Intuitively, it seems we all know no two-digit metric, or even a more elaborate metric like Twitalyzer, can truly measure influence. Too many factors go into defining, discerning, and describing influence. For instance, consider the influence of George W. Bush today, now compare that to his influence on September 12, 2001. Influence, in that case, was significantly affected by environmental conditions. So it is with you and I. (Even though Justin Bieber has a perfect Klout score of 100, I still have more influence on my 8, 10, and 13 year old children than he does! My Klout score is nowhere near his.)

As JC Penny showed us last week, any ranking system can be gamed, even one as disciplined and well funded as Google. So it is with Klout. There are specific strategies you can pursue to get a higher Klout score. If that’s your objective, no doubt you’ll succeed. You’ll find in my post four keys to increase your Klout score.

Many people recognized the humor and absurdity of my four keys. I’m glad. If you’ve heard me speak, read my blog, or engaged with me online, you know I cherish Zig Ziglar’s oft-quoted axiom, “You can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” You’ve probably also heard me state and defend against all challenges the admonition, “Follow back every person who follows you on Twitter.” Even though that suggestion STILL ruffles some people’s feathers, I still advocate accepting another human being’s out-stretched hand.

Which brings us back to the real issue of increasing one’s influence. Is that a worthwhile goal? I wonder if influence, like corporate profits, is a by-product of rendering valuable service to others. Render enough valuable service to others, and you’ll have all the influence you need.

Even if increasing one’s influence is a worthwhile goal, it can’t be successfully pursued without attending to, acknowledging, and affirming other human beings around you.

Instead of increasing our Klout scores, we’d garner more clout by rendering more, more valuable service, to more people. When we’re doing that, we won’t need a third-party rating system to let us know we’ve succeed. (Just ask Warren Buffett, one of the most influential people in the world of business, who just happens to have a Klout score 1/3rd the ranking of Justin Bieber. Who would YOU rather spend a day with?)

Trey Pennington

Klout’s founder, Joe Fernadez, is both a genius and a gentleman. He recognized a need in the marketplace and has been working aggressively to satisfy that need. The business press is taking note and is given him and his company earned recognition (and venture capitalists are giving him/them the big bucks to back it up). I got to spend some one-on-one time with Joe in Indianapolis during ExactTarget’s conference last year and found him to be a delightful dinner companion and a deep thinker. I like and admire him a lot.

Here’s why Klout is necessary:

1. Too much confusion: Many companies really do want to “do social media right.” They know much is happening in social space and they want to be there and be good citizens there. At the moment, there’s so much happening that it’s hard to know where to start. As Annette Simmons says, “We don’t need more information. We just need someone to make sense of it all.” Klout strives to help companies make sense of it all.
2. Too many voices: There are nearly unlimited voices shouting into a space where companies have limited resources. While companies, no doubt, would love to hear and understand every voice, there aren’t enough ears on the planet to hear everyone. Klout strives to help companies focus those limited resources on the louder voices.
3. Too much complexity: Social media is far from simple or settled. Social media giants rise up and wither away (Friendster, MySpace. Hey, is Plurk still around? What’s the name of those public group instant messages services before Twitter? Was it Jenga, Jaiku, or something?). Who knows what “the standard” or what “the rules” will eventually be? In the meantime, Klout gives companies something they are immensely comfortable with, readily understand, and can quickly use for decision-making—a two digit number. Companies need that (though I pray they go further, invest more into listening and understanding, are are never content with just a number).

Klout is necessary and Joe Fernandez is a genius. He is focused. He has said it often enough that the saying and repetition of it are making it a de facto reality: Klout is the standard of influence. Just ask Justin.

Trey Pennington

Across the web:

• Klout’s explanation of influence (worth studying)
• Review of Klout: When Smaller Numbers are Better
• Review of Klout: Klout & Critics: Time to Close the Door or Kick it Wide Open
• Klout is awesome (disclaimer: I got this swag and was a hero to my three younger children as a result)

1. Get important people to talk about you. Klout measures the visible vestiges of influence. Getting people who already have Klout scores to retweet your tweets or in some other way mention you enables you to ride the draft of their influence. You can find these people by using Klout’s business service. You might check out HubSpot’s listing of Twitter Elite, too. Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and if they don’t notice you, you can use a Twitter mention to ask them to retweet you. If you’ll get important people to talk about you, you can increase your Klout score.
2. Stay away from people who aren’t important. Be careful about who you follow on Twitter. People with low Klout scores and people who are inactive on Twitter can bring you down. Remember the old adage about associations. Klout knows the score of all of your followers. You’re ranked by the company you keep. If you’ll keep company mainly with important people, you can increase your Klout score.
3. Get more people to appear to pay attention to you than you’re paying attention to. Simply stated, make sure there are a lot more people following you on Twitter than you’re following. You can accomplish this by aggressively following people (but not TOO aggressively, probably no more than 300 to 400 per day, and not all at once either) and then waiting until a week or two after they follow you back to unfollow them. If you can attract more followers than followings, you can increase your Klout score.
4. Find something that’s trending already and then re-amplify it. This is where using the web version of Twitter comes in handy. With it, you can see the top trending topics and then click on them to reveal popular content. The rest is easy, either use the auto-retweet button, or do a classic retweet so you can edit the trending tweets to add a bit of your own personality to the content. Of course, be sure you keep the trending keyword in your tweet!

By now you’ve probably picked up on the underlying current—it looks like the Klout-kind of influence is not so much about creating a wave as catching a wave. Just as a surfer rests in the water while he scans the horizon for the next wave, you, too can lurk on Twitter and pay attention to the people and content swelling in the distance.

The key to increasing your influence online

None of the suggestions mentioned above have anything to do with real influence. Real influence is complex, multifaceted, and environmentally constrained (time, space, people, place, topic, occasion, etc.). Influence is more significant than two digits can capture (though Klout is necessary nonetheless).

I certainly don’t fully understand influence; I can’t even fully define it. For the rest of my life, I’ll probably keep reading all those unending books on leadership, marketing, psychology, influence, persuasion (that there’s a non-stop supply of new books on the topic ought to be a big clue that influence is WAY more than digits). Even so, as I ponder the real keys to increasing real influence, the words of Zig Ziglar ring in my ears and reverberate in my heart. A definite key to increasing your influence is found is Zig’s counsel: “You can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough people get what they want.”

Don’t worry about increasing your Klout score (or twittergrader ranking or whatever comes next). Just use whatever gifts you have to help other people accomplish their dreams. If you’ll help enough other people get what they want, you’ll have all the influence you’ll need.

Trey Pennington

Just like most of an iceberg is hidden, so a human being’s backstory is out-of-sight. If you wanted to see the rest of the iceberg, you’d have to do a deep dive underneath the water (which would be very cold, I presume). You’d have to do some research, get special gear, probably make more than one trip to berg, and in general, make a serious investment.

If you want to see a human’s backstory, you’ll have to make a serious investment, too. However, you can get started right away by making a determined choice to pause before you make those snap judgements about what you see in others. Instead, run what you think about what you see through the backstory filter by reminding yourself, “There’s more to this story.” Then, temper your words and actions with compassion.

For companies, it means valuing the backstory by making a commitment to listen, explore, and discover your customers’ backstories—asking where were they before the discovered you, understanding what fears, hopes, dreams, and goals are, discovering what fuels their imaginations and actions.

When you take the time to value another’s backstory, you gain insight into why people do what they do. You’ll be better prepared to actually help them do what they want to do.

What’s your customer’s backstory? What’s yours?

Trey Pennington

When you have the answer to that question, take it from your mind, put it into words, and give those words to that person.

If you make a habit of focusing on things for which you’re grateful and then make it a habit of expressing that gratitude through every available media (and especially face-to-face), you’ll build that community you seek. And, hey, even if you don’t built a huge community, guess what? You’ll be grateful for the community you do have.

You might just be amazed what a lot of gratitude and a small community can do together.

Gratitude fuels community.

Trey Pennington

Whenever I encourage companies to use video, blogs, and yes, even Twitter, for storytelling, my good friend, Sean Buvala, who IS @storyteller on Twitter, says, “Always remember, those are only shadows of an experience, not the experience itself.” Sean agrees with Connie: storytelling is a right-here-right-now-together experience.

Storytelling IS a powerful experience. When I attended Connie’s storytelling workshop in Asheville, North Carolina, I caught a glimpse of what she and Sean call “present in the moment.” All participants paired up for a story exercise. Connie asked us to focus on an experience with an animal. At the end of the exercise, I was taken aback by how close I felt to my partner. Even though we had known each other for less than 15 minutes, we both felt we shared a unique bond that made us FEEL like friends.

In that moment, educational background, life experience, material possessions, fashion, and every other possible factor of “class” made no difference whatsoever: we were simply two human beings caught up in “the moment.” The content was nothing profound; the sensation was unforgettable.

Connie says this is the paradox of story: “story takes us to another place, yet when it’s working, it makes us really present in the moment.” Herein lies the challenge for marketers. Almost by definition, and maybe even by default, we marketers deal in the world of mediated experiences: there’s something (usually media) between us and the people we seek to influence. How can we use media (mediated experiences) to create “fully present in the moment experiences”?

I’m hoping some of you have some profound comments you’ll share to shine some light on the possibilities. At the moment, I’m both fascinated and perplexed by the notion of using media to create right-now-together experiences. It’s possible that events hold a key (i.e., focusing all media on getting people together face-to-face; though I do realize that won’t work for everyone).

Connie offers a final thought to fuel our pondering on the topic: she says for her, being present in the moment includes “breathing together.” She adds, “though we’re experiencing story individually…there’s a sense of connection…even if we don’t know [each other], we’re in community, listening together.” Aha! Now, how can we, as marketers, create opportunities to “listen together.” Hmm…

Trey Pennington

Growing your network

• Use search.twitter.com or Google to find 5 leaders in your industry and follow them on Twitter
• Follow back every real person who follows you
• Follow 5 people who participated in a tweet chat discussing your topic. Here’s a mega list of Twitter tweet chats.

Growing your relationships

• Scan your @mentions and reply to every human who addresses a tweet to you
• Scan your direct messages and reply to any that don’t look like auto-generated messages. Nearly 99% of all my incoming direct messages are auto-generated. Many people call them “junk mail,” and nearly everyone calls them spam. No doubt you’ll come up with your own vocabulary to describe them.

Growing your influence

• Scan your “home” stream of tweets posted by people you follow to find relevant content for your followers and retweet it.
• Share 4-5 links to other relevant content around the web (blog posts, news articles, research, polls, surveys, etc.). You can use your RSS aggregator (I’m using Google Reader at the moment) to “harvest” relevant content to share via Twitter.
• If you write a blog, share a link to a recent post. Twitter readers may give you grief if all you do is share your own content, but if they know you’re also sharing other valuable, relevant content with them, they’ll be glad to see your content, too.

While’s there’s much, much more to leveraging the power of Twitter, if you’ll follow the outline above, you can get started in Twitter right away without it consuming too much time. Over the next few days, I’ll share more ideas to help you use Twitter to expand your online presence, and yes, to add Twitter as a meaningful part of your sales system.

Trey Pennington

I especially appreciate where he places social media in the process. Too many of us present social media like it’s a cure-all or the ultimate marketing toolkit. Many have even gone so far as to proclaim the death of direct mail, death of print, death of newspapers, all listing the killer agent as social media.

John has a gorgeously balanced approach. He says, “While the notion of community-building online has become a very commonplace practice, the opportunity for community-building offline is richer than ever.…The converged business [the business blending John's balance] uses every advance in technology as an opportunity to forge a deeper, more personal relationship with its customers.”

Marketing is a series of decisions and actions. John says, “For the converged, high-tech, high-touch business, the primary decision filter for every marketing process, customer touch point, and tactic is how technology can make the customer experience more fun, more convenient, more engaging, and more frequent.”

Bravo. It’s not about tools or tactics or even policies and profits. It’s about using everything possible to create something for someone ELSE.

John is as delightful in person as you’d imagine he would be. It was fun to grab a few minutes to talk with him on camera while we were together at Conquer & Grow, hosted by InfusionSoft.

Trey Pennington

That’s exactly what Jeff Milliman, the 1980 NCAA cross country champion, did in 1998 for Olivier Blanchard. Olivier wrote about his experience with Jeff in a 2005 blog post called That Bond of Trust. I caught up with Jeff today at his new home at Go Run, a part of Go Tri Sports, in downtown Greenville, South Carolina.

Please note a few really cool things about this social story:

• Jeff just did what he always does: listens to people and then applies his knowledge to try to help solve their problems.
• Jeff is willing to take a risk in order to fulfill his passion.
• Jeff did the unexpected and went the extra mile and SEVEN YEARS LATER the object of his generosity, Olivier Blanchard, wrote about it. (How many shoe salesmen have people writing glowing stories about them seven years after the sale, or seven hours?)
• Jeff’s act of generosity and Olivier’s act of gratitude enabled an long lost friend to reconnect with Jeff after nearly 20 years apart.

That means you never can tell when the harvest of your generosity will come.

Olivier wrote about Jeff five years ago. I’m writing about Olivier’s 1998 experience with Jeff today. Olivier says he’s sent many people to see Jeff. I’ve already sent several folks to him, too, because of Olivier. Jeff’s generosity and trust makes him incredibly influential. However, if you go see Jeff, you will KNOW he doesn’t care at all about how much influence he has. He doesn’t need a score, or his avatar in a magazine, to tell him he’s influential. He just doesn’t care about his influence—he just wants to make sure you have the shoes you need to do whatever it is you want to do. That’s all.

Seems like a good way to extend one’s influence is to take a risk to ensure customers succeed.

_______________

To see Olivier Blanchard in person and hear more about developing and delivering memorable stories, register to attend the September 24th Social Story Conference in Greenville, South Carolina.

To get the perfect running shoes for you, visit Jeff Milliman at Go Run, 400 E McBee Avenue, Greenville, SC 29601 or call him at 864-232-9400.

Thank you to Verizon Wireless for helping make video vignettes of Social Story available.

The Problem

The retailer’s problem is the same problem facing businesses of every size. Nate Elliott, analyst for the vaunted research firm Forrester, recently turned his research prowess towards the problem. In his blog post announcing his current research project, he asked, “How can marketers overcome social clutter?” He asked readers, “Do you feel it’s getting harder or easier for marketers to get a message to users through social media?” Readers responded with an overwhelming, “harder!”

The Villain

First, let’s define this villain called Clutter. Who is this black-hatted character bringing companies large and small to their knees?

To air traffic controllers and others who read radars, clutter is “a term for unwanted echoes…[that] can cause serious performance issues…” That’s a definition marketers can visualize, too. You’ll hear communications professionals talk about the “signal to noise ratio.” Everything that’s not signal, is noise—unwanted echoes, clutter.

The Faux Solution

Many marketers attempt to overcome Clutter by buying more ad space or airtime, sending out more direct mail pieces, making more cold calls, posting more tweets or updates. Instead of killing Clutter, they feed the sneaky villain.

The Hero

Squaring off against Clutter is our white-hatted Storyteller. The Storyteller is effective not just because of what he does, but also because of who he is. Through three key relationships he’s empowered to act effectively, slicing through Clutter and delivering wanted signal.

1. The storyteller’s relationship to the story: The Storyteller believes The Story is a gift that’s been given to him and a gift that increases in value as it is given away.
2. The storyteller’s relationship to himself: The Storyteller is focused on The Story and minimizes self in order to present the story free of personal interference.
3. The storyteller’s relationship to the audience: The Storyteller focuses on the audience and their experience of The Story. He is committed to communicating The Story to enable the audience to not only live The Story for themselves but also to co-create its meaning.

The mindset, or heart, of the Storyteller prepares him to take action to cut through Clutter.

Essential Elements
First, you need to know your own core story. Your core story is a narrative example of:

• who you are and what you stand for
• who the big, hairy monster is (the villain)
• what results customers achieve because of you

Second, you need to know your prospects’ core story. Their core story includes:

• what they want to accomplish (what results do they want in the end?)
• what gets in their way
• how they feel when they’re thwarted
• how they feel when they’re victorious

That means listening and paying attention to your prospects and customers is more important than ever. If you don’t know their stories, you won’t be able to share a story with them that cuts through Clutter.

Stories cut through clutter because, stories

• connect with people emotionally
• help us make sense of facts (facts, statements, declarations, and even offers overwhelm us; stories give us a framework to make sense of it all)
• aid memory
• aid word-of-mouth (we tend to remember in story; we tend to share in story)

Sharing your story

Adopting the mind of a storyteller, understanding your own core story, and understanding your customers’ core story are the first steps toward conquering Clutter and connecting with your marketplace. These foundational steps will take you far down the path of effective communication and engagement with the people in your marketplace.

Trey Pennington