Street musician (Photo credit: Another side of yukita)

I am a big fan of Chris Brogan as many of you may know. Today I can’t help but respond to his recent blog on influence. Following is an excerpt I have taken from his blog that I think is exceptional:

Who are the influencers? Is it me? Sometimes. Is it you? Often. It’s fluid. For instance, anything Dave Thomas likes in music on Spotify, I’m bound to check out and eventually purchase. Likewise, if Steve Garfield or C.C. Chapman blog about some new photography product a company’s given them to try, I’m going to give it consideration.

I’m asked all the time why I don’t much like Klout. It’s because I think the platform is flawed in how they determine influence. They measure chatter. If I tweet a link about some product in a category, and a lot of people retweet it or the like, it counts as influence. (This is the least accurate portrayal of Klout ever. Read Return On Influence (amazon affiliate link) by Mark Schaefer for a much better one). Click here to read the full blog post. You don’t want to miss this.

Influence in My Book

I share often during my talks that everyone has influence. Many people don’t think of themselves as holding influence. They think influence is held by someone higher up on the corporate ladder or someone who has a bestselling book or someone who has ten times their annual income or someone who is on TV or someone who has won an oscar or someone who has won a Nobel prize (my eye is on this one) or someone who runs a country . . . get my point?

But as Chris points out, we all have influence. Here are the fears I hear people  and companies sharing around influence:

• Won’t the never-ending “push” for recognition, coupled with the ever-increasing noise of the web make getting attention that creates influence harder and harder.
• How will we grow market share when now there are much lower barriers to entry?
• If we aren’t at the top of a Google search how will that affect our success?

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