The importance of digital influence

Earlier in the week during the Social Media Marketing class there was a very interesting question fielded to the students. The question was “Is Klout/clout/influence important or useless?” It was a question that was the point of a heated debate with many different opinions on the issue.

Since that day I have been giving the topic serious thought. What I found was that the question itself has three different parts that have to be broken down into individual categories, as all three are completely different things. The topic I am going to focus on primarily is that of influence and it’s importance in user-generated content on the web.

Since the explosion of social networking in the last decade people have shared their thoughts on millions of issues with millions of people all over the world. These topics of conversation are about anything the people participating in the conversation want it to be. It allows everybody in the online community to express themselves anyway they want to people that care about the exact same things. They are two-way conversations. Two-way conversations have one key requirement… influence.

My opinion of what influence is may be very different from yours, so let me define. Influence to me (in an online setting anyways) is sharing your opinions or thoughts on something and creating a means by which to have a two-wayconversation. This does not necessarily mean getting other people in the conversation to see your point of view. Rather it gives people a chance to hear your opinion and add to the conversation with opinions of their own. You are influencingthem to get involved. Any comment that spurs on a genuine conversation about something is, in my opinion influential. The comment does not have to interest everybody because not all topics of conversation are things that everybody cares about. But somebody, at least one person should care about what you have to say otherwise why are you posting it on the Internet to begin with?

What does this mean for businesses?

We have entered the digital age. Consumers are no longer listening to long winded corporate driven messages any more. They want to interact on a personal level with the companies and brands in which they have a vested interest. If these companies’ do not generate content that is interesting to their consumers’, their consumers will simply find another competitor that they can relate more easily with. It’s all about building personal relationships with consumers’ based on their personal interests.

In closing, online influence may not be the most important thing to users on the Internet, but it should be.