We all love the topic of influence and authority. Its the primary reason any top 10 list exists. There are inherently many pitfalls in measuring and ranking any person’s authority online or offline. The questions that come up:

1. What parameters do you take into measuring authority? – for e.g. a few include: #twitter followers, # of re tweets, # blog readers, # of saved items on delicious? All of the above in some combination?

2. What about influential people that dont have a significant online presence? E.g. I know the Chief Mentor of Infosys Narayan Murthy has not a very big online presence, but every time he says something over 2 million people listen to him. How do we track that?

3. How much weight to you give to the various sources of influence – main stream news vs. blogs vs. twitter vs. any other social network.

We ran an interesting experiment with BuzzGain over the last few weeks. Friend and all around nice guy Chris Brogan was tracked against Indian prime minister candidate L. K. Advani. Here are the results.

1. In overall mentions, Chris is holding fort and in many cases getting talked about a lot more online than L K Advani. This is awesome for Chris, since over a billion people in India know L K Advani, and a lot fewer know Chris. But online, Chris is King.

2. Sentiment for Chris and L K Advani is mostly similar, mostly positive and some negative, but its trending in similar directions.

3. Main stream media news is where L K Advani beats Chris in mentions. Which is expected since the # of news outlets covering the elections in India is far greater than the # of bloggers writing about Chris and social media.

4. In the blogosphere, the exact opposite metrics hold true obviously, since the # of bloggers in the US far outweighs the # in India.

5. Finally there’s a reason he’s called the Mayor of Twitterville. Chris just overwhelms L K Advani in terms of mentions and retweets on Twitter.

This leads us to a new set of questions:

1. How much more influential is Chris than Mr. Advani online?

2. Should we start to leverage circulation numbers for main stream media (offline viewership) to account for their reach when fewer than 10% of users are on the Internet (as in the case with India)?

3. What would you like us to compare next?

Drop me a note or leave a comment and we’ll explore that next in a future post.

First: what’s changed about the interview process now?

1. 1. Your competition is the decision to not hire even though for each position there are 2-3 times more the # of candidates.

2. 2. Time lines are stretched: In most companies now the CEO has the final approval on opening new requisitions or approve new hires. In normal circumstances it would take 2 weeks to get anything signed by the CEO (trust me, I’ve been there), but now it takes 4-6 weeks.

3. 3. You are meeting / interviewing with lot more people (3-4 before vs. 6-8 now). The dynamics of the interview change with the increasing number of opinions and stakeholders.

So how do you need to adapt to get hired?

1.  Network twice as much: Look for specific industries that are growing: Green Technology, Repossession firms, Property Management companies. Within industries look for companies that are doing well in a down sector: E.g. Data center consolidation (Virtualization).

Using LinkedIn you can see new hires and promotions within a company. Usually a promotion carries with it some head count or new responsibilities that might be best for a contractor or free lancer. Target those individuals first, so you can get a leg up before your interview.

2. 2. Research about the individual you are going to interview with before: Most recruiters will be able to tell you who’s going to interview you. Else hit Linkedin or Xing and get the list of all the employees in the position that you believe is relevant for you so you can better understand who’s going to interview you. With the exploding # of users on Facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. you are bound to find more details about that person, their background, school, college. It’s a great way to break ice quickly and gives you more time to discuss what’s unique about you and how you fit the role.

3. 3. Come prepared with a point of view on the position (90 day plan): To put the person at ease that you can “hit the ground running”, spend some time to think about what are you going to do in the first 90 days. Put it in writing. A simple month by month with max of 3 bullets per month should suffice. It need not get too specific, but during your interview it gives you points to discuss.

4. 4. Provide an active leave behind which can be distributed easily via email: Your 90 day plan might be one. Some analysis on a competitormight be another. A list of relevant blogs they should be reading on the industry might be 3^rd. A landscape of the market or relevant news with your color commentary on how it affects that company might be 4^th. This makes it easy for you to be on their mind even after the interview and helps the discussion around candidates on a more tangible deliverable.

5/ 5. Be thoughtful in your follow up: The usual thank you for the email won’t suffice. That’s table stakes. Now you need to ensure that you ask questions during the interview that can lead to a more thoughtful follow up. You have more time to think about the questions, so leave an email to the individual with a more detailed response and ask 1-2 questions you missed during your interview.

The basic rules of the interview have not changed during the downturn; it’s just that changing dynamics means you need to change your strategy and correspondingly your tactics to respond better.

What do you think? How have you adapted your interview techniques during the downturn?

1. NYtimes: Magazine sport fewer ad pages this January than usual.

January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages. But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.

2. John Bell: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Pro of the Future

Marketing and public relations are coming together. PR is growing as an industry while “traditional” advertising – what ever that is – remains flat. Still, we have taken no new ground in ‘measurement’ and articulating the tremendous ROI of P

Its a well understood maxim that technology companies are the “early adopters” of most things new in technology. Used to be financial services and telecommunications were the flag bearers, but if you were developing any kind of software the first companies you’d go and knock on the door of were in New York or Silicon Valley. I started to analyze twitter in this same regard.  Who were the early adopters of Twitter from a corporate perspective (ignoring individual users for this discussion) and why were they adopting twitter.

SocialBrandIndex is one such directory of companies on twitter. So is Twellow. There are several uses of twitter from a corporate perspective. The biggest number (431) of companies that have a “presence” on twitter are media companies – this includes online media, newspapers, large blog networks and TV networks & movie studios. We track about 1900 companies (of which I think about 800 are fake or “hijacked” accounts on twitter.

The question I started out to answer was since twitter is such a social (as in people are needed to be social) site -

“Is it better for an individual to represent a company than for a company to have its profile as a iconed entity?”

What that means is that is would you rather have your questions answered by Mahalo OR by Jason? Its hard to disassociate a prominent individual from a company from the brand. At the same time, Lionel as your point person for all DELL is better than any DELL support is it not?

One of the main drivers for companies to adopt social media I think is to ensure that they show up as a company with real people instead of a faceless organization or “corporation”. Should they have not learned from the several bypass IVR cheat sheets on the web that customers want to talk to a real person?

What do you think? Would your rather follow someone that’s a real person or Comcast Cares even if you know there’s someone there to help?

A quick comparison of their circulation, unique visitors, online revenue and editorial staff is below. The interesting question raised by 247Wall Street is when do these publication die? Their models seem doomed if you consider cost of printing, editorial payroll costs and the steep decline in advertising.

Leaving aside whether they survive for a minute, lets focus on how you as a business can get a mention or get written up in these publications.

1. Pick the right reporter based on topic of interest: Notice the editorial staff on each of these publications. You can use BuzzGain to get the exact writer / reporter / journalist to cover your story or you can go to their editorial pages and get the entire editorial staff and contact them directly. The important thing is there are over 200 to 400+ reporters on staff. Just because they are a business magazine does not mean everyone cares about startups in the Web 2.0 space.

2. Focus on obtaining an online mention versus a print mention: Clearly the total circulation of these publications is individually about a million and readership about 2-3 million. Compare that to the total number of unique visitors on a monthly basis which is anywhere between 3-5 million. Why is this important? An online mention is more easily actionable – they can search and visit your website. In addition if the article provides a link to your website your chances of Search Engine Optimization improves.

3. Learn more about the reporters past writing style, story angle and suggest follow up pieces to previously written articles. The total number of links to articles written by other writers in this publication compared to the number of outgoing links is very high. This means most business reporters are linking to their own pieces instead of referring to other blogs, web sources. The more you can “link” stories they have previously written about to the story you are trying to pitch them, the better chance you have of getting your story written.

What’s worked for you with business press? Have you got a mention? What tip would you suggest?