Archive for the ‘influence’ Category
Newer Entries »Influence Mapping: The Maverick Cop Way (Part 2)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
The story so far: In the last episode of Influence Mapping: The Maverick Cop Way, we discussed a simple process for organizing what you know about influencers. We discussed briefly the decision making unit model we were using, our (very broad) definition of “influencer”, and showed how we can score them quickly for the three key variables reach, authority, and “ease-of-use”. At the end of the process, we found ourselves with something like this:
Now we’re going to go a little further, and show how we can map the relationships between the various stakeholders. This is the second and final post, and it may introduce a lot more that’s new to you. But stick with it – it might be worth it.
What you’ll need before you start
You’re going to need UCINET, a programme that analyses matrices and networks. It comes along with another programme from the same publishers (Analytictech) called NetDraw that draws networks. You’re going to want both. UCINET costs $250 for a corporate license, but the first 30 days are free. NetDraw is a free download.
They only work on Windows, but I’ve not experienced any real problems running them on a Mac using Parallels.
1. Create a matrix
Take your list of influencers (as per the table above), and add in the four key players from the decision making unit; the initiator, the decision maker, the purchaser and the end user.
Paste them down the left hand side of your table, and along the top edge, as in the illustration below. Excel’s Edit > Paste Special > Transpose command is useful, not to say essential, when you’re doing this. At the end of the process, you should have something that looks like this.
The rows show the influencers, the columns show those being influenced, the targets.
Because we don’t think that an influencer can exert influence themselves we drop a line of zeroes down the diagonal. This is more to help us navigate than anything else. Don’t feel you have to do this.
2. Fill in the matrix
Go through the rows one by one, deciding if a given influencer has any effect on the targets (the column headings). So for example, we know that the initiator influences the decision maker, and so on. But knowledge of the end user may well influence the decision maker, too. So – for example – when I’m choosing my dad a computer, I take into account the fact that he’s not so au fait with technology, and that if he can’t use it, he’s going to call me to ask for tech support. So I’d better choose something that will limit these calls.
At the end of the process, you’ll end up with something like this (although probably much bigger). It can take quite a lot of time to go through this process – this may be one of those times when you want to work with a partner to bounce the ideas around.
Tags: audience, influence, mapping, networks, planning, public relations, tool
Posted in how to, influence | 2 Comments »
Unravelling member-get-member activity
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
This is a network map. You’ve probably seen something like this before. What’s quite interesting is that this is an undirected graph (that is, the links go both ways – if A knows B, B knows A, that sort of thing) but there’s some directed activity implied.
Groups on sites like Facebook and Bebo work by members recruiting other members, either actively (“join this group”) or passively (friends can see on their friend feed that other friends have joined up, and decide to get involved).
We’d expect to find that people have strong existing personal relationships within such groups.
We took one group (a green interest group) which has around 2,000 members. We selected this group because it is has a clear single-minded proposition,as well as a strong local element that means that people are more likely to know each other than on some of the more generalist boards.
There are more than 250K publicly available relationships inside and outside the group, and we looked at analyzing all of them.
It seems that there are a few highly connected people (people with between 395-400 friends) who sit at the centre of these things, and on whom the eventual success of the group depends. While they may be no more active than other users (and may even be less active), they are the hubs who link together the network.
In the maps you can clearly see three kinds of shape.
Long fingers show where users get users (usually one or two at a time). Fan shapes show one user who mobilizes many friends. These are clearly interesting to us. In the middle are “mares nests” where lots of people know each other.
This is a pretty straightforward Pareto-like distribution: 33% of the users are connected to 79% of the members, the remaining 66% only link to 22% of the users.
Here’s how we’re going about it.
1) Spider every member of a group, and their friends
This shows the members of a group (red) and all their publicly-visible friends. This is a much smaller group than the one in the graph above (these things grow exponentially, you understand)
Red dots are members, grey dots are their friends.
I’ve gone through and blurred out the individuals’ names. We probably shouldn’t have been collecting those anyway…
2) Look for relationships between members
Here we just use a little perl script to sort through the lines selecting only those relationships between two members. In essence we’re throwing away all the other relationships. Perl is good at this sort of thing. I found a trick over at the perlmonks site that shows you how to search an array much faster than just grepping (which took a while).
3) Drop the results into NetDraw
We’re using Analytech’s excellent/free network drawing application, NetDraw. You can tweak the Windows Metafile output in things like Illustrator.
Tags: mapping, networks
Posted in influence, networks | 4 Comments »
Influence Mapping: The Maverick Cop Way (Part 1)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
You know the maverick cop? The one who breaks all the rules, has to surrender his gun and badge somewhere in Act II, but nevertheless somehow gets the job done? His approach to solving problems is crude but effective (usually it involves shaking people down, which isn’t something we get to do a lot in the communications business.)
I don’t know that maverick cops are into influence mapping. I don’t know how many people really are, but it’s a big part of my work life. These days it seems I’m always being asked, “Mat, who is the most influential x?”, or, “Mat, who influences the online discussion on y?” or, “Mat, what influences people’s purchase decision-making when it comes to z?” These are all interesting questions, and bear a lot of thought and research and planning.
However, time isn’t something we all have a lot of these days, so right now I’m going to share a very quick-and-dirty method I’ve been working on; the research equivalent of holding a pimp upside down over a balcony.
Before we start, what’s wrong with this approach?
It builds on what we know, or what we think we know. Using it successfully will require all those assets that the maverick cop has in spades: a sharp brain honed by experience, a deep knowledge of the streets (well, your market), and an underworld intelligence network of pimps and hookers (in our case these are more likely to be clients and colleagues, of course.)
Axel Foley aside, maverick cops don’t always do so well out of their jurisdiction. This approach isn’t going to expose surprises or new information so well. It’s all about organizing what you know.
If you are a rookie cop, you’d better stick by the book. That’s all I’m saying. Or someone will bust you down to traffic duty before you know what’s hit you.
And what’s so good about it?
Well, it’s fast, for one thing. And it’s a process – which is another. Now if you add into that the fact that – when you have more accurate data, you can go back and plug it into the model without breaking it, but only making it better – then you’re onto a winner.
Tags: digital, influence, integration, mapping, planning, public relations, social media, tool
Posted in how to, influence | 1 Comment »
