Activating Influence: Who vs. Where

Hi, I'm Ted Smith, research fellow for CNET Networks, and today I'd like to share with you some research we've done on activating influence: who versus where.

So influence starts with people that talk with other people. And most of us think about influence as individuals that are highly connected to other individuals.

We think about networks that look something like this, with one person who's highly connected in the middle. And that's always a "who" way to talk, and so "who" is the most influential person.

Well, we used to think the most influential person was the person who was connected to the most people. As it would turn out, in our research we've shown that the people that those people are connected to have networks of considerable size in their own right.

And to acknowledge the role everybody plays in a social network paints a slightly different picture about what's going on. So rather than looking at a pyramid, the shape we see -- of influence -- with those very influential people at the top, with a lot of connectivity, but a whole lot of people that are connected to lots of other people. And so a diamond actually represents the way people really are connected to one another.

And so it's not a "who" question, it's really "Where do I find these exchanges going on, and what's happening in those exchanges between people?" So let's scroll down on that for a second. Let's take a look at an exchange between two people. Now you typically have a person who has a question or a concern that they're looking for help with, and somebody they turn to, to get an answer. And what we found is that in all of these cases where information is flowing through a network, you have two critical ingredients.

One is the information that they've shared, and the information that people share in these networks always has a quality of being unique and trusted. And if you think about how important that is for the person getting the information, it's critical that it's information that really improves their situation. So passing faulty information doesn't work for a network. It really needs to start with the quality of information that they're getting.

And the second piece, which is equally important, is that it's easy to share. Think for a moment about situations where people have asked you for help, and how you valued being able to forward a link, send an instant message, whatever it may be, to get them unstuck. And we found over and over again that that's a critical ingredient to this.

So, when you think about the whole picture here, of all the exchanges that go on in social networks, all the advice giving, it really does come down to having these critical ingredients in place: quality information, easy to share, portable. And getting over the notion that it's really about that person -- that "who" -- and connecting with the "where" that you find these things.