Creative Commons, by Brian Hillegas
I’ve been thinking again. Last time, I tossed out the idea that measuring influence might be gleaned from Grunig and Hon’s work on measuring relationships. Usually, you need to get people to fill out a questionnaire to determine the quality of the relationship, but maybe looking at the public evidence is enough. Here are three of the six elements, with comment following about the potential for adapting to qualitative influence measurement:
Control Mutuality — The degree to which parties agree on who has the rightful power to influence one another. Although some imbalance is natural, stable relationships require that organizations and publics each have some control over the other.
Think about that in context of online influence – being “Facebook friends” might imply a mutual influence, but being friends with an organization if one’s not a customer or other stakeholder wouldn’t seem to greet the same implication.
Still, the idea that an organization would change its behavior as a consequence of interaction with its stakeholders is the essence of Grunig’s Excellence Theory (two-way, symmetrical communication.) Retweeting on Twitter, and a content analysis of the @reply sequence (actual conversations) might lead to an index by topic – it could demonstrate the extent of control mutuality as a surrogate for mutual influence. The question is whether there’s enough in the stream to properly analyze.
Trust – One party’s level of confidence in and willingness to open oneself to the other party. There are three dimensions to trust: integrity: the belief that an organization is fair and just … dependability: the belief that an organization will do what it says it will do … and, competence: the belief that an organization has the ability to do what it says it will do.
This, too, could be accomplished by content analysis, substituting individual for organization. Establishing the extent of trust could also indicate the opportunity for influential behavior, which could be apparent from the stream. We’d need to define the language trusted people use, but that doesn’t seem much different from a normal content analysis.
Satisfaction — The extent to which each party feels favorably toward the other because positive expectations about the relationship are reinforced. A satisfying relationship is one in which the benefits outweigh the costs.
This one’s tough – the nature of the relationship plays in to the analysis of satisfaction. Celebrities may make general comment about loving their fans, but is that a sincere platform for mutual satisfaction? Also, if the expectations are very low (as in celebrity culture, where the connection is, um, tenuous in reality but provides a simulation of a close relationship), does that negate the influence string? My putative 14 year-old son may get his hair in a Beiber, demand I buy Beiber music and Beiber-esq purple garments, but is that influence or a phase? Or merely effective marketing?
Next post: the remaining three elements.
