Influence: the holy grail of understanding outreach

Influence seems to be the holy grail of distributing content. Yet no-one seems to have cracked it yet. A few people claim to have to done it – and their theory seems to be valid – but results suggest that no-one has truly cracked being able to accurately rate a site or blog by exactly how influential they are.

The reason for this is that people aren’t tackling the issue in right way. In fact, I think a lack of appreciation for the simple science of influence is almost certainly why people haven’t figured it out, and that if you understand that influence, like any other metric, is different depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

Here’s a simple node diagram, showing 2 networks. Each node is a site, the size of each node denotes their audience size, and the arrows show the flow of information between sites (whether this is pingbacks, retweets, doesn’t matter – you get what i mean).

The diagram shows 2 networks sat closely together – namely Automotive, and Design (for the purposes of this example). For simplicity, let’s pretend I’m only showing up the fairly influential, larger blogs, so if Jane from Wigan is retweeting something, she’s so small this diagram can’t even see her. Thank god.

Put simply, this diagram shows us 3 types of site when considering Influence:

1. Mass Influencers. The Purple ones. They’re large in audience size, and for this reason probably show up fairly well on inbound link rankings. In fact, they’ll even have lots of nodes hanging off them, people who retweet everything they say, and may even get quoted on a few blogs too. However, what’s often overlooked is who is doing that. If you look at the arrows on the diagram from the Left-hand Purple blog, only a couple are taking it’s content, and that’s a couple of also-influential blogs. So, for this example, the Purple blog has a large audience, has high inbound links, but potentially not from it’s own influential peers – and these are the connections that spread further than just one node.

2. Well Connected Influencers. The next type are the blue ones. They’re smaller, niche, and possibly appear average when judging inbound links. However, they’re connected to several other influential blogs, and are quoted by much larger ones, so audience potential is still high. They’re also credible, highly connected (almost always in real life, not just the “blogosphere”) and know their own industry inside out.

3. Bridge Influencers. The two Green ones. These are probably the most overlooked of the lot, and where I think Influence is still nowhere near reaching yet. They appear poorly on inbound link rankings, and for 2 reasons: firstly, they may sit between 2 industries, and influence rankings prefer to put sites into distinct categories. Secondly, they genuinely don’t have a huge amount of connections, simple as that. The important thing as you may have guessed (the name? the diagram perhaps?) is that they bridge 2 networks – Design bloggers quote their stories, Auto bloggers do the same. They are the key to opening up, for example, Design-based content from an Automotive client.

What all this adds up to is that your objectives for outreach need to be considered before you identify which blogs you’d like to engage with, and that influence should be ranked in multiple ways (and no, don’t add them all up get a “score”).

• Inbound links – still hugely valid, but only if you consider who the links are coming from. A link from a large site, from a highly linked site, and a link from a highly linked site which also is linked to other highly linked sites. Complicated, but needs to be considered. Total links should also be analysed, but only valid when you don’t care how much further you want the content to spread – consumers are often the last node if your content is not top notch.
• Audience size – if you’re trying to reach the masses, then yes, consider this one. As mentioned above, seeding content to well connected sites will eventually reach the masses if seeded correctly (and sites with large audiences often want cash for content…).
• The whole network – what’s the end goal? Are you bridging the gap between 2 industries? Are you trying to be credible among Industry experts? Are you just trying to get to consumers as fast as possible?

Whatever you are trying to achieve, your judge of Influence needs to match.

Advertisement