When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:
- Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
- Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
- Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives.
If I was looking for one word to sum up these needs and their focus then I'd borrow from our Chairman Larry Weber's gravitation to the word INFLUENCE.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "influence" as:
- the power or ability to affect someone’s beliefs or actions
- a person or thing with such ability or power
- the power arising out of status, contacts, or wealth
- the power to produce a physical change.
And we're interested in four flows of influence:
- our own influence with our stakeholders
- our stakeholders influence with us
- our stakeholders' influence with each other
- our competitors' influence with our stakeholders.
(I define stakeholders simply as any and every party with whom we have or would like to have a relationship and interaction for our organisational success. And I define competitors here loosely as any party whose organisational objectives for influence are at odds with our own.)
So really understanding influence is pivotal to organisational performance management, and Social Web Analytics (SWA) is a critical component in understanding influence.
Organisational Performance Management
The days of assessing organisational performance solely with financial quantities are long gone. Financial reports, such as the ‘profit & loss’, look backwards. They are, in the language of performance measurement, lagging indicators that foretell little if anything of an organisation’s ability to meet objectives going forward.
This stuff is often referred to as business performance management (BPM), but I’ve opted here for the wider definition of “Organisational” over “Business” so we can include charitable and governmental organisations for example.
Modern approaches to performance measurement, such as Kaplan's and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard, augment financial measures with leading indicators. In the case of the Balanced Scorecard, the measures can be considered in four perspectives:
- Financial perspective
- Customer perspective
- Internal process perspective
- Innovation and learning perspective.
From my experience of putting the Balanced Scorecard into operation, defining and understanding influence contributes to two of these perspectives. Obviously one of these is the customer perspective, but as you may know if you have read the SWA ebook, I also believe influence, and therefore SWA, should feed directly into product development and innovation. Now that's a new role for public relations consultants!
The Influence Scorecard Meeting
All this exciting stuff has compelled me to host a meeting of those thought leaders from around the world who are defining the measurement of influence for organisational performance management in the 21st Century. The meeting is fuelled by the following two observations.
Firstly, debate about this issue is often narrow and isolated from the organisational performance management informing the board’s assessment and decision making processes, and this is plainly sub-optimal.
Secondly, now that SWA has been in development for a few years, we should be modelling and forging consistent structures and taxonomies of influence data, its translation into operational indices and its application to overall organisational performance management; the Influence Scorecard if you will.
Who should be there to contribute to the debate and set the approach to the Influence Scorecard?
I’d like your help in identifying the 100 people to invite. I’ve started to list organisations and individuals below, but any and all ideas welcome (if you’re up for it personally, please put your name down with appropriate link). The list includes SWA vendor companies, social web experts, and performance management experts.
I have made this post editable by any MarCom Professional member so you can just edit and add people and organisations to this list if you wish. Else do simply leave a comment, linkback, twitter #influencescorecard or email me...
And I’ll keep you posted here on the plans: venue, date, speakers, panels, workshops etc. etc.
I hope you’ll agree this is a timely and important meeting that will leave a legacy, albeit one that will prompt yearly reviews no doubt, and we should have some fun too. I'm looking forward to cracking it with you…
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Follow up posts:
6th Feb 2009: Enhancing Organisational Performance Management with the Influence Scorecard
13th Feb 2009: Influence Scorecard update
26th June 2009: An outline of the Influence Scorecard
3rd July 2009: "The first Influence Scorecard meeting"
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List of relevant organisations and people to invite
Robert Kaplan / The Paladium Group
David Norton / The Paladium Group
The Advanced Performance Institute / Bernard Marr
Social Target / Nathan Gilliatt
Federated Media / John Battelle
Jay O'Connor, President Elect, CIPR
Dr. Kevin Money / The John Madejski Centre for Reputation, Henley Business School
Charlene Li / The Altimeter Group
Richard Owen, John Abraham & Laura Brooks / Satmetrix / Net Promoter Score
Anthony Nadalin, IBM Chief Security Architect, Co-Chair of OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems
Nat Sakimura, NRI Senior Researcher, Co-Chair of OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems
Philip Sheldrake says:
Thanks to Andrew Smith (escherman), Ged Carroll (renaissance chambara), David Meerman Scott, Connie Bensen (TEchrigy), Vanessa Stirling (Clarabridge) for all your supportive emails in the few hours since my post.
Good to hear you're up for it. I've added some of the names you proposed between you to the list. And I'll be in touch as soon as I'm returned to London from Brisbane next week.
30 January 2009 — 2:11 am
Philip Sheldrake says:
Thanks to Tim Marklein (Weber Shandwick) and Katy Howell (Immediate Future) for being the first to jump in and edit the list in the main post. And to those who have emailed since my last comment.
Watch this post this week for more info.
1 February 2009 — 6:12 pm
Philip Sheldrake says:
The emails keep coming, thank you! We'd better get our skates on and get things organised over the next couple of weeks, and I will reply to each and every email I promise.
In the meantime, here's the current snapshot of the thread over on my company's blog:
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Alecia O'Brien | January 29th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Philip, this meeting is an excellent idea and we’d love to be part of it. Our corp comm customers are looking for an application that will give them a PR version of business intelligence. They want (and their CFO is demanding) to be able to directly correlate the impact their organizational activities (i.e. tactical PR activities) are having on their reputation - and furthermore, their bottom line.
It’s almost like saying they need a Salesforce application for PR - that will let them measure their departmental influence on the performance of the organization (think brand equity, stock price, sales, etc).
I’ll have our Founder and CMO, Chris Johnson touch base with you soon. Thanks for the inclusion.
Alecia O’Brien
http://www.dna13.com
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Connie Bensen | January 29th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Hi Philip,
I’m very interested in participating in this project. This area will be a focus of research for me this year. I will send an email.
I’m also the Community Strategist with Techrigy & we’re interested in helping establish best practices & providing leadership.
Connie
@cbensen
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Joseph Fiore | January 29th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Hi Philip,
Thank-you for including us on the list of vendors, and for advancing this idea/suggestion.
The list above is quite impressive. Should you require our input in the process of developing an influence scorecard, I would be happy particpate on behalf of our company.
You can ping me anytime at @RepuMetrix
A point to the topic that might be of interest concerns an Open Reputation Management Standard
(ORMS) - an initiative by Technical Committee being spearheaded by OASIS. It might be worthwhile to see if there is anyone on their committee that should be included and how far along they have gotten with their project.
Joseph
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Standardized PR measureme… | January 29th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
[Linkback …] In his blog post ‘Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organizational performance management‘, Philip is seeking to define influence taxonomy data, and standardize its interpretation and application into the measurement of overall business performance. Influence he defines as our own with stakeholders, theirs with us, stakeholders influence with each other, and our competitors influence with our stakeholders.
He gets a big hooray from us, and our backing too. […]
http://blog.dna13.com/?p=126
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renaissance chambara | Ge… | February 1st, 2009 at 12:01 am
[Linkback …] racetalkblog.com » Influence Scorecard - defining influence measurement for organisational performa… - Philip Sheldrake’s initiative could be very interesting […]
http://renaissancechambara.jp/2009/02/01/links-of-the-day-173
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Philip Sheldrake | February 1st, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Alecia, Connie, Joseph, Alecia, Ged,
Thanks for your comments and emails. The thread is continuing over on MarCom Professional where interested members have started to edit the main post, adding companies and people to the list.
I’ll be updating on my blog there and here, and in the comments to the original post.
With the amount of interest shown in such a short time, I think the next step will be formalising a description of the event, setting a date and venue agreeable to the earliest interested parties, and getting the invitations out.
Thanks again, Philip.
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Anthony Hamelle | February 2nd, 2009 at 1:46 pm
This is a great initiative. Influence is set to be one of the main assets of corporations, brands, or for anyone seeking to alter public perceptions. In the old days of the 20th century, exposure (eyeballs) was the only required key thanks to a mass media landscape dominated by broadcast TV. Now that this era has begun eroding, we clearly need to better define this notion of influence, which comes in many shapes or forms…
You can count myself in for linkfluence.
2 February 2009 — 7:09 pm
Michael O'Connor Clarke says:
Interesting stuff and a good list to start with. In addition to the many important organizations and folk listed above, I'd highly recommend you get input from KD Paine. Slightly startled to see that she's not already on the list, in fact. She's certainly one of North America's, and possibly the world's, leading authorities on all things to do with PR and influence measurement: http://www.measuresofsuccess.com/
I'd also venture to suggest that my boss, Joe Thornley, would be a worthy addition to this list. Joe organized and hosted a major roundtable on Social Media Measurement last year (http://snurl.com/bngoe) and has done much to advance the discussion on metrics in this area.
10 February 2009 — 10:13 pm
Katie Paine says:
This looks to be a VERY large gathering :) but I'd very much like to weigh in on this since I've actually been measuring influence in digital media since 1995.
29 June 2009 — 12:03 pm