When people talk about ‘influence’ generally, what does that mean to you?

Graham: To me, someone with influence is in possession of the power to change people’s minds about something. The person with influence would have to have strong opinions that can be backed up by irrefutable evidence, in order to change my mind about something. Influential people usually have a degree of charisma, too.

Dipa: Influence to me means having the ability to impact on the way one makes decisions /choices, take action and responsibility for the same actions. Influence can have effect on decisions and choices made and as a result determine a positive or negative outcome. Influence is the ability to have impact on the outcome.

Chris: 99% of the population do not agree with what you think and how you think, so Influence must be the ability to create a change in peoples thinking such they come on board with whatever idea or concept it is and then… are pleased about it… has to be a win / win otherwise this is manipulation… both parties must be better off as a result of the change.

In a social media/online context, how do YOU judge your own influence?

Graham: I wasn’t very good at judging my own influence, apart from keeping a track of who was following me on Twitter, until someone nominated me as the 4th. most influential person on customer service online. That was a surprise as I am not really scientific about this kind of stuff. Over 90 blog posts seems to have done the trick though!

Dipa: My own influence in a social media / online context would be around 6 if you look at scale of 0 – 10 where 0 is no influence at all and 10 is highest level of influence. A little bit better than average, but with a lot of room for learning and improvement.

Chris: You can do no better really than use measures that are available and gut feel. In my opinion, we weigh up influence in others by how many retweets they have, by how long a thread might be in a Facebook post, how well people are connected… but not just online… offline counts loads too!

In real life, how do YOU judge your own influence?

Graham: I guess by what people say about me, how people react to me, feedback I receive and the amount of hugs I get when I walk into a room!

Dipa: In real life I believe I am slightly more influential than I am online. Again in the scale of 0 – 10, I would say my influence level would be around 7. I am more of a connector than an influencer.

Chris: In real life, influence can be measured by a number of factors… how well you are connected, do people ask you for advice or guidance (they might not act on it)… do people take notice of what you say… do they advocate you when you are not around… respect of others, trust and integrity, living by good principles are all important characteristics of those that we might want to follow or be more like… this I would suggest is how we assess someone’s influence.

How useful do you find tools like Peer Index and Klout?

Graham: I have never really explored either of these. I joined Klout a few months ago as I was invited by several people, but I tend to find things like this more of an irritation than anything if I am honest.

Dipa: Peer Index and Klout are useful tools but only as guideline of the effects of one’s activities and engagement online. As until now these tools have not been able to measure offline / real life influence you cannot really solely use these tools to measure influence.

Chris: I do not use PeerIndex at the moment, however I did meet one of the Directors of that business a few weeks back at a business dinner event and it is worth looking into… seems it might well have better algorithms… however Klout is a ‘fun’ not to serious but recognised measure of engagement in social platforms… it is a guide… not accurate but… useful to see whether you are going up and down and it does kind of reflect the activity levels … well certainly in my experience anyhow!

How accurate do you find tools like Peer Index and Klout?

Graham: See above!

Dipa: Tools like Peer Index and Klout are accurate enough to measure the level of activity which lead to influence building and sometimes this measure may be affected by a couple of days of inactivity. Does that mean one is less influential during those couple of days? Of course not. So I would conclude that tools like Peer Index and Klout are accurate to measure level of daily activity and not influence. However, Klout has recently changed the logarithms to measure influence both online and offline. It still remains to be seen if this will improve the accuracy of the measure of influence.

Chris: See above.

What ONE piece of advice would you give someone who wants to become more influential?

Graham: I think be authentic, be yourself, because if you are not, you will get found out, and then you will lose whatever influence you had.

Dipa: Only one? Be genuinely interested in others, share information, engage with people and do not just sale and broadcast your business! Both offline and online.

Chris: Well they need to build their contacts through engagement… become seen as a contributor, someone who gives rather than takes… someone looking out for others rather than themselves… this is a good route to building influence.

Do also include any anecdotal examples or stories about your experience of becoming more influential, if you like.

Graham: I write and speak about my own experiences a lot, and this is resulting in people wanting to share my thoughts and opinions with a wider audience. I think that having an ambition to be influential could be dangerous – in my case it appears to be happening organically, and I’m not sure what the end result will be, but I’m enjoying the feeling!

Chris: I can just speak from my own experience… as you start to engage with what you would consider influential people who have similar goals and visions, being included in their circle and invited to participate then open up the opportunity to leverage off their influence but then to build ones own too!

How influential are you? In life generally, and in your business life/industry? We’d love to hear your answers to these questions. Leave your comments below or join in the conversation on this topic on the Link4Growth forums.

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The mailing list still had it’s worth, of course – it still does –  but the landscape had changed. Everyone (surely?) now understood that  it’s conversations, engagement and interactions that builds relationships. ‘Push marketing’ was suddenly, ‘so last decade’.  So everyone scrambled into Twitter and Facebook where conversations could happen, and the mantra (for the misguided) became ‘It’s all about the number of friends/fans/followers you have.’ Naturally, there is some truth in the concept that the bigger the audience, the higher the numbers of people likely to hear your message, but without genuine engagement, you’re simply moving the ‘push’ model into a different space.

Slowly but surely, old school thinking is changing and businesses and brands are understanding that it’s influence which counts. This has always been true; Word of Mouth marketing, getting buy in from early adopters and celebrity endorsement – all revolve around influence and have always been a part of traditional marketing strategies. As hackneyed as it sounds, social media means we really are now all connected and that means that our ability to influence is way greater than it was 10 years ago, say.

So is influence ‘the new currency’? Not really… But nevertheless, it’s easy to see why ‘influence’ has become such a big buzzword of late and why tools which measure our influence or ‘social worth’ eg. PeerIndex, Klout, Kred and Appinions are growing in popularity.

Digital Influence is one of the hottest trends in social media, yet is largely misunderstood. (Source: The Rise of Digital Influence)

The Rise of Digital Influence, a report by Altimeter Group Principal Analyst Brian Solis is a ‘how-to’ guide for businesses to spark desirable effects and outcomes through social media influence. From the Executive Summary, “The report helps companies understand how influence spreads, and it includes case studies in which brands partnered with vendors to recruit connected consumers for digital influence campaigns. Brian evaluates the offerings of 14 Influence vendors, organizing them by Reach, Resonance, and Relevance: the Three Pillars that make up the foundation for Digital Influence as defined in the report. Also included are an Influence Framework and an Influence Action Plan to help brands identify connected consumers and define and measure strategic digital influence initiatives.”

Read the report here:

In our next post, we will speak to 3 SME owners about ‘influence’, what it means to them, and their thoughts on the freely available ‘influence measurement’ tools mentioned above.

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A typical example of this is with our SME7 Supplier Database. This definitive list of accredited SME product & service providers is crucial to the SME7 Business Modernisation initiative. To guarantee consistency and quality to our SME7 Clients, we can only utilise those that are included within the SME7 Supplier Database. Inclusion is based on a strict accreditation process which means that only suppliers who deliver a) outstanding quality and service, b) add value, and c) agree with our Principles and ethics, are included.

We had initially started to build the database within the SME7 IT framework, but were conscious that having it ‘closed off’ like that didn’t quite fit with one of our guiding principles of adding value for those who ‘got’ the vision and concept of SME7 and so, bought in early. The solution to this challenge only began to reveal itself recently as our own understanding of Google’s vision and Google+ deepened.

So after careful consideration and research, we took the decision to rebuild the Supplier Database using the Google+ framework – creating a business page for each Supplier in order to leverage the SEO and search capabilities of Google. This will maximise exposure for every supplier’s business through association with SME7.

We have a busy couple of weeks ahead now liaising with Suppliers to review progress and discuss the key messages for their page in order to ensure that SME7 Practitioners are matching the right clients to the right core services / product offerings of our Suppliers.

So… can’t stop… heads back down… much to do!

Find out more about the SME7 Supplier Database at: www.sme7.com/supplier

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What always amazes me about similar news items carried by the mainstream press (increasing gas bills/food prices/petrol costs etc) is that they never examine the alternatives. The punter they inevitably interview for their reaction is a conventional householder with a family, and an apparently fixed income – who expresses dismay that they’ll have to cut back on some luxury in order to keep affording to live.

This response assumes two things: first, that income is fixed (see my other blog on Living4Free for a challenge to that!); and second, that current outgoings can’t be challenged.

If you’re currently a commuter, complaining about lousy rail journeys where you stand jammed into overcrowded carriages, on trains frequently running late or cancelled, paying £3,000 to £5,000 (out of after-tax income) a year for the privilege, then maybe there’s an alternative: reinvent your job.

Do you really have to go to that office in the city centre, every day?

Think hard, and there are a number of alternatives, which involve smarter working and the effective harnessing of new technologies – many of which are free, all of which are great value for what they can deliver.

Here’s a checklist to question the validity of your daily commute:

• do you spend whole days in your office when you barely see another soul?
• do you get out much to meet clients? Or is this something that rarely happens these days?
• are there days when you could actually complete all of your interactions (phone calls, email, videoconferences) from your dining table, just as effectively?
• check your diary – if you could rearrange a couple of meetings, would you need to be in the office every day?
• is there another, local office or perhaps client premises, which are easier to get to, where you could base yourself sometimes?

Many of us already own smartphones, and already have broadband at home. Increasingly, companies have IT systems that allow remote access – or are placing their systems on the cloud, facilitating access to corporate information and emails from anywhere.

Then there’s the option of holding face to face meetings remotely. Even Skype offers a basic, free video conferencing facility, but if you wanted a full, professional quality video meeting facility, these are available today for typically £1,200 a year for 10 users. Compared with the season ticket, that looks to be great value.

There’s no need to become a hermit. Pick the days you will work remotely, and plan around that. Some railway companies even make part-time commuting better value by offering further discounts: the Chiltern Railways carnet allows you to buy 12 return tickets for the price of 10 – ideal for the irregular commuter.

It’s up to you – moan about costs going up, or plan to do something constructive instead. And if your employer doesn’t get this flexible working stuff, then maybe it’s time to start thinking about working elsewhere: just like the dinosaurs, companies that fail to move with the times will ultimately become extinct!

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On the other hand you may be losing business, and be worried that your business rivals have suddenly found a competitive advantage – but you have no idea how to respond?

The world is definitely changing, and SME7 has been set up to target its assistance to the owners of SME business, helping them to make the necessary decisions and changes to survive and thrive into the future. The good news is that it is not so difficult. Once you are over the initial hurdle of understanding that we will never be returning to the ‘Good old days’ and that we now have to operate differently, the hardest challenge is almost over!

But the time to act is now. The longer businesses wait, the graver the danger, because new businesses operate instinctively with new technology and less overheads. Unless traditional businesses change, then their future looks very challenging indeed.

Fortunately SME7 has Chris Ogle, author of the book In 2 The Clouds (a book that was written as a guidebook for SME’s to make the changes necessary), who is passionate about helping Business Britain modernise and become fit for the 21st century. If you would like Chris or one of the other SME Practitioners to give your business a 21st century business M.O.T. then complete the form on the Contact us page.

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Corporates traditionally have much deeper pockets to survive the tough times, although very often that means they have to make sacrifices. There’s official support for them, too, with the recently announced bank-backed Business Growth Fund, which promises to ease cashflow issues for the big guys. And their mood can be bolstered occasionally with the odd choreographed visit from an overseas dignitary or trade mission to boost order books… this makes a welcome bonus in the corporate space.

But what is the government doing though for those businesses in the middle? Not startups or corporates, but those with traditional offices and staff, who have formed the bedrock of business in this country for years. The answer is quite simple… nothing! Even the service that was there, Business Link, which few spoke of in glowing terms – has been removed.

With close to one million businesses in this space, there is much to lose if they are left to fail. Recently, even small business and enterprise minister Mark Prisk acknowledged “these companies face a tough time, the future is joint venturing and collaboration” and these businesses must change if they are to make the cut in the 21st century!

This is why the private initiative of SME7 is so important to UK SME businesses. This is an initiative aimed at “helping those that have got a business, stay in business” according to founder Chris Ogle. Not a here today, gone tomorrow service, not one at the mercy of government change or legislation, but one that brings together the very best independent specialists to deliver the expertise and services to SAVE our SMEs.

“The SME sector is notoriously difficult to get to,” says Chris Ogle, “but just because it is difficult, does not mean we should give up and abandon them.”

Right at the heart of the vision of SME7 is a desire to help oppressed business owners modernise and make their businesses more efficient. And often, this involves small, incremental steps. “Too many SMEs are still using out of date systems that maybe they set up when they started out – the Excel sheet to do the expenses, the out-of-date copy of software, the PC that’s furred up and short on memory,” says Ogle. “And they absolutely need to get more efficient, in a world where it’s possible to farm out work to cheaper parts of the world at the click of a mouse. We saw it happen with manufacturing, now it is increasingly happening with services.”

“And they are missing out on the opportunities of new techniques, new technology and new ways of marketing on the web and through social media, which the younger entrepreneurs now establishing businesses will use as part of their competitive advantage from day one.” The established SME owner has no choice but to modernise: “If they don’t they’ll be stamped on by the newcomers in their sector, within five years.”

With SME7, Ogle has created a flexible, affordable programme to help take businesses into the modern age. And he’s done so by harnessing Prisk’s call for collaboration, drawing together a database of niche experts from across the UK, who have been found as he’s covered the country networking and speaking to people. “The ironic thing is,” says Ogle, “that for many SME owners, the people who can really help them are often no distance away. We’re bringing them together to work in a mutually beneficial way.”

Ogle is currently travelling round the UK, spreading the word about SME7 as part of its soft launch. In the coming months, this evangelist is committed to making a difference by ensuring that struggling business owners get the benefits he is sure the SME7 vision will deliver. He just needs you to tell the struggling business owner you know, about his solution and path to a more successful future.

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One of an occasional series of profiles of people who are benefitting from new ways of working. Independently of SME7, Kaslers Solicitors has adopted many of the seven principles to transform their business and set it up for expansion, even in a time of recession. In a fast moving world, Kaslers is one of the few legal practices so far to embrace change. If this profile leaves you thinking “I should be doing some of that to change my business for the better”, then contact the SME7 team today!

It’s rare enough these days to find a solicitor whose business is booming – apart, that is, from insolvency practitioners – but even rarer to meet one who’s an evangelist for flexible working. But, according to Michael Breeze of Kaslers Solicitors LLP in Kent and Canary Wharf: “I believe the business model we’ve got will be the norm for many solicitors’ firms in five years’ time.” This coming October, when all legal firms need to renew their professional indemnity insurance, he’s predicting that booming premiums will lead to another round of closures for struggling practices in his sector.

Michael has every right to be one of the old school. He qualified in 1977, and for his first decade or more worked from the firm’s traditional offices in the City of London, making a fine living advising mainly commercial property clients. “We had salaried staff, and offices in Upper Thames Street and I thought I had arrived, when I got my own huge pedestal desk.”

It was in the early 1990s that Michael had his wake-up call. “Two partners retired, and I was left holding the baby,” he says. Heavily exposed to the bombed out property sector, business fell off a cliff and Kaslers downsized from 18 staff to 4, and closed the London office. He was effectively a one man firm, albeit with support staff, who all worked from his home office in Kent.

Through the second half of the 1990s, Michael rebuilt his client base through furious and focused local business networking. “But as we grew, I tended to take on people who worked from home. In the late 1990s, it was wedded in my mind that I did not want to pay commercial rent again.”

Ironically, Kaslers has moved back into offices, in locations where it has a hub of personnel. But they’re always serviced offices, with flexible rents and meeting rooms by the hour when they’re needed, solving one of Michael ‘s original headaches. “In the old days, we always seemed to spend too much time worrying about trying to sub-let spare space, then worrying about moving tenants out when we got busy and needed it back.”

Life working from home was not as easy as today, with communication by dial-up internet connections, reams of fax paper and mobile phones that were fiendishly expensive. Michael  was one of the first to get an email address – though in the early days, its value was limited by the fact that few others in the legal profession had the facility.

More recently, Michael and his business partner Simon Scott have been on a growth path thanks, in part, to a chance meeting. “The other pillar of our model came from when I met a partner in a 35 partner firm, who wanted to work differently.” The Road Traffic Accident specialist joined Kaslers in 2008. “Within three months of him joining, he was saying ‘this is wonderful’. He loved the flexibility, the fact that he could work longer hours if he wanted, and from this came the suggestion of rolling it out to the other legal areas and indeed, across London and the South East.”

Michael took his concept on the road. “The recession was rolling in, and we got a remarkably favourable reception from solicitors.” The business has expanded, now numbering 25 lawyers and 9 support staff, many of them based around the M25.

The model may not suit everyone, as it does demand team members get out and network to help find business. Fee earners take the lion’s share of fees on work they introduce and deliver personally, half of the fees on work that Kaslers provides them, and they can earn a commission on assignments they introduce to others within the firm. But, says Michael , it can perfectly suit partners who are fed up with the restrictions and politics of a large practice; those faced with redundancy; survivors of the first round of cuts, who find themselves working harder for less; and solicitors who want to look after their children. “And for people who would like to set up on their own, but find the prospect just too risky, it’s a perfect halfway house. We exercise a light touch, we don’t want to force anyone to do anything.”

Running a virtual business does provide challenges, not least helping people feel part of a team. A monthly get together, where departments take it in turns to present to their colleagues, works well: “We do have to work hard at maintaining the collegiate spirit,” says Michael , admitting one or two recruits have found the home working set up a lonely one.

And while premises costs have been minimised, the IT infrastructure and business procedures need to be strong. “We’ve had to beef everything up,” says Michael , with a network now run off three separate servers. “We’re not on the cloud, and I do wonder if we’re missing a trick there, but that would involve confidentiality and data protection issues.” Operational systems, too, have had to be developed to cover items that might be automatically covered if sharing an office environment. “When we were small, I checked everything, such as conflicts of interest, but now we have developed systems to detect and deal with them.”

BlackBerries and scanned documents have long been the order of the day at Kaslers, and Michael  is exasperated by his peers who simply won’t keep up – “some firms out there still won’t use email,” he adds. He’s excited by the fact that his IT provider has just added his iPad to synchronise with the server and his BlackBerry so that any work on one is automatically updated over the other two.

For the future, Michael is clear his business is scalable, and the model delivers a great service at reasonable fees, so he’s on the lookout for solicitors who would love the opportunity to work from home, network locally and join the team. “For the legal profession, the big fixed costs we face are premises, salaries, and professional indemnity insurance: we’ve cracked two of them.”

More about Kaslers here

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According to figures quoted in the Sunday Times, the last government created 3 million jobs, but many of them were taken by immigrants; meantime, the number of households where nobody works grew from 184,000 in 1997, to 352,000 in 2010. Said the paper: “After stripping out students, there are still 269,000 households where nobody has ever worked.”

The private sector has been brought in previously to tackle the workless (or workshy): from 2005 to 2008 the Labour government spent an estimated £760 million on Pathways to Work – which apparently, didn’t provide all that many pathways to work.

So what’s different this time? For one, the Work Programme contractors get more flexibility in how they go about helping the unemployed. “You are free to put together a support service for them that actually meets their needs,” Debbie Scott of Tomorrow’s People told the Sunday Times.

And there’s payment by results. Contractors only get a small fee for taking someone on: it ratchets up if the individuals get a job, and then stay in the role. There’s a bigger fee for the harder cases, typically those who have been out of work for a longer time.

So, what are the shortcomings? First, there’s a focus on finding jobs for individuals, and there’s a problem here – there aren’t enough jobs to go round. In April, 461,000 vacancies were advertised, while 1.47 million claimed jobseeker’s allowance, and an estimated total 2.46 million were unemployed.

And the idea of a support service that “actually meets their needs” sounds rather too applicant-oriented, not an approach that will help fill vacancies. Here’s hoping that the private sector advisors come up with some constructive ways to get people into work, perhaps by helping them to establish their own businesses – a route that would have greater potential to actually create roles that suited from the outset.

The big worry is that individuals get sent on training courses (which will help massage the figures, and fill the pockets of training agencies), but at the end won’t be any nearer a job. Followed by much hand-wringing about the state of the economy.

And unless these new contractors work on the mindset of individuals – so they no longer expect to be given a comfortable, reasonably well-paid job, but understand the need to graft to establish their value in the market – little will change. Too frequently, those on the dole are not prepared to put the effort in, to genuinely learn the new skills that Britain’s SMEs need in the workplace.

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The internet provides endless access to information, and makes communication easy. In the West, there is plentiful, cheap food, and household comforts continue to be invented, then subsumed into our culture as essential.

But behind this easily applied label, there is the danger that the older generation, looking down their noses at their loafing offspring and their peers, are actually missing a key change in the way younger people are approaching work and the world of business. And, according to an article in the New York Times, this fundamental difference is something they ignore at their peril.

For some bosses, it is the frequent moan that younger workers use their day at their desks “wasting their time” on Facebook or Twitter, or sit there with their earpieces in, avoiding contact with fellow workers. But these complaints demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding, apparently, with plenty of research to support this assertion.

One major characteristic of this younger generation is their belief in the value of working in teams, something the older generation look upon at work as a weakness. This collaborative approach comes from being brought up sharing information with peers, across social networks and in playing online games.

And then there’s the demarcation between work and play. Older generations have a black and white distinction, often based on command and control, and the days when time spent at a desk correlated directly with output, such as the processing of paperwork. Today’s youngsters operate in a linked online world and have a much more blurred distinction, being comfortable mixing work with play; and they see examples all around them where the delivery of results is no longer as linear as it was.

Examples of highly successful brands such as Skype and Facebook, teach that the business model counts success in ways other than simply short term profit. And new media hero Google, which is now highly profitable, famously allows staff to play games in the office, and spend work time on personal projects.

For those already running their own SMEs, the message is clear. You can simply rant on about the younger generation, and their weird ways, or you can attempt to understand them, or at least harness them. One SME I interviewed recently only came to understand the value of collaborative working and business networking, thanks to having the foresight to let a junior team member “waste” time investigating online forums. The links he created, and the influence those have had on the thinking of his seniors, have completely rewritten the company’s business plan.

So take a look around SME7 – it’s all about helping existing small businesses make the most of the changing tools open to business; tools that the younger generation are already familiar with using. Organising your company to be flexible; to outsource and collaborate rather than simply take on more staff; to built bullet-proof and expandable IT systems on the cloud; to turn your website into a profit centre: all these are achievable aims, with the right team helping you along the way.

And doing nothing, continuing in your old, established ways, is not sustainable in a world where the youngsters of today start their own businesses, which will operate completely differently to yours. As one young employee said to me recently: “The last three years, I have been a bit like a sponge. In five year’s time, I’ll be dangerous.”

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Two hundred years ago, Britain was a leading economic power, and life expectancy was 40 years. Fast forward to today, and we’re living longer, pretty much everywhere; but the rising economic might of China means it is not far behind the old economic superpower of yesteryear.

Watch this intriguing video to see how economic output, and life expectancy, have changed over the period. China’s on a roll……and the West is stagnating. What does that mean for you, your income, and your business?

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