In a business today a customer / prospect's influence can be important across many functions.
As more people move online and take advantage of the explosion of "channels" across social media sites and personal blogs, as well as horizontal and specialty social networks, tracking what people are doing and saying is somewhat easier. What to do with the data you collect though, isn't any easier than before. The other side of the coin though, is that online, people have a voice that can rapidly and sometimes unexpectedly get magnified to a degree that was never possible offline. Now of course marketing would love to leverage positive influence for "word of mouth" marketing. With the growth of community based or peer to peer support, customer service has even more reason to be concerned with influence, in fact, any group in the company that wants to use a community (product management, sales, etc.) should be concerned with influence.
Businesses are struggling to varying degrees in dealing effectively with the new empowered customer / prospect. The days of a company controlling its messaging are waning. People turn to their online networks for information, advice, and recommendations instead of using company provided channels. This is the crux to the changing landscape of influence. Online influence is real time, contextual, relative, individualized and variable. Think about what makes a person influential to you. It could be that you have a trust relationship through a social network AND because of that relationship you have learned: 1. that the person is knowledgeable on the subject / content and 2. you personally value that person's opinion and advice. Influence really boils down to this, can the person's (influencer) words / actions / video / etc. get the second person (influenced) to take some action or change some belief.
For example think of a simple product review on Amazon. Chances are that none of the reviewers have a specific relationship with you, so trust is fairly low and expertise can only be established by reading the reviewer's words. But if one of the reviewers lays out a case that makes you accept their expertise then the impact of the review can be more influential. But, if you have another more trusted source, say someone in your Facebook network, who offers conflicting advice you are much more likely to act on that sources' advice over the Amazon review, it simply does not have a high enough influence ability to overcome the deeper trust relationship.
From a company perspective online influence can be important but at the same time it is very difficult to establish, particularly out of context. Through social media monitoring tools you can collect lot's of data but using that data to establish influence is complex due to the nature of influence and how / who it impacts. This is even more difficult if you consider that there are differing types of influence. A person may have broad "influence" in a non-specific horizontal way, say by having lot's of followers or friends, but that type of influence most likely isn't enough to get the individual that the business is targeting to take action or change a belief. What a business needs is the influencer in the context of what outcome the business is trying to influence.
Maybe a couple of examples would help here. Let's take a local eatery for example. For restaurants local influence, specific to the city and even the neighborhood is important. Certainly it's possible that a local food critic (or even a national food critic) could be an important influencer and that person might be surfaced through looking for somewhat broader public influence, but it is still very specific to the market and to the context, in this case food. But what might be even more important could be a reviewer food blog.I have a friend in who isn't on Twitter, has less than 100 friends on Facebook, doesn't use FourSquare, Google+, Tumbler, Instagram, Flickr or even post on YouTube. If she has a Klout score it would be tiny, but, she has a huge following on her food blog. In fact, she is exactly the type of influencer that a local eating establishment would want, but could never be surfaced from some broad measurement of public social media presence.
Take a second example, let's say in the enterprise software world. The brands are often global or at least national so you might think that broad public influence might be desirable but the problem comes down to expertise and context again. For a complex product expertise is even more important. It's possible of course, for an influencer in enterprise SW to build a good following on Twitter or LinkedIn, but more likely you'd want to look beyond those channels to blogs. . The weight of the social channel in the influence calculation is critical and specific to each industry and business.
Community platforms have already started down the path of contextual influence measurement. Community platform vendor Lithium Technologies, for example, has integrated this type of tool into the platform so that influence specific to the individual community can be monitored, measured and become actionable to the community manager. Social media monitoring tools like Medallia, Attensity, Radian6 and others are moving down the path of customizable influence measurement and a response system to make use of the data. This is an emerging area of interest from an enterprise perspective, and there's quite a lot left to sort out when it comes to online influence and how a business might monitor, measure and take action on the information.
