THE COMMUNICATION OF INFLUENCE: A NECESSITY

Three factors make the communication of influence a necessity:

1. The press is in difficulty with a continuous decrease of the number of journalists, the end of media investigation and a sourcing of information that is largely influenced by social media.
2. The discredit of the political and scientific voice: impact of scandals, development of scientific controversies and rumours.
3. Propagation rules on social networks based on emotion resulting in a misrepresentation of facts et thus disinformation by the media. 

Any public or private organization relies on communication to reinforce its capacity and influence strategy. The communication of influence uses:

- press relations for valorization' actions engaged with journalists 

- lobbying for influence actions based on political, economic and technical arguments and press campaigns.

In the end, the objective sought is to weigh on the public opinion, to generate adhesion, acceptance, mobilization or impact on a legislative, regulatory or normative text proposal.

Two components are essential for an effective communication of influence:

1. monitoring and economic intelligence on the web
2. action in the field and on the web

• Regarding web monitoring: Knowing expectations, opinions about the enterprise, arguments to be deployed to influence.
• Regarding web sites : Becoming oneself a media
• Regarding social networks: Circumventing the intermediaries of one's market (distributors, journalists) to directly federate the publics and trigger mobilizations.

How to build an influence strategy

1. Mapping the web environment: Identifying targets to convince and federate, understanding relations and influence games between the actors.
2. Prioritizing targets: Opponents, Supporters, Allies and Undecided
3. Understanding the paths of influence: the path followed by an internaut on the web, his/her exposition to multiple influences (google, information sites, forum, blgs, organization's websites, social networks, institutional websies), the orientation of his/her perception et his/her decision about a product, a service or a brand.

Conclusions

If new tools provide organizations the opportunity to directly influence public opinion and not through the different political, media powers, conversely public opinion has taken advantage of these tools to bend organizations. Therefore it is important for organizations to know the phenomenand and the influence mechanisms to prepare for it. They also ùust be able to define their targets and thus build an influence strategy.