The George Clooneys, Tom Rooneys, Adam Looneys and just plain Tooneys of the world aren’t the biggest influencers anymore.
Thank goodness.
But Calvin Lee is
Calvin is a 40 something, unmarried geek who lives in the basement of his parents’ home.
More important, Calvin is a “superconnector.”
His 140-character pronouncements, comments and bitly links drive the opinions of 80,000 disciples. That’s 80,000 people who follow his exploits every day. And each one of those 80,000 is connected to thousands of other online sneezers.
The big aaachoo
Calvin is like a supercolider. He propels other people’s stuff faster and farther than Wernher von Braun.
That’s why people like Calvin should be important to you.
To create a movement, your online content is going to have to move among and through networks. Networks of passionate “tribe influencers.”
That is, if you want it to spur action, change thoughts and disrupt the status quo. Like the object in Newton’s First Law, the most effective content needs a lot of momentum behind it.
Influencers sneeze and the tribe catches a cold
Influential subject matter experts, like Calvin, exist in every tribe. But to leverage their power to build a movement you’ll need seven things:
- A defined tribe who shares a common worldview and, as a result, has a cause that you understand and relate to through your own purpose.
- A content strategy that’s relevant to your tribe’s cause, challenges, opportunities and issues.
- Experience-based content that helps the tribe and is worth sharing.
- Content that’s been made spreadable through stories.
- An online networking strategy that propels stories through your tribe using influencers.
- A way to identify the igniters like Calvin
- A way to engage them.
Content is like a bad bean burrito
It is extremely powerful, but only when it moves through networks.
And like a bad bean burrito it can move very quickly through the system. That is, with the right experiences and stories and people like Calvin pushing it along.
Because the online world is not made up of passive tribe members. Instead it’s “a tribe of tribes” where you must let others carry your ideas and stories.
Finding high velocity influencers
The key is identifying and building networks of the most influential citizens in your tribe.
Happily, the heavy lifting in this area is being done by some digital number-crunchers. Here are four good ones worth looking at:
Klout
Kred
PeerIndex
Appinions
I’ve got your number
These social scoring resources sift, sort, analyze and codify the online reach and sway of all active web citizens. Each person’s level of influence is distilled to a single number, just like the E-Score defines a celebrity’s appeal.
This makes it easy, quick and nearly free to find top targets and open effective new channels into your tribe.
In fact, this social-scoring method led Audi, Subway, American Express and Disney to our friend Calvin Lee.
So even though Calvin is unknown to the public at large, he’s highly influential to his 80,000 Twitter followers. Thanks to the 200 tweets he sends them every day.
In fact, Calvin’s Klout score of 80 is more than four times that of the average web denizen.
But there’s another problem
There are more than 300 million Twitter users and there are billions and billions and billions and billions of tweets.
Which tweets and which influencers and which topics are of importance to your tribe?
Little Bird is a software program that solves this connectors problem. A problem that gets more and more complex every day.
What a little bird can tell you
If you want to know which influencers you should connect with on Twitter, Little Bird gives you that answer.
You want to know what content you should be retweeting because it’s of most interest to your tribe? Little Bird can give you that answer, as well.
Want to know what trends are emerging within the influencers in a particular category? Little Bird can give you that answer.
So in a nutshell, Little Bird helps you tap into the people and content on Twitter that are influencing the direction of your tribe.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a superconnector
Superconnectors come in five different flavors.
They connect and spread ideas and movements in different ways.
If you’d like to meet a few and see exactly how they do it, check out Influencer Influenza.
We’ll introduce you to 15 people who spread content faster than a speeding bullet. And build strong connections in a single bound.
Where people like Calvin can take you
Content that moves among these valuable and valued “citizen influencers” is power.
Purpose-driven organizations can use that power to connect tribe members and tell compelling stories. These are the connections and stories that will lead a movement.
But that’s just my opinion. What’s your take?
Art by Roy Lichtenstein
