Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Communication

Social influence and social media

This morning I went along to Like Minds’ Social Media Week debate on Trust and Social Influence.

The good people at Like Minds pulled together a great panel and the debate was very wide reaching, so I’m only going to focus on a couple of the useful points I took away with me.

Behaviour, not values

The first point is that the tools that currently measure influence base their scores on your online behaviour, not your values or work or your offline behaviour.  Now, I love watching rugby, I used to love playing rugby, I still play squash, however, I rarely ever tweet about either sport.  I’d like to think I influence some people about rugby and squash, but no tool that uses social media as its data source is likely to pick that up.

Margin of error

For PRs it’s important to note that tools that provide influence scores or assign which topics someone is interested in, work best when aggregated.  That is to say that individually they’re either right or wrong, but across 1,000 or 1,500 of the vast majority of people they’ve highlighted as being influential on topic X should indeed have some influence on topic X.

Don’t shoot the messenger

Azeem Azhar from PeerIndex made a point that perhaps is the most important one to note on a personal level.  Tools like PeerIndex, Klout and Kred all publicly tell you what they think of you.  Other tools, some developed for proprietary use by large brands, judge you and assign a value to you without you ever knowing what they think of you.  A good, recent example is American chain Target figuring out a teenager was pregnant before her father knew.  So, as much as people knock PeerIndex and its rivals for inaccuracy, at least they’re making their mistakes in the open.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.

Nudge nudge, tweet tweet

Having had a chance to play around a bit with #newnewtwitter, two changes strike me as particularly interesting, one is a small change in mobile browsing and the other focuses on anonymity. It seems to me that they are both changes designed to alter users’ behaviour.

Placing Twitter at the centre of mobile browsing

On the updated iPhone app you can no longer copy a link and paste it into a browser. This means you have to browse through the app’s built-in browser. Facebook’s app takes a similar approach. It means that if you want to view the content someone is trying to share, you need to do it through Twitter and without leaving Twitter. So you stay on Twitter, it acts as the hub for your mobile browsing.

When you couple this change with Twitter’s new discover tab (an amalgamation search and trends with a new stories service), it’s clear that Twitter is making a serious play to challenge Facebook and Google as people’s starting point when exploring the mobile web.

Nudging people away from anonymity

Names now take precedence over Twitter handles. Is this a way to make online relationships more personal? Is it a small change in the larger push to make Twitter big in China and other countries where the government has a preference against anonymity? Or is it a move to placate Western governments who, now feeling some pressure of movements organised through social media, are less enamoured with free speech when it’s coupled with anonymity?

Regardless, one thing it will definitely do is make users associate people by their names instead of their Twitter handles. This means that, unless you’re writing under a pseudonym, people will associate you with your tweets. It won’t be @quirkytwitterhandle said something, it will be Trevor said something.

Obviously, there are easy workarounds to this change, for example you can change your name in the settings to your quirky Twitter handle. Most people won’t do this though and, over time, this will change behaviour. I suspect people will moderate their tweets because they will recognise that those tweets are directly associated with them instead of their chosen online identity.

So, two very different changes, but both designed to change behaviour and both more significant than they initially seem.

This post also appeared on the Huffington Post.

A world of big niches

The growth of social media has enabled small, niche interest groups to grow. Your local MG owners club with a handful of members who pootle down to a field somewhere once a year for a big national gathering, can now connect with thousands of other MG owners and enthusiasts around the world in an instant. This small niche group is now big. They’re big because geography is no longer a barrier to connecting with people. They’re big because their interest isn’t really that small when aggregated up – it’s just small in their local area.

Niches might be single issue, but people aren’t

Much like the intertwining storylines in soap operas, distinct online communities are woven together by people having multiple interests. Take Trevor, for example. Trevor likes cars, embroidery and swimming. Three pretty distinct hobbies. When Trevor announces on twitter that his car was broken into, his strong relationships with people will mean he gets sympathy from his embroidery and swimming friends as well as his car friends. When he says this is the sixth time it’s happened in the last two years. He’ll get a lot more sympathy. When he says he’s setting up an online petition to get his local police force to take the issue more seriously, his embroidery and swimming connections will sign it online alongside his car friends. They’ll also ask their friends to sign it. Many of their friends will have interests completely unconnected to any of Trevor’s interests.

Niches affect big issues

On the big issues of the day, niches come into their own as a way of organising people and disseminating information. A good example of this is the Occupy movement. First they occupied Wall Street, then others with similar interests occupied other cities around the US and globally.

A closer look at London’s Occupy movement reveals that they are a fairly diverse bunch. Indeed, one of the recurring themes in media coverage about them is that they appear to have no single message – they are made of distinct, niche groups. When they occupied the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, they described themselves as a “disparate smorgasbord.”

So, niche groups are growing in size and it’s easier than ever before to build large coalitions of support by tapping into them. The challenge for communicators is maintaining a consistent, single focus. The 99% have disparate interests.