Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

  • Copywriting
    • Content Marketing
    • SEO
  • About
  • Contact

Earning Your Face’s Value – The Influence Project

August 17, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Sant Pere de RodesFast Company has done an interesting thing with the Influence Project. They’ve shown people (for a limited time, anyway) that even tiny actions can have a massive effect on how others perceive you. Your visible inclusion in public places,  in any number of small ways, can add value to your visibility.

But does this visibility have any value?

Let’s use me as an example – I’m probably at the high end of average as far as savvy with online media goes. I’m not claiming to be special here, just making a statement; I’ve been online most of my life, building communities. Did it help with my placement in the Influence Project? Here’s the breakdown, as of right now:

  • Two people have signed up for the Influence Project directly from my link.
  • Two people have signed up from the links of those I’ve influenced.
  • When last I looked on Thursday after signing up, I was ranked around 3,400 our of 29,000
  • Oh, they removed the numbers: It now says I’m in the 94th percentile out of 32,000+ users, meaning I’ve gone up to around 1,900

So, does this mean I’m influential? Oddly, not at all. Four people signed up, out of 13 clicks on the bit.ly link I circulated (by one Facebook post, three tweets, and one blog post).

We need a better example for contrast. Case study: iJustine Ezarik. Justine is very well known online – in fact, so well known that I’m almost hesitant to use her as a study because I can guarantee I’ll miss critical details. So we’ll be really minimalist about this, and only look at some specifics:

  • When I signed onto the Influence Project, iJustine was ranked 9 out of 26000 users. Pretty impressive.
  • At the moment, she has more than 4,600 direct sign-ups recorded to her name, and sits in the “99th percentile” meaning she’s likely maintained her ranking quite nicely over the last week.

99th percentile, out of 32,000 users? This conceivably puts Justine anywhere from rank 1, to rank 320 – which is a wide range to be in. What effect does this have on comparative value?

Face value is a quantum currency – as soon as it’s measured, its perceived value changes.

Yes, I’d have expected to see people like iJustine, and even Mr Shoemoney in the top 1 percent. That’s not surprising. When we think about web celebrities and influencers, we can all probably name between fifteen and twenty people – most of whom will end up in the top 1 percent.

Putting people in the top 1 percent isn’t proper perspective for this Project, however. Guessing at where we’ll sit – and being proven right or wrong – is much more interesting.

Fast Company’s concept is pretty simple, and it’s all over the project’s site: You’re more influential than you think. It’s true – I wouldn’t have expected to be in the top 5 percent of influencers online. But look at the numbers – from Justine’s 4,600+ links, to my two is a big gap. That was enough to get into the top 5. What about the other 96% of those who signed up?

Over 30,000 people have less than a combined 13 clicks to their profiles, 2 first-tier influences, and 2 second-tier influences.

This tells me the web, as a whole, is entirely ineffectual at getting people to do the simplest thing it could possibly ask them to do: “Click this link, because what you’ll see there is pretty cool!”

The biggest argument in favour of building community and being a leader – in any arena – is influence. Making a place for yourself where you are given the implicit permission to ask for things (assuming you’re ready and able to reciprocate) is touted as a good idea. What the Influence Project says, however, is that gaining any kind of measurable influence is easy, but can be very distracting from the reality that any influence is only as good as what it’s used for. Using your power for self-assessment (like asking people to pump you up on Fast Company’s dime) or frivolously expending energy flailing your clout about the net is bad business practice.

How can we do better? How can we build lasting influence, measure it, and then put it to good, practical use?

Image by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: face value, Fast Company, iJustine, on-the-web, real value, study, ubiquity, value, visibility

A Definition Of Value

January 6, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

Anyone for tea?Everything has a price tag these days. How do we decide what has value? In a culture where anything can be acquired for a sufficient amount of money – land, real goods, art, ideas and other intangible objects, even integrity – how, or perhaps why, do we insist on assigning a flat numerological factor to anything?

Anil Dash asserted yesterday that having a million Twitter followers isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. How Kim Kardashian gets paid $10k per tweet, I have no idea, but it seems to me this is where the entire followers system falls down.

Commerce demands an objective sense of value. There isn’t a lot of bartering going on in western culture, at least on the business scale. Set prices help us get some indication of what went into the production of a product, or what will come from the hiring of a service. We look at ten nearly identical computers and decide value based on brand and price tag. We look at quotes from contractors and decide based on price and reputation. Often, we can trick ourselves into thinking it’s entirely a play for getting the most value out of each dollar we spend, but again, by what method do we demarcate the value of each dollar we spend?

Think about this: You have some vacation coming up, and you’ve got a few options, assume you have the budget for any of these following, and for the sake of argument, let’s say they all cost the same amount of money. The less pressure here the better. Here we go:

  • You can spend a few thousand dollars going to an all-inclusive resort with your partner, have an excellent week of recovery and recouping from the stresses of a busy season at work;
  • You could instead rent a car and a digital SLR camera, take a road trip across the country, load up on breathtaking pictures and souvenirs, and fly back home loaded with more booty and less of a headache;
  • Or, you could fly to another continent (assume there’s a seat sale) and backpack for a week, stay off the grid, maybe take a few pictures and enjoy some exotic food.

How do we decide between these three obviously appealing options? With a lot of consideration, if we’re smart. But it requires something western culture often fails to train into us; a sense of relational value. Which one of these three dream trips gets our vote requires a lot of bartering with ourselves. Perhaps I don’t like taking pictures. Maybe my partner has a desperate yearning to see Spain. Or maybe we’ve done one or two of these options, and all we’re left with is the third.

How we make these decisions relies heavily on personal value, and that’s the kind of thing business and commerce is simply not set up to handle. Here’s the kicker; neither is much of what we do online.

There’s a pendulum effect we can see clearly when we’re dealing as a society with new modes of communication. Just like learning a language, adapting to a new process goes through a number of stages; incomprehension, misunderstanding (or incomplete knowledge), savvy, exploitation, and fluency. We go through various fields of “I can’t do this” to “Others can’t, I win by default” and settle in the middle on “everyone can, hooray!” – but it takes time, and critical mass, to get the pendulum to stop, and a lot of interference to ensure it stops in the middle ground. That’s objective value, that’s where we are right now. Everything online is a transaction. You follow me, I follow you. I tweet, you retweet.

It’s not conversation. It’s not bartering. It’s exploitation, and it’s right in the middle.

Oddly enough, incomprehension, savvy and fluency are all on the side of socialisation. Incomprehension and misunderstanding fuel exploitation, and demands objectivity to be corrected; this is a good thing, because objectivity is great for commerce, but very bad for people. It doesn’t leave any room for personality. And with all of the hype around the human business and personal brands – all of this oomph moving us away from the middle, away from mediocrity and towards individualising the world, we need room for relational thinking. Without which relationships are transactions, and transactions are nothing but ephemeral.

On a bizarre side note, this happens to be entry number 100 on this blog.

Photo by Richard0

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: anil dash, bartering, choices, commerce, misunderstanding, objectivity, relational value, relationships, savvy, socialisation, society, the middle, vacations, value

Categories

  • Announcements
    • Event Notices
  • Blog
  • Communication
  • Content Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Personal
  • Reviews
  • Social Media
  • Technology

Archive

  • January 2016
  • June 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • July 2008
  • February 2004
  • Copywriting
  • Blog
  • Reading Lists
  • Colophon

© Copyright 2023 Ian M Rountree · All Rights Reserved