I fully confess to being fascinated with the debates going on around the topic of ‘influence’. Even more so because of the strong and often negative reactions that have arisen in response to the rise of influence measurement tools (such as Klout and PeerIndex), particularly within the marketing community.

These debates are both inevitable and unavoidable, since the continued expansion in the use of social networks completely flips the dynamic between customer and marketer, rendering many of the tried-and-true methods employed by the latter suddenly ineffective.

Many marketers don’t like it – at all. Nor do those who would like to consider (and advertise) themselves as ‘influential’ care to find that their Klout score is not as reflective of their perceived greatness as they’d like it to be.

So a backlash has begun. Which is also inevitable.

However, if one thinks it through, it becomes clear that while a 100% clear and documentable definition of ‘influence’ may never be agreed-upon (I suspect we might not even get to 50%) that the rise of Influence measurement has only just begun.

Is Klout perfect? As Martijn Linssen tweeted yesterday, probably not. But as Judy Shapiro says in her AdAge piece referenced below, they were the first to stake their claim to actually measure social influence. That stake in the ground does not imply they will be the last or the definitive word, but they deserve credit for focusing the conversation and bringing the discussion into the mainstream.

Chasing the “Influencer” set is a long standing marketing strategy – not a novel concept newly minted from the social media revolution. We may have called them by different names 20 years ago – thought leaders, trend setters, early adopters – but we always understood their disproportionate power to drive business.  Via adage

Back then, it was not hard to know who influencers were (usually confined to public personalities) but it was hard to determine which “influencer,” a.k.a. celebrity, was worth more than another. To solve the problem, a company called Marketing Evolutions introduced “Q Scores”, a well-known popularity metric as one way (albeit limited) to compare one personality’s influencer value from another.

Then, as social media “happened” – BOOM – brands had easy and really really cheap access to more influencers than ever before. The only trouble was sheer quantity made finding the “influencer diamonds in the rough” really – uh – rough.

What we are about to see is an explosion of tools for measuring influence, sentiment and other key online metrics – most if not all of which will derive second-order ‘metrics’ from the massive data sets created by consumers on social networks.

• Who follows you? 
• Who retweets you and how often? How influential are they? 
• Who favorites you?
• How active are you?
• Who shares your content? Where? How Often?

These metrics, measures and scores will also evolve beyond the general and beyond the consumer, as a marketer at, say, IBM, cares much less about their influence relative to Justin Bieber and Barack Obama than they do in relation to Microsoft and Oracle. This is the problem we are working on at Terametric.

As these tools, scores & metrics continue to evolve, the debates will get more frequent, in many cases louder, and in some cases angrier. But there is no turning back – the revolution is in full swing, and the customer has taken control of the conversation and isn’t giving it back.

My advice? Use the scores that work for you (and measure that too) but any attempt to deny that such a thing as Influence exists is denying a trend that is inevitable and only bound to accelerate.

 As Josh Brown recently (and correctly) stated – Influence is the new Currency, for both consumers and for businesses. Like it or not (and many don’t), we’re already there.