On Wednesday I gave a talk on Social Influence to leaders in the arts and cultural sector as part of a leadership initiative by Sync Leadership. It was a lively and interesting discussion where we looked at everything from why we want to influence others to tricks and tips for effective influencing.

Start With Why

Simon Sinek is the author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action which says that to make change we should start with Why we are doing something before moving onto the How and the What.

Start with why you want to influence others online and the strategy and tactics for achieving your goal will become clearer. Do you want to create change? Do you want to show different ways of being, working or thinking? Do you want to raise your profile to get more work? Do you want to challenge the status quo?

Have Something To Say

Gandhi famously once said: "don't talk unless you can improve the silence". We are all aware that the social web is creating far too much noise in our lives with constant status updates and tweets. I try to make it a practice not to add to the noise just for the sake of being seen but only share content or ideas when I think they are of value.

Social media is just an amplifier. You need to have something to say in the first place.

Know Me, Like Me, Trust Me

To influence others they must get to know you first, then like what you do, and then start to trust you and become an advocate for your work.

The first step is being found. Sounds simple but if no-one is listening, you are not influencing. A good trick is to Google your name/company/brand on a different computer to yours and see what results come up (your computer will have cookies remembering what sites you have visited). Are you happy with the results? Where are you mentioned on the social web? Make the most out of your LinkedIn and Twitter profiles and optimise them with the keywords you want to rank for.

Get active on social media and post regular but great content. Engage in conversations - don't make it a one way street. Listening first and asking questions is a good way of influencing others. Use Twitter searches and hashtags to follow conversations around a topic you want to influence.

Make your content shareable with sharing buttons on your blog. Actively ask others to tweet and share your content. If you don't have a blog, guest post on other blogs and drive traffic back to your website. Make it easy for people to follow you by putting links to your social media on your website, your business cards and your email signature.

We can influence by being an authority or expert in an area, by sharing our ideas on a topic as well as curating the best content from others. Having an opinion on the social web is crucial. In the early days of tweeting and blogging, I was reluctant to say anything that went against the status quo or that challenged others' opinions. But now I am more comfortable in my skin and happy to say what I really think.

Telling stories and being human is another key way of getting others to know and trust you. Each of us has a unique journey that has led us to where we are today and sharing our lessons and vulnerabilities is a powerful way of connecting with others.

What's your story?

"The internet is no longer a web of pages, it's a web of people."

At the LikeMinds community debate on Social Influence last night, this idea was key to understanding how we are influenced online.

Take a moment to think about how you found out about an event, a product or a service recently. Perhaps you did a Google search but more likely you saw a recommendation posted on a friend's Facebook page, asked a question on Twitter or received a LinkedIn or Eventbrite invitation. The integration of applications (made possible by Application Programming Interfaces or APIs) now means that social sharing is becoming ubiquitous. Just bought tickets to the opera? Why not tell your friends about it!

With Web 2.0 and easy access to media to share our ideas; the business of influence is being democratised. But how do we measure our own and others' influence?

The interest in social influence has given rise to a host of social scoring applications that can measure and rate your influence; PeerIndex and Klout are two such applications. But these tools can be flawed and do not reflect a person's true influence which is measured in all sorts of intangible ways including their offline connections and how they treat people.

With everyone being online and everyone having a network of friends and followers, the concept of reach illustrating influence is now outdated.  In my opinion, you get influence by being credible and persuasive not by having thousands of followers. Size no longer matters. What matters is the quality of your connections.

With influence comes power and power brings responsibility (to misquote Spiderman!). When we are blogging, or Tweeting or sharing on Facebook, we should talk about and share content about something we really care about. When you consistently generate high quality content, you get followers anyway organically. There is too much noise on the web to justify anything less.

Listening is also a key component of influence. They more you respond effectively to your 'friends' the better you will influence them.

Lastly, do something that creates action – this is a mark of real influence.

[Image with thanks to Gustavo Pedrosa via Creative Commons]

A quick ‘Save the Date notice’ – to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day on Tuesday, 8 March I will be hosting a free event called Enabling Women at Happy, an award-winning social business in east London.

Watch this space for more details.