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Recently, with the explosive growth of social media (e.g Facebook garnering 300 millions users worldwide and Technorati reporting that the number of blogs indexed is doubling every month), the population of social media experts has also increased pervasively. In industry mixers, people flash you business cards that include the term “social media”, and more and more people’s LinkedIn profile titles are “social media expert” or “social media consultant”. As Louis Gray points out in his blog “Social Media Experts are the New Webmasters” , social media experts still can’t make a living on this skillset alone, (with the exception of some prolific bloggers).

So, what is the opportunity cost of doing social media? If you spend so much time on social media, can it help you pay the bills?

In the recent Future of Influence Summit held at San Francisco, one of the many interesting topics discussed was the “business model for influence”. Some intriguing issues were raised in a panel on Influence and Reputation – such as that Influence (i.e. social media influence) would be a currency for trade in the future.

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There were heated debates at the Summit around what exactly is influence?  What are the best ways to measure influence? Without agreeable measurements, you won’t be able to trade influence as a currency. One quick and easy measurement that some of the panelists spoke of was the number of social media connections (e.g. Twitter followers or Facebook friends).   However, this measurement was heatedly contested as a flawed measurement because many Twitter and Digg users have gamed the system through scripting, spamming, and through reciprocal follower-ship. Therefore the calls-to-action disseminated through these phony followers seldom produce any results of significant value. Chris Brogon’s “Trust Agent” that, on average, human being’s authentic online connection is about between 100-200 connections; Hence, some people only have a couple hundredgenuine followers but they command trust among those followers and thus their voices bring up volumes, compel actions, and effect changes.

Among the panelists, Brain Solios played the devils advocate in the panel. He brought up the provocative point that nobody among the panelists actually know exactly what influence is; his view is that influence doesn’t depend on social media; it has existed as long as language has existed and has nothing to do with social media connections. Influence is the power of persuasion: some people or some pieces of content are persuasive, and they compel actions and effect changes. On the other hand, some others are no. In otherwords,notall content is created equal.

As a member of the audience, I had the benefit of collecting a wealth of fascinating nuances about influence. In my view, everyone hits some (but not all) aspects of influence; these viewpoints can co-exist without being mutually exclusive.

Ultimately, influence is as complex as the taste of wine; and the economy of influence can learn from the evolution of the wine business, where a few agreeable functions govern wine making and pricing.

Here is why:

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Wine, of course, is not just wine. The shades of quality, price, color, sweetness, dryness, and flavor among wines are so many that you can consider “wine” a whole world of beverages rather than a single product.

Whatever your notion of wine is –  and even if that changes with the seasons, the foods you’re preparing, or how much you like the people you’ll be dining with – wine is something that’s in constant experimentation.

Influence resonates with wine in many ways; for example in that theinfluencibility of a message depends on its packaging, the timing of the message, the context and the media with which the message is delivered, whom it is delivered to, and who delivers it;

So, the concept of influence is an ecosystem, and not a single, stand-alone element.  Influential measurements consist of “persuasion”, “connections” and “authenticity/credibility”

(to be continued)

That awkwardly placed exclamation point certainly took me to a pause… but I wasn’t sure it was a good pause. That odd-looking character arrangement pops, but doesn’t make it pithy.

TechCrunch reveals, “Other slogans in the new campaign include “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.”

It struck to me that these slogans ring a Web 1.0 era, when it is all about personalization — connecting Yahoo and You, 1-to-1. The rest of the web world has evolved into harnessing peer-to-peer influence, crowd sourcing, and socialization; Yahoo seems still living in “caves” and making “fires” about personalization. The slogans sound vague and tired. I was expecting something more refreshing that the $100 million can buy.

Digiday: Daily describes that the ever brash CEO, Carol Bartz, didn’t miss an opportunity to dish it out: “When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys? Go be cynical about frickin’ Google.”

This sounds like a sour grape, isn’t? Would such kind of remark or the $100 million shove her opinions down to our throats? Of Course Not! I am not head-over-heal for Google camp, nor do I dislike Yahoo before. But I definitely feel that Yahoo is missing the sense of humor that underdogs needed to beat the big guys, which pushes me to like Google more. How funny, that kind of gut feeling is called “brand affinity” that marketers strive to cultivate. But, it takes arts to foster and takes minutes to destroy.

Marketers waiting in the Social Media sidelines risk being eschewed, ignored, and becoming irrelevant to consumers and the marketplace. And those who have already jumped onto the Social Media bandwagon might have encountered challenges like:

How to orchestrate social media efforts or link them to ROI?
How much is a Twitter message worth? How do consumer social media behaviors evolve? How do we monitor or measure them?

Social Media doesn’t have to be an adversarial, inefficient, utterly fragmented channel for marketers. Marketers and individuals can both strive symbiotically in these channels. However, simply setting up social media profiles in Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, or simply implementing the latest whiz-band social media wares in your website won’t cut it. Paradoxically, marketing has to return to the ancient skills — “It’s not about selling widgets, it’s about selling you the belief in a story about widgets.”

There are brilliant marketers who tell compelling stories in the traditional one-way media which, by peculiarities of our time, nothing seems further from hip than what was hip yesterday: the days of one-way story-telling seems more remote than the Concorde or even skinny ties. The POP Agency uniquely and passionately emphasizes on the art of crafting relevant “conversational marketing” that make your brand stand out the pack.

“Let’s give’em something to talk about.” From Bonnie Raitt’s Song

“Dullness won’t sell you your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance” Bill Bernbach