You no longer have to win an election, be an elite athlete, or possess movie star looks to have power. We are entering the age of the Citizen Influencer, in which every person has a chance to get behind the velvet rope and be treated like a rock star. So says author Mark W. Schaefer in his new book Return On Influence.
It’s no secret that Facebook and Google keep running accounts of our every move, want, and desire with a cold completeness and unnerving efficiency that would shock even George Orwell. This trend of social scoring is creating new classes of haves and have-nots, social media elites and losers, frenzied attempts to crash the upper class, and deepening resentments.
Social scoring is also the centerpiece of an extraordinary marketing movement. For the first time, companies can—with growing confidence—identify, quantify, and nurture valuable word-of-mouth influencers who can uniquely drive demand for their products.
Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence. And they’re not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. They are beginning to measure online influence through extraordinarily complex algorithms tweaked daily by teams of PhD-level researchers and scientists. They’re declaring their judgments online, too, for the entire world to see.
Although being publicly rated and compared has a significant icky factor, we can’t ignore the breathtaking business opportunities. The good news is that in this new world of social influence, even the obscure, the shy, and the overlooked can become celebrities in their slice of the online world.
You too can be an Internet celebrity.
You too can earn your way into the influence class.
You too can discover the power of your own return on influence.
