Stay Thirsty Friends – Be the Most Influential Man in the World

No one in Social Media cares if you are the most interesting man in the world like the Dos Equis Guy… We want to see the most influential man(or woman) in the world! A few names come to mind for that title; but it’s not like Ann Handley, Scott Stratten, & Gary Vaynerchuk need any more accolades. This term influence has become quite the buzzword lately. Who do you influence? How many people do you influence? What is influence? If you’re anything like me, you’ve become nauseous due to influenza from the influence epidemic. Did we break a record for saying influence 7 times in the opening paragraph? Let’s call Klout,since they’re the “standard” of influence( that’s #8!). But before we do that, here are a few ways that you can immediately increase your authority in Social Media

INFLUENCE FOR $200, ALEX.

Alex Trebek “The number of Timothy Snow’s Klout Score”

You “What is 82”

Alex Trebek “That is correct”

It’s like a game show sometimes, isn’t it? As much as we hate to be poked & prodded, or don’t want big brother watching our every move online, it’s what the people want to know. Like it or not, the measurement apps aren’t going away and you’re always being rated by someone, somewhere. There’s never going to be a perfect assessment of one’s influence, they all have flaws. They often measure your superficial influence, not real influence. You’re not more influential because the cute puppy picture you posted gets shared 30 times or 10 people retweet your retweet of a Mashable story. Real Influence goes beyond an action… beyond the shares and retweets. Influence is the power to persuade, the ability to change people’s thoughts, and sway their pre-conceived beliefs. It’s tricky to measure, but you’ll know the feeling when you’re doing it right.

PERCEPTION IS REALITY

It’s not necessarily how successful you are, it’s how successful others think you are…and I’m not talking about your mom. When you convey a sense of importance, you instantly become more significant. Successful people don’t ask other people to like their fanpage or retweet their blog post. In other words, there’s a fine line between self-promotion and being labeled as a spammer. When you utilize tools like Empire Avenue and Triberr where people promote your content, it makes you appear in-demand. It’s far more effective when others are doing the promotion for you. Also, winners in social media do not clutter their feeds with negative commentary. Remember, winners find ways –losers find excuses. If you’re not getting the desired results, change your tactics.

NETWORK: QUALITY > QUANTITY

While it’s possible to have a marriage of both quality and quality, only a small percentage of influencers will achieve this. Not to say that can’t be you, but I highly recommend building your network through known commodities rather than going for the quick score. There are services that will get you a bunch of twitter followers. You can send friend requests to everyone with a pulse and maxout your 5000 connections in a jiffy. That’s all fine and dandy, but what good are thousands of people who ignore you? Or, what if you don’t relate to what their most talked about topics are? Bottom line, when expanding your network, it’s ok to be picky about who you chum with. It will pay dividends to bring value to those who are more influential than you are. Start supporting them, and you might be surprised how many will start supporting you.

PARTING SHOTS

Before I ask for your thoughts, I didn’t an interesting Twitter experiment that plays into this topic. For the first time, I was approaching a symmetrical number between those I was following and those who followed me right around 1867 last week. Although a bit shallow, one of my own “metrics” when I observed other people was that same follower to following ratio. It’s just human nature, it gives the perception of importance when someone has more followers than they tweeps they follow. So I decided to trim the fat and unfollowed 40 or 50 not-so-active accounts that weren’t following me. In the last few days, I’ve gained 125+ additional followers without doing anything else different. Might be worth considering if you’re in a similar spot with less than 10,000 followers.

Here’s what I’m interested in hearing about – What’s your definition of Influence? Who Influences you most and why do you think that is?