Under(standing) the Influence: UPA Boston 2012

UNDER(standing) THE
INFLUENCE
Design Implications and Opportunities for
Behavior Change within Digital Networks
Chris Avore @erova
UPA Boston
#DUI
#UPABOS12

Wednesday, May 9, 12

disclaimer
• I’m a designer, not a social scientist
• I’m sharing derivative, empirical work

Chris Avore @erova #DUI
May 7 2012, UPA Boston


topic I’ve been interested in, reading about, and exploring for years.
As an independent consultant I designed social intranets for big pharma and the federal
government, and now using similar information in the software and other digital products
we’re building now, including media & sentiment monitoring systems.



Before we get started, I want to put a question in your head for you to think about.
About a year and a half ago, Alyssa Milano sent this tweet mentioning the name of Nicholas
Christakis and James Fowler’s book Connected.
Think about how many sales were generated by clicking the link in the tweet.

where we are today
• mainstream marketplace has
redefined influence for convenience
• hear, seek out the loudest voices that
may not be the most helpful
• another way to sell stuff



where we will be
• understand causal social influence
• question the score
• how to conceptualize, execute,
measure social campaigns for
business



Who are our product’s
biggest influencers of our
customers, and how can we
communicate to them more
effectively?



Your boss, my boss, deﬁnitely my boss’s boss, could pop on over and be ready to dive into a
social inﬂuence campaign. what do you do now?


Designers and marketers have recently found ample resources to understanding principles & theories of psychology and how they can be applied
to their products or campaigns.
• Reciprocation
• Consistency
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

Mental notes image:
http://www.inspireux.com/2010/07/12/mental-notes-musthave-addition-your-ux-toolkit/

Networks are fundamentally changing the
landscape that designers design in,
so designers have to understand
how networks work in order to be
able to design for them.

@richradka


Understanding one person’s behavior isn’t good enough anymore.
We need to talk about networks and how to identify who could be helpful.

A new knowledge set is required to
design for the social web:
• social behavior
• networks
• how people think

@padday


This is echoed by Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook and author of Grouped.

That paradigm shift requires a shift in our approach as well.

Influence 401
• Social Structures
• (comprised of) Social Networks
• (which beget) Social Capital
• (which begets) Influence



We need a frame of reference to know how to design for this change in expectation and activity. That frame is
there and ready.
How do we answer these questions:
Is activity the same thing as influence?
Is it worth targeting influentials?
Let’s start at the top and work down:


the groups with little outside influence will likely have a greater trust and affinity with the fellow members of that network, which can be designed to as
well.


• This is not actually a Lite Brite toy, but a simple illustration of a typical social network
• A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors and the ties between these actors
• Social network analysis: Identifying nodes and patterns in the networks
• this network is made up of about 150 people, which gets us close to the Dunbar number, the ceiling of social relationships that people can maintain
• All of these people are likely more similar to each other than they are different, even if they contain friends from high school, friends from your current job, and friends of your family.
• Their race, education, and even gender is probably similar
• That concept of sameness is known as homophily

Meg Matt

Larry Riley Courtney Pierre Amy

Alice Steve


So now let’s zoom into a few people in the network we just saw.

Embeddedness: degree to which individuals or ﬁrms are enmeshed in a social network.
the concept that “individual action can only be properly understood in the context of interlocking networks of relationships” (Watts 244)

With a show of hands, who is the most important person in this network, without regard to how these people are connected (family, work, etc)

Meg Matt


Alice Steve


Riley has centrality & betweeness. She’s only 2 steps away from this particular social structure or network.
She probably has a great rapport with her friends only a connection away.
She has a stronger influence among these people, but she really has about 4-6 strong ties across all her networks

Meg Matt


Alice Steve


If you’re gauging importance based on the spread of ideas instead of most betweeness, Ron Burt says who is actually
important to identify new ideas isn’t Riley, it’s Courtney.
You need to determine the approach you take when determining who to is more important to your business goals:
someone with greater connectedness in strong ties, or someone with more reach & access

Meg Matt


Alice Steve


A structural hole is if Courtney loses touch with Pierre.

It’s these details--location, hierarchy, access to new ideas, weak or strong ties, that binds social capital into the network.

SNA recap
• a network graph can recommend business
decisions based on targeted people and their
peers in the network
• Look for bridges and those around them--they
have access to new perspectives, ideas
• strong ties share info & have greatest influence
over each other (4 strong ties average)
• The tighter a network is, the greater closure,
where trust is greater but access to new info is
more difficult



Social capital
• The investment in social relations with
expected returns in the marketplace
• The advantage created by a person’s
location in a social structure
• “Influencers” aren’t the only people
with social captial. Why?



Lin 19. Burt 4.
information, inﬂuence, social credentials (‘standing behind’), reinforcement of identity
& recognition

Because social capital
exists in our myriad
networks of friends,
colleagues, & contacts.

Our friends & strong ties
are our greatest influencers


Social capital
Social Capital is
the Wild West of
academic work.
There are no skill or
intellectual barriers
to entry.



• Social capital is easily mistaken for reputation
• Activating social capital is not like a financial
transaction.



Social capital



It’s really more like a river, where if you do something for someone else, you haven’t reduced
your holdings like you don’t have noticeably less water. nor will you have signiﬁcantly more
water if you pour a cup or bucket into it either...

yes, if a river mouth is blocked, or climate changes, the amount of water can change, but
those are greater events to create a change in social capital, much like a network change.

social capital is the
catalyst to influence

@briansolis


Understanding the network means we can begin to see patterns of inﬂuence.

Causal Influence
How peer behavior changes one’s
expected utility and thus changes the
likelihood (or extent) one will engage in
that behavior

@sinanaral

We need to emphasize CAUSAL inﬂuence--events that occur because someone else triggered it.

Correlation is a likely mutual relationship between 2 things, but that may not necessarily be caused by one or the other



It’s easy to look back with hindsight and create a compelling story.

It’s comfortable to think that by targeting those with the highest scores we can get more
efficient business outcomes.

Influencers

TWO-STEP FLOW MODEL OF INFLUENCE


similarly, we thought this was basically the way influence spread in a controlled, hierarchical flow from the top down.
This flow, theorized in 1955, has been the dominant paradigm of media sociology since the late 70’s.
It’s been a “guiding theme for diffusion and marketing research”

Influencers

NETWORK MODEL OF INFLUENCE


Recent research indicates that the diffusion or ﬂow of information goes back and forth from opinion leaders to followers, and propagate for many
steps, not just two.

Diffusion


Diffusion is how, why, and what rate new ideas spread throughout networks and ultimately cultures.

It’s what much of Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point, where one person, or a few people, can create huge waves of influence.

He uses the story of local boys William Dawes & Paul Revere. Paul was one of the connected influentials as he rode into history through Lexington and Concord but
William Dawes is relatively unknown.

They’re looking for the match that started a forest fire.


But to continue the forest fire analogy, it’s difficult--if not impossible--to peg a single event that actually triggered a viral event, online or offline, recently or hundreds of years ago.

There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters

This gets to influenceability--the environment has to be right for a forest fire.
Likewise, the network has to be right to be influenced, based on the size and structure of the network and the experiences of the people in the network.

In other words, it’s really tough to prove causal social influence.

Diffusion






Diffusion
• lightning • high winds
• dry air • heat wave
• drought • volcanic eruption






Influencers

NETWORK MODEL OF INFLUENCE


Ideas diffuse through networks of strong ties talking to friends, not from a butterﬂy effect,
not from a Law of the Few.

These networks inﬂuence where people go, what they do, and what they buy.

What’s your score?


Who here has a social account: facebook, twitter, linkedin (raise hands)

Keep your hands up if you haven’t heard of Klout, because you have a score.

Put your hands down.

Now, a new show of hands, how many people know within a point or two of their Klout score? You can admit it.

Scoring
Online Influence
• Is a RT or mention the best we can do
to measure who we influence and
who influences us?
• Are reach, amplification and frequency
really indicators of influence?
• Are scores capturing the ability to
drive action or about the ability to
drive a response?

• --a measure of activity

Scoring Arms Race


We like numbers, lists, rankings. We want to know our place in the universe. Klout is the ﬁrst step towards putting a quantiﬁable number on just how effective your online presence is

The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action.
Every time you create content or engage you influence others.
The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

1 True Reach: How many people you influence
2 Amplification: How much you influence them
3 Network Impact: The influence of your network

People who buy into the game are willing
to manipulate their social media practices
to get high status in these systems.
But as they play the game — and as the
companies respond to their gaming — those
who are uninterested in the game end up getting
written out of it.

@zephoria





But if it’s just a game people won’t get upset right?

It evolves to be
centered on the
players.

@zephoria



If we think we reach out to people with a high score help our campaign, it’s natural to think,
after spending themoney and effort, that it was probably more successful than it was.

Scores lead to confusing
causation with correlation



It’s easy to look back with hindsight and create a compelling story.

It’s comfortable to think that by targeting those with the highest scores we can get more
efficient business outcomes.

Social Influence
Marketing
• When a marketer identifies, seeks out,
and engages with selected people in
support of a business objective.
• Give them free stuff or access to
events & hope they say nice things
• Turn the people talking about your
product into your brand advocate

How are people using scores? Basically through Social Influence Marketing

These folks, such as the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, define an influencer as:
A person who has a greater than average reach or impact through word of mouth in a relevant marketplace.

These are the people who maintain that you can reach out to 1 or 100 people, offer them stuff, and hope it spreads, rather than hiring a celebrity endorser.

Influence
Smackdown


So let’s talk about the 2 camps, and how we can design for either.

One the social science side - RED corner-- we have Paul Adams, Duncan Watts, and others who have researched that inﬂuence spreads through strong ties in our networks,
and that causal inﬂuence is difficult to wage a marketing campaign behind.

In the Blue corner, we have Brian Solis, Joe Fernandez (CEO of Klout), Malcolm Gladwell, and scores of marketers who claim that identifying people who talk about topics,
who get retweeted alot, or trigger other interactions, should be given special promotions or access to inspire activity among their masses of followers.

Despite how at odds are with these two camps, there are still themes we can design for.

Make sharing simple

Put sharing tools at the bottom of your content, not just top

Support conversations, not just broadcasting

[pic of tools}

Beware Frictionless Sharing: Washington Post Social Reader, Spotify music player

Show the default sharing message & make sure it’s editable; no surprise messages

Social Network Analysis

many intranet systems can visualize social connections

determine if network has structural holes and how to bridge them

ambient awareness: activity streams & updates can create bridges

Allow people to establish
credibility/specific authority

people have different levels of authority & credibility in their lives

Personalize that authority as necessary

Market to Emotion
not Rational Thought

People generally share, remember--and socialize--about emotional experiences, not rational facts, ﬁgures, or features.

It can even be in messaging, not slickly produced ads, videos, etc. The copy should reﬂect emotion.

Magic Middle

people with high scores may be difficult to influence, so if you’re using scores, don’t just reach for the top, look to the middle where you’ll likely find the real
people who may share your story.

Surface Similarity

Denis Goodwin, Owner, TruVal Appraisals LLC
You share 23 connections from University of Maryland

• emphasize similarities

• most basic info may not cut it

• reduce the WTF moment

• weight looser ties accordingly: a Group membership probably isn’t a strong tie as School or same previous employer

Ethical questions
• a Klout score isn’t a FICO score
• yes, marketers have ranked
demographic markets for years
• brands must encourage full disclosure
• if you live by the score, prepare to die
by the score



Testing Influence
• Test with real social content, don’t ask
“would you share this?”
• Monitor the cowpaths: are people
sharing in ways you aren’t providing
them? Tweeting your content if you’re
not on Twitter?
• Data informed design, but some
metrics run same risk as scores



This is the UPA, after all. So we can still talk about usability.

Guesses?



Christakis said, “I think that the ability of Twitter to disseminate information is different than its ability to inﬂuence behavior.”

AM: 0

TOR: 1

SF: 3

Wrapping up...
Chasing influencers is often futile
People need to be influenceable
Those with ‘high’ influence are often more
difficult to influence themselves
Close, strong ties are primary influencers
Influecenability based on social network,
life experiences
Ethical influence cannot be a choice





Want more, read more! Full bibliography will be posted to my website this week.

THANK YOU

Chris Avore
@erova
erova.com


Under(standing) the Influence: UPA Boston 2012

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