The Middle Class of Influence & How it Works

Let’s talk about influence.

The thing is, so many people we work with are trying to influence others, without having a construct to apply. The result can occasionally look like crossing your fingers.

The most tried version of this is the celebrity endorsement. Put your products in the hands of some media darling, and hope for some of their ‘cool’ to rub off on you. My goal isn’t to convince you that celebrity can’t work, it can. My question is whether this is the best, smartest, or most efficient approach for your client. If you don’t have a construct to weigh influence against, you can’t make a value judgement on any of those questions.

Celebrity is powerful. Celebrity is not everything.

First thing’s first, and repeat this like a mantra: influence is about creating, ending, or otherwise changing a specific behavior. Influence is about making someone do something or not do something. You need to have that behavior clearly defined from the start.

Influence is, then, one’s capacity to impact the decisions of others.

Now that we have that out of the way, who are you going to use to help change someone’s behavior? Who is going to be your client’s vessel for influence?

The Rising Middle Class of Influence

In a very tangible way, the internet and social media have transformed the way that we consider how much influence an individual possesses. Historically, based on how information was disseminated and at what cost, huge amounts of influence were concentrated in individuals or very small groups of people— be that a king, a pinnacle author of an era, or broadcast persona.

What has changed is that people can now more easily connect and impact others through digital means. Instead of a world where there were two punctuated groups— those with influence and those without— there is something resembling a long tail of influence.

A gradient going from the most influential people in the world, and those of us with very little. A smooth slope between Barack Obama and myself, with lots of individuals in between. We call this The Middle Class of Influence.

The Application of This Phenomena

“How does this matter to my attempt to get people to purchase my product?” you might be thinking. “So fucking what?” as a wise person once said.

If you view your goal from the perspective of influencing X number of decisions, you can do that through one uber-celebrity who very neatly influences X number of people. How convenient. Minus the fact that said person’s participation may cost $1m dollars for some insignificant amount of participation. A tweet. A snap. Some small bit of ephemera. A contribution to the day’s digital detritus.

Or...

You could choose to find 1,000 individuals with .001X influence. Their combined influence still gets you to your goal of influencing X decisions, but with their participation costing dramatically less — often nothing at all. The difference, however, is that you can have these people create more meaningful conversations with the people they interact with as opposed to one-way conversation with an uber-celebrity.

There are assuredly instances where the super-celeb is a more appealing option, for example, simple products, things people already understand and have had contact with. However, when a product is new to the world, difficult to explain or nuanced, it might require that level of conversation to truly create some meaningful level of influence. In these cases, The Middle Class of Influence might be a better well to mine your influence from. It’s certainly worth considering.