with millions of other people; it didn’t change my life–not even a little. I found it interesting. I may have even tweeted it or “liked” it (I doubt it). It did not influence me.

Influence is more than just getting me to click or post. Influence is something that changes the way I see or think about things. Something influences me when it makes a difference in my life that matters– in my relationships, art, work, spirituality and values.

Often the things that influence me don’t cause me to do anything that can be directly tied to the original experience or idea.

I teach law school because I really hated law school and wanted to do it differently.

I practice employment law because I grew up in the 60’s and was fascinated by the Civil Rights Movement and the concept of equality among people.

I am terrified of falling from heights because I had to walk across a train trestle high above of a rushing river in Peru when I was 8.

These are things that had distinct and profound influences on me. But the events and the results are years apart and have complex layers of action, inaction and other facts and forces woven into them.

For example, I went to law school because I was a philosophy major and didn’t want to have to get a job yet. How do you measure that?

Psychologists, Sociologists, Historians, Cultural Geographers, Anthropologists, Economists, Marketing and PR Departments and John Sumser have been trying to figure out cause and effect in human behavior for years. Now the computer scientists and programmers are in on the search.

Sure, on some cosmic level, everything is connected. The butterfly migration in China can probably tell us something about the weather in Norway. But digging deeper into minutia, especially patterns of clicks and posts about babies farting and kittens waving their little paws seems like the wrong direction to look for insight and meaning.

Today, collecting data is easy, cheap and there is more if it than ever before. We’re just figuring out what it means, if anything. Interesting questions, pictures and stories are emerging.

Yet, counting digital droppings does not really explain what ideas and experiences matter to me or anyone else. And if it doesn’t matter, then it’s not influence.

Resources

The latest Pieces on Influence

Defining Influence 2012 (influence vs power)
Measured Influence
If It Doesn’t Matter, It’s not Influence by Heather Bussing (great dialog in the comments)
Another Look at Influence (Principles we’ve uncovered)

Defining Influence 2012

Last modified on 2012-01-10 18:52:50 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Influence in HR and Recruiting

Later this week, we’ll be introducing the first installment of the Inluencer Lists for 2012. You may have noticed that we took a nearly six month break from following the horse race. It seemed like a good idea to sit back and reappraise.

Since the last published list, we’ve been doing a lot of listening. (It’s a pretty powerful way to let influence flow though you.) The topic of influence is grabbing a lot of attention at conferences. That’s what we hoped for in the beginning of this influence project, over two years ago.

HR and Recruiting professionals have very limited access to authority, resources or direct power as a means of getting things done. Those elements belong to line management. HR is a staff function. Staff functions have to use influence as a primary mode of accomplishment.

There’s that word again.

Defining influence is a class A Philosophy project. There are nuances upon nuances. Influence is one of those ideas that describes situational dynamics. It’s present in the popular culture these days because marketers are interested in using networks in social media to turbo charge sales results.

The most important distinction is that power is the ability to cause things to happen. Influence is the ability to increase the likelihood that something will happen. Power evokes command and authority. Influence is gentler and more environmental. Power includes force. Influence has almost no force. Power distributes resources. Influence affects the distribution ratios. Power acts. Influence implies.

While all relationships contain a blend of power and influence, hierarchies run on power and collaborations operate on influence. Power directs. Influence suggests. Power is the direct path, the interstate highway. Influence is more subtle, like the wind blowing through a wheatfield or the latest fashion.

Who Cares?

The reason that influence matters in the public sphere is that ideas flow like fashion or the wind through the wheatfield. Knowing how to give an idea its largest possible audience allows the market to make decisions. Knowing how influence flows through the marketplace helps people with ideas understand how to reach the people who might need those ideas.

As the forum gets more private (deeper in a niche or behind a corporate firewall) understanding how influence works in a specific context gives change agents the ability to succeed more efficiently. Accumulated influence is how most technology decisions are made. It’s how HR Policies evolve. It’s how best practices come to be accepted.

Understanding the mechanics of influence is essential for the effective operation of a Human Resources Department. It’s critical for understanding industry dynamics. It’s necessary for the promulgation of ideas in the market or the organization.

The Influence Project.

In 2012, we are going to work closely with a new service called Social Ears (more about that later). Over the course of the coming year,the way that we define and measure influence will be on display as we try to figure out what it means. To maintain some level of balance, we’ll keep slogging through the Top 100 Influencers project.

The work will focus on the things that are possible to learn and measure online.

Here’s the first sample of the work.

Imagine that you had access to the last one million pieces of content generated by the top 1,000 or so sources in the HR – Recruiting Universe. Imagine a word cloud built on the past 90 days subset of that content. You’d have a visualization of the trending topics in the overall category that includes HR, Staffing, Recruiting and the rest of the silos.

Here it is (It’s a routine product of SocialEars):

Word cloud of the trending topics in HR - Recruiting 4th Quarter 2011

Resources

The latest Pieces on Influence

Defining Influence 2012 (influence vs power)
Measured Influence
If It Doesn’t Matter, It’s not Influence by Heather Bussing (great dialog in the comments)
Another Look at Influence (Principles we’ve uncovered)

Measured Influence

Last modified on 2012-01-10 18:53:33 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Influence in HR and Recruiting

For nearly two and a half years, we’ve been measuring and talking about influence. As services like Klout, EmpireAvenue, and PeerIndex have come along, influence measurement has taken on a new credibility. It’s also taken some pretty silly turns.

Yesterday, we looked at a word cloud that showed the trending topics in the online universe that cares (publishes) about HR and Recruiting. The underlying structure is pretty straight forward. The size of the word is a function of the number of times it was mentioned. A word cloud gives you a picture of the terrain: the more the word is uttered, the larger its representation.

Within recent memory, this was better than anyone could imagine. Successful dissemination of a message was measured by the number of press clippings. Tracking the number of mentions of a story was an admittedly impossible task. Press clipping services (later, media monitoring services) prospered by helping organizations understand some of what was being said about them. Polling companies tried to grasp the trends that drove popular sentiment.

Today’s measures are an outgrowth of that clipping service mindset. In theory, you can start to calculate the impact of a piece of text (and it’s author by proxy) by looking at references, tweets, retweets and so on. This is what is meant when online influence is measured.

Even though we’ve been working with the issues for a while, it’s still very early.

What can be measured today is a very narrow and specific form of influence. The combination of content, repetition, references and distribution is the stuff that makes it likely that you will get one point of view or another. Much of what is called ‘influence’ is the likelihood that you will find person X’s material at the top of the search engine results. In this way, so-called influence is little more than a second cousin of SEO (and you can sort of tell that by the way people try to game the analysis.

Recent studies from Harvard and Pew are starting to suggest that influence operates differently online than we’ve been led to believe. Friends don’t inherently influence the way that friends absorb new ideas.

In the flow of ideas, there are a spectrum of kinds of people. Curators identify and move information to audiences. Creators build the material that gets circulated. Lots of people straddle the middle between those two points.

Over the next year, we’re going to look closely at the types of people who move ideas around our industry.

Resources

The latest Pieces on Influence

Defining Influence 2012 (influence vs power)
Measured Influence
If It Doesn’t Matter, It’s not Influence by Heather Bussing (great dialog in the comments)
Another Look at Influence (Principles we’ve uncovered)

Conversation as Influencer: William Tincup

Last modified on 2012-01-06 17:17:40 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Editor’s Note: This is part of our Books as Influencer’s Series. As always, William Tincup approaches things in his own unique way. And if you get a chance to have a conversation with William, take it.

Three Conversations by William Tincup

I can’t tell you what I’ve read this year… it’s been a blur… 2011, the year of the whiz bang, fly by, brain fucked on X… the social media headache, ahem addiction. Truthfully, I have a Google reader account with over 1000 blog subscriptions and I haven’t logged in since early 2010. I consume content these days via social… via my newsfeed… in Facebook, in Linkedin, in Twitter, etc. etc. etc. Again, I’m not sure entirely what I have read, when I read it, did I dream it and/or think about dreaming about it. My guess is that I’m like you. It’s a hazy, unclear world we live in.

Adding to my content conundrum, I’ve been lucky as I’ve had thousands of conversations this year… all these inputs, not enough folders to make sense of it all… it’s like my brain is main-lining Adderall. Whew… calm down… disconnect. Get away from it all… at least for 10 minutes. Good luck with that strategy William.

No, I’m not crazy… we’re not crazy… this is our new normal. Where conversations… both audial and narrative come together as one in our mouse brains. Fused inputs. Not sure of the roots, not sure of where it all leads.

You know, conversations are like art for me… some art provokes us… some art is good but not great… some art will always languish in mediocrity. Some art challenges us; some art inspires us… while other art frustrates the shit out of us. And, some art should never see the light of day.

Three conversations that stand out for me in 2011…

Dwane Lay || Dwane made me rethink my position regarding supply chain. Prior to Dwane, I thought supply chain and the concept of lean had absolutely no effin place in or around HR. I was wrong. Dwane is an expert in lean HR. Thank goodness I got to meet him and/or hear his message. His ideas on how HR can be more effective / efficient are ground breaking. Period. Check him out. Blog || LinkedIN || Twitter

Daniel Crosby, Ph.D. || Like most of you, I thought all Ph.D.’s were spinless assholes. Turns out, again, I was wrong. By meeting with and listening to Daniel… I’ve come to understand the error of my ways. His ideas on organizational effectiveness rock. And, he cares about marketing / brand. And, he’s got a great voice, etc. He’s a good guy and he has great, innovative ideas on how HR gets better. Check him out. Blog || LinkedIN || Twitter

Joe Gerstandt || Never in a million zillion years did I think a straight white guy would school me on anything diversity related. Actually, who the fuck listens to a white guy talk about diversity? Well, I do. He is the most compelling voice in diversity and inclusion today. Trust me, he’ll make you think… and it will hurt. Thank goodness I got the chance to hang with him in 2011. Check him out. Blog || LinkedIN || Twitter

So, here’s the thing… we’re all busy… reading, sharing, thinking, talking, writing, etc. Do me a personal favor and check these folks out. And, think of the three conversations that meant something to you this year. Ahhh, I can’t wait to open the package that is 2012. What art, ahem conversations await me…

Books As Influencers: Bob Corlett

Last modified on 2012-01-06 17:23:40 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Editor’s Note: We asked our Editorial Advisory Board what books influenced their thinking this year. This week we will be publishing their responses. There are great books and important ideas from some of our favorite influencers. hb

What books have changed my thinking this year? by Bob Corlett

As a staffing consigliere, I’m endlessly curious about how economic forces are reshaping our business environment. Fascinated by what makes change initiatives succeed or fail. Eager to learn what makes people engage and do good work. But rarely do books make me reexamine what I “know” like these four did.

Myths of innovation: (Scott Berkun)

Much of what I thought I knew about innovation was wrong and counterproductive. Berkun looks past the simplistic and superficial stories we tell (“Watson come quickly!”) to reveal the hard work and process behind innovation. For example: “You can say ‘innovative’ as many times as you want, but it won’t make you an innovator….I know from my studies, if you are in the room when something that is later called an innovation is being made, the language is always much simpler. Words like problem, solution, goal, experiment and prototype—simple workman-like words—are the language you’ll hear.” His perspective has been profoundly helpful to me as I continue to wrestle with how to improve the hiring process for small companies.

Flash Foresight: (Daniel Burrus)

A flash foresight is a “blinding flash of the future obvious.” Hard trends are reshaping our world and much of the old economic order is giving way, creating both huge uncertainty and huge opportunity. Unlike the old economy where using a resource (like oil) depletes the resource, knowledge increases when you share it. This creates an entirely new set of dynamics in the business world—an economy based on abundance, not scarcity. This book made me reexamine my understanding of economics and better understand what is yet to come.

Start with Why: (Simon Sinek)

How do some companies consistently outperform others? Why are some leaders more inspiring than others? It turns out that great leaders and companies think, act and communicate in a different way than others. Key message: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” This deceptively simple concept was incredibly disruptive to most of what I learned in business school. (Not big on reading? Take 20 minutes and watch his TED talk.)

Switch: (Chip and Dan Heath)

Leading change is not just about being inspirational—there are hard realities most executives overlook. This is easily the most practical, useful book on leading change that I’ve ever read. Key quotes: “Big picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is precisely in the details ….What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity…Ambiguity is exhausting …What looks like a person problem is often a situation problem.” Written with vivid examples, you’ll easily remember the lessons of the book after a quick read. I’ve quoted this book more often than any other.

Books As Influencers: Rueff, Uranga, Dewitt, McCormick

Last modified on 2012-01-06 17:40:08 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in our series on what has influenced our favorite influencers: the members of the HR Examiner’s Editorial Advisory Board.

Rusty Rueff

The Next 100 Years by George Friedman. Reinforced thinking that we have to solve our immigration issues as it relates to Talent over the next 50 years.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. How we treat intellectual property as it relates to the human body is going to be an ongoing issue for information sharing, privacy, and human rights.
Eat to Live by Daniel Furhman. Kicked my bottom back into eating right and healthy.

William Uranga

Smart and Get Things Done by Joel Spolsky: For those that want to be great leaders of or excellent talent consultants to them in hiring technical (particularly engineers), this is a must read. Straight forward, humor and gives you a feel of the good, suitable talent you want to have on your team.
Borrowing Brilliance by David Murray: There is nothing new under the sun. That isn’t an excuse, but liberation for us bottom-line folks. David tells his own story (sometimes a bit verbose) and shows how you can find solutions by looking at different time periods, geographies and industries. You don’t have to be right-brained to be creative or find new ideas.

Todd Dewitt

None changed my thinking really, though I did read an old book I love, Atlas Shrugged, for a third time and found fresh insights into business and leadership. The book warns of the threat of excess government trampling the work of free individuals, thereby harming the very engine that creates growth and productivity. Though imperfect like any book, and hyperbolic at times, the core ideas are terribly useful to ponder. Specifically, the ideals of passion, hard work, educated risk taking, and the profound importance of self reliance stand out. They form the very foundation of innovation and entrepreneurial action. In the end I find this work a bit long, but full of truly worthwhile drama and idealism.

Neil McCormick

The majority of the books I read in 2011 were for research purposes.

Lean but Agile by William J Rothwell, James Graber, Neil McCormick was the key book for me in 2011. I’ve read this book numerous times in the past few months as I’m one of the authors. Released in January 2012, the final version is confirmation of the importance of rethinking the way we approach human resources. It’s practical and steps the reader through the logic of Lean but Agile and supports this with helpful strategies and processes to achieve the required outcomes.
Competing on Analytics by Thomas H Davenport Jeanne G Harris This is an interesting concept and was part of the research I’m undertaking to define linkages and return on investment for human resource interventions.
Bourne Sanction by Robert Ludlum Great read. It gave my brain a rest!

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The Online Influence Edition

HRExaminer v3.01 January 7, 2012

Table of Contents

If it Doesn’t Matter, It’s Not Influence by Heather Bussing

If it Doesn’t Matter, It’s Not Influence

Defining Influence 2012

Defining Influence 2012

Influence in HR and Recruiting

Measured Influence

Measured Influence

Influence in HR and Recruiting

Conversation as Influencer: William Tincup

Conversation as Influencer: William Tincup

Books As Influencers: Bob Corlett

Books As Influencers: Bob Corlett

Books As Influencers: Rueff, Uranga, Dewitt, McCormick

Books As Influencers: Rueff, Uranga, Dewitt, McCormick

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