Leveraging Influencers

A few highly connected and visible associates can have a disproportionate say in shaping opinions on Social Platforms. While at times this may seem a little lopsided, this also presents an opportunity of spreading an organizational message without having to reach out to everyone.

So the million dollar question is how do we identify these “influencers” and how do we utilize them to predict if an idea will be adopted by the larger community.

To do this — we start with a simple comparison, ideas are like viruses — just like a virus can spread rapidly depending on how well connected “Patient Zero” is, an idea’s adoption rate is highly dependent on well connected the Change Agent is . Eg A, a highly connected associate, is in a much better position to influence opinions than B (on the network periphery). This measure is broadly referred to as “Centrality”.

Every idea (and virus) has an S shaped adoption pattern with an initial phase (where associates are slowly getting to hear of the idea), exponential increase phase(where the idea spreading from 2 to 4 to 16 to 256 etc) and a plateau phase where there are no more people to “infect” with the idea.

Simulating these 3 phases in the “central” associates will give a early heads of the adoption rate.

Therefore, to predict the adoption pattern of an idea or campaign — we need to do the following

This information can now be used to proactively prepare for roll-out to the larger organization.

As organizations repeat this exercise for every campaign like Mergers / Program Launches / Organizational Changes etc — Influencers keep getting acknowledged, incentivizing them to be more socially active. More importantly the Change Management process becomes a lot more focused and effective since HR will be working with a relatively small number of influencers instead of carpet-bombing all employees with standardized mailers.

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