Scott Brinker blogged about propinquity and Twitter last week. I’d never heard the word propinquity before. However, propinquity seems to be a label for a familiar concept — the notion that physical promixity promotes relationships. My parents harped about that while I was a teen. Happily, Scott takes a different tack. He suggests that social media applications such as Twitter may wear down the effects of physical promixity in relationship dynamics. I wonder what kind of effect they will have on relationships with influencers. And how we will measure it.
Today, we use several criteria for measuring influence for our Influencer50 clients. Our metrics include factors such as an influencer’s
- market reach
- frequency of impact
- quality of impact
- closeness to decision
“Closeness to decision” is where propinquity comes into play. We include physical proximity and timing in this metric. So, we already think of closeness to a decision as a measure of more than physical distance.
It’s not hard to envision extending “closeness to decision” with new metrics focused on social media, mobile communications, or both.
Several companies already use Twitter as a way to engage with influencers and customer conversations online. Duncan has written about this development in The Influencer, our free newsletter.
One thing is clear. We haven’t gotten our collective heads around the implications of social media in terms of influence. We’re still caught up in early adopter personalities and tactics.
Sometime soon, we’ll need to stop counting social media links and echoes. We need to start agreeing on what counts as distance and what counts as closeness and what counts as influence.
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January 27th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Hi, Barbara — thanks for the mention of my post. Propinquity is one of those words that so rarely gets to be used in a sentence.
I think you’re right. The “noise” of early adopter social media effects is not necessarily predictive of the mainstream patterns of the future. Reminds me a bit of search engines in the pre-Google era, when ranking was based how many times you could repeat the same word over, and over, and over, and over again on the same page. It was many years before Google’s PageRank algorithm uncovered a much more true sense of page authority, by measuring incoming links from other authoritative sources.
Counting number of friends and number of tweets seems an artificial means of ranking social influence, albeit one that’s popularized these days. But I too will be very interested to see what real influencer ranking will emerge over time…
January 29th, 2009 at 7:14 am
Barbara’s application of Propinquity to also mean “Closeness to a decision” from a timing perspective is BANG ON!
If you can get to people during THE moment when they are most emotional about making a decision and influence them during this moment and IF do it before the competition your ability to influence them grows by a factor of 10X.
If you miss the magical window - called the Window of Dissatisfaction - then your ability to influence the decision maker drops SIGNIFICANTLY.
The secret is to know what are the events that trigger (Trigger Events) that put people into the Window of Dissatisfaction, and to have relationships with those ‘in the know’ when these ‘Trigger Events’ happen and to have them be part of your influencer team.
If you want to identify the best ‘Trigger Events’ for your product or service you can download the template and instructions at http://www.WonSalesAnalysis.com.
Feel free to call me if you have ANY questions about the Won Sales Analysis process, Trigger Events or the Window of Dissatisfaction.
Have an EVENTFUL week!
Craig Elias
Creator of Trigger Event Selling
Phone: +1.403.874.2998
Skype: Craig.Elias