The New Currency: Ideas or Influence?
One of the things that’s so inspiring about the Information Age is that the possibilities for an individual are limitless. A college drop-out created one of the world’s most powerful companies. A college kid came up with a billion dollar operation out of his dorm room, (and at 26 years old he’s running it). A child from a broken home who didn’t know his father grew up to be president of the United States.
Is there anything that can’t be done? When ideas are what create success, can we afford to judge anyone based on their pedigree, education, or age?
As was predicted, in the new millennium ideas became currency.
In an environment that has evolved to value ideas, every day is a new opportunity to change the world, to be a catalyst for growth, to build something amazing. The ease and speed at which we’re now able to connect is what makes most of these dreams possible.
What’s small is big, and what’s big is flat. Ideas spread like a blaze in the wind, and the strength of our connections allows us to leverage those ideas into something greater, faster.
That was until the chilling effect of “influence.”
It’s ironic that Fast Company, a brand known for highlighting the speed of great ideas, would create and promote an idea like the Influence Project. Because it’s ushering in a new craze over superficial influence that’s unhealthy to the ecosystem that supports the growth of ideas, and it threatens the intricate and delicate networks that allow ideas to move so quickly.
The new fascination with who’s influential, who’s not, who’s got clout, and who doesn’t, and the ability to filter people out of your life based on a number is unhealthy for a community. The long-term result of the Influence Project, as well as Hootsuite’s Klout scoring and filtering, is going to be a social media ecosystem that gets even more strongly segregated into cliques.
Am I the only one who hates cliques? Or having your value as a thinker, idea person, and sharer crunched into a cold, inhuman number?
With Hootsuite’s Klout tool, it’s too easy to filter out followers, and limit conversations to only people who are in the highest quartile of “influencers.” Does this honestly benefit anyone? Or does it encourage us to all become focused on influence?
With a rise in artificial influence-seeking behaviors like spamming contests and ignoring followers who have low Klout scores, the sharing and mixing of many disparate people and ideas (something we just recently gained) and the quest for social media trust will both be lost, and the new currency will no longer be ideas, but numbers and the perception of influence.
Sure, filtering by Klout can be useful to brand community managers who want to identify influencers within the community for strategic seeding. But when everyone in the entire community is using the technology to shut out “the noise” of everyone below the Klout number they “respect,” we’ll have a community that’s no longer driven by sharing and connecting, but by popularity.
The loss will be great.
In this TED video by Matt Ridley, “When Ideas Have Sex,” he talks about how important it is that ideas are shared and combined. I especially loved his concept of the genetic inheritance of an idea. By allowing them to co-mingle, the best parts of ideas come together to form a new, better idea.
Just like in a biological ecosystem, if an environmental factor is manipulated, the resulting evolution changes course. The Influence Project and Klout scores aren’t the end of the world, and they’re not going to end the sharing of ideas. But they do add a factor that reduces the energy many will spend on ideas, reduces the potential for some people’s ideas to be heard, and increases the energy that many will expended on manipulating personal influence, faux influence.
A lot of ideas that could have and would have connected, won’t. A lot of people who could have benefited each other (in ways that have nothing to do with influence) will never come together because at least one of them couldn’t be bothered.
It’s actually disheartening. I’ve seen remarks about annoyance with “followers seeking validation” by trying to connect or be heard. (Connect? Be heard? How dare they?!) Or the other blogger who tweeted how the people trying hardest to connect “probably deserve it the least.” I’m guessing those are the types Klout was designed for. It shouldn’t be a surprise they both have high follower counts. But what they’re gaining in “influence” they’re losing in trust, relationships, and access to ideas outside the echo chamber.
Join the Conversation…
Has Klout scoring affected who you interact with and how you interact with them?
Is there an innovative way to counteract an unhealthy focus on scored influence?
Does crowdsourcing represent the physical embodiment of the democratic sharing and mixing of ideas?
Will there come a time when Klout scores are automatically attached to our name on interactions across the internet?
Michelle,
I wasn't aware of HootSuite's Klout, so thanks for introducing me to that.
This is a very interesting debate, ideas vs. influence. As you said, many people are seeking faux influence. Certain aspects of social media are becoming a popularity contest – and this is nothing new. Before we had Twitter followers and Facebook fans, we had forums post counts and on-line gaming high scores. There will always be people who invest an obscene amount of time in being some form of “popular”. And that's just it! Popularity does not equate to influence (e.g. Ashton Kutcher).
I've always been a fan of the snowball effect when it comes to generating ideas. Bounce your ideas off others and they'll add to it, and vice versa. This is similar to the video above of “ideas having sex”. So while I do understand the want for a measurement of influence, I also don't want to be cut off from that one potential person. I operate under the “you never know” premise. You never know who you're going to meet one day, you never know who will read your tweet one day, you never know who will change your life one day. Obviously any tool/software that essentially reduces potential interactions greatly hinders potential opportunities.
When it comes to the spread of ideas, you have to assume that the biggest of ideas will make it through the relevant networks regardless, because they are just so great. But what about the plain good ideas? They aren't life-altering, yet, but they provide some sort of positive influence or resource. And then from that idea comes another, and another, and another. These are the ideas that could be seeing stop signs along the way due to Klout scoring. What if in order for one idea to get off the ground all it needed was Person A to retweet it. But Person A does not see this idea because it came from a person with little to no influence?
There is no one currency, it is both ideas and influence. Bigger ideas need less help, less influence. Smaller, but good, ideas need a little more help, more influence to get them rolling.
Bryan, your attitude toward meeting people and connecting with anyone is one of the things that makes social media so beautiful. You really never know who you'll meet or how you could impact each other. Back in the day (before social media), these serendipitous connections were rare unless you stepped outside your daily routine. Now, you can meet someone new and interesting 24 hours a day. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. I admire your thinking.
As for ideas and influence being currency, it's true they're both currency in their own ways. But think about this… sometimes someone with great ideas may be just starting out… maybe they just got out of high school or college, or maybe they've been too busy working to focus on social media… and maybe they're brilliant… but no one ever hears them because they have a low Klout score and they're getting filtered. But three months later someone with a high score mentions the same concept and all of the sudden it's gold. Yes, the great idea did get out. But filtering perpetuates an environment where the only thing that's valued is what comes from top influencers. It's very limiting, and instead of the benefits of a flat world, we're back to silos.
Bryan, thanks again for furthering the conversation!
Provoking heated debate (that generates thoughtful posts like this) is a valuable type of influence. Is Fast Company's misstep actually doing more good than harm by helping shine a light on where we err? Perhaps the cover of the Fast Company “influence” issue should go to the individual who most effectively compels folks to rethink online influence. Who knows what the editors may have in mind as all this unfolds? I hope it's more than meets the eye.
Thanks, Michelle, for taking the time to write on this topic. The questions you raise on Klout are interesting, too. With whom does Klout really click? And could a tweaked metric offset its face-value shortcomings? Influence vs. ideas, yes – and impact: actually getting things done in the physical world. So many people could care less about Ashton Kutcher, but if he could help solve something like the world malaria problem, then, yes, indeed, he has real clout.
Hey Michelle,
Great post. I am actually one of the cofounders here at Klout (which is totally separate than Hootsuite, check out Klout.com). Our goal is definitely not to limit the spread of ideas or penalize people who aren't popular. We believe that every person that creates content online has influence. We want to understand who they influence and on what topics. We want our data to be used to surface the person who doesn't have a ton of followers but is the thought leader on solar power, knitting or whatever the topic might be. We think that the person who is most influential about Rolls Royce might be a 16 year old kid who has never touched one but is constantly posting about them online and driving conversations.
People have always been segmented by money, looks or even follower count (and there are a lot of people with huge follower counts and very low Klout scores). We want to democratize this and let the data do the talking. What's great about Hootsuite's implementation of Klout data is that it lets users decide when and how to filter their streams. There are times when filtering out as much noise as possible is extremely valuable and other times where you want to expose yourself to what everyone is saying.
Great conversation you are starting here. Happy to chat sometime if you want to hear more about our approach to influence. Thanks!
Michelle,
Thanks for adding your voice to this debate. But you know, I couldn't quite put my finger on why I agreed with you until I read Joe Fernandez' comment. He said “We want to democratize this and let the data do the talking.”
As a former analytics junkie, I have to say that I am not a fan of letting the data do the talking. The data needs to be interepreted, frameworked, and challenged before it can yield information, knowledge and ultimately insight.
While Klout does provide another dataset, it can't possibly raise to the level of meaningful insight. I just have a number, but the Klout score needs to be cross-referenced with a variety of other bits of data to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.
In the end, we should be looking at “diversity of perspectives” if we want to build sustainable and vibrant communities. Companies and personal brands should build a robust story championed by people with differing points of views. Does it really matter what one piece of data says about them? I hope not.
Hi Stacey, Thanks for taking the time to comment! It never occurred to me that Fast Company might have an interesting angle of what online influence really means. My first thought was that they would splash someone's face on the cover and hail them as an online messiah, when there are so many richer stories to tell than “Here's someone who has mastered spamming, aren't they great?!” But maybe you're right. Maybe Fast Company will come through with a compelling, enriching story. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Thanks again for the comment!
Joe, Thanks so much for taking the time to join the conversation and provide an insider's view. First of all, Klout as a product appears to be very well-designed, and admittedly, as much as it bothers me to see everyone's Klout score in my stream, it's fun to take a peek at my own statistics on the site. What can I say? It's just that I don't like where it takes us to be able to filter based on influence, as it can cause us to miss out on valuable ideas and conversation.
But to your credit (and Klout's) I see the point of tracking influence. And I see that in a community focused on accumulating followers, retweets, and friends… it was inevitable that those pieces of information would eventually be assembled and analyzed. Klout appears to be doing a good job from a technical standpoint and I can respect that.
I agree that it seems that by following just the numbers, influence can be democratized, but I still stand behind my belief that it also polarizes and encourages users to exclude (or even devalue) others with low scores.
If someone is new to Twitter or late entering the social media community, it would be extremely difficult to make an impact or build a following in the face of Klout filtering, unless you already have influence such as a celebrity who can use other mediums to create buzz very quickly.
I guess I'm just nostalgic for the “good 'ol days” in social media when we were all equal and an intern could tweet with a CEO.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response, Joe. I look forward to talking with you.
Hi Stanford, your comments are as astute as your blog posts. Always appreciated!
You hit on two great points… quantitative data can never tell the whole story (I'm a big fan of certain types of qualitative research), and diversity of perspectives is the foundation of a vibrant community. These two concepts are the reason why measuring influence and being able to filter on influence are detrimental to a community. I'm back to where I was when commenting to Joe, though… it was inevitable that the wealth of numbers and statistics was going to be assembled. There's not much we can do about it but be cognizant of our prejudices as we connect within the community.
Thanks again for the comment!
Great post Michelle. Very thought provoking….
Normally I wouldn’t comment on posts but I felt that I had to as your writing style is actually good. You have broken down a tough area so that it easy to understand.
Thank you for the post!!!
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