Rally's Dave Rogal is giving Social Media Insider Summit attendees a great tutorial on what "influence" and "influencers" are? Sure, we all think we understand that – implicitly – but he's
making it fairly explicit.
And as an industry currency, or at least a denominator, he says that "influence is the new engagement."
By that, Rogal means that the concept of influence
has picked up where the long-waged industry debate around "engagement" left off.
Rogal noted that a few years back, when he was on the publisher side, he spent much of his time developing
"indices" to explain the engagement of his media properties with the target audiences of various categories and advertisers he was selling to.
"We never really settled on one official
definition for engagement, but that's not a bad thing," he said. "It actually created a lot of flexibility of tailoring engagement for what the specific business objective is."
So where do we
stand with influence? Well, according to Rogal, it's still a work in progress.
"As an industry, we're really struggling with what influence is. We know what it is not," he said.