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Influence Games

I love fake money - The Anti-Social MediaThe other day someone invested in me on Empire Avenue. If you have sold off your shares yet, I’m sorry I don’t care enough about building my influence to help a stranger succeed in an online game.

Someone else used Klout’s +K button to declare I am an influencer in social media. I’m glad I’m recognized as the crazed cartoonist I am, but influential? I worry about that.

These games have no real bearing on influence, which can only be measured by the actions that people take based on the words and actions of another. So if I tell everyone to  jump off a cliff, and no one does it, it doesn’t matter how many times you give me  a +K in cliff jumping. I’m not influential that way.

Don’t worry about playing some mad game for influence or trying to mindlessly push a button. These don’t build influence. Your relationships with the people behind the avatars are what will get you ahead, not meaningless virtual currency.

Now excuse me while I go play World of Warcraft to earn some serious gold to pay off some newbies.

3 Responses to Influence Games

  1. Brent June 28, 2011 at 1:12 pm #

    “Your relationships with the people behind the avatars are what will get you ahead” pretty much is spot on. The only point I wanted to make is what influence leads to, which is the bigger picture -LOS LINKS!

    Keep in mind that content and link farming is big big money. The more influentual bloggers are obviously going to get a bigger share of the ad network, right?

    How much can the spam industry make by spamming search engines with links from those graded by peers as influential? Remember that the engines are looking for many factors but one is definitely relevance to topic as defined by a category

    Lets do the math:
    Assume 500M searches/day on web about F*%K You Friday
    (all search engines combined)
    Assume 5% commercially viable
    (much more if you include porn queries)
    Assume $0.50 made per click (from 5c to $40)
    -12.5M/day or about $4.5 Billion/year.

    Obviously the above is just a scenario, but hope it contributes positively to what you are saying in a way most may not have thought about.
    .

    • Jay June 28, 2011 at 3:34 pm #

      Thank goodness I have the market cornered on F%*k you Friday!

      Now, where are my billions again?

  2. Camilo Olea June 28, 2011 at 3:20 pm #

    “Your relationships with the people behind the avatars are what will get you ahead”

    And thats why I declare myself your humble servant, good sir. I hope someday you’ll make me ruler of a little piece of the interwebs.