The 6 Degrees of Online Influence

There are so many articles about how to influence your audience. This article will talk about six degrees of how you may be influenced by consuming online content.

Let us look at each one of them below.

1. Ignorant: This is when you lack awareness of the topic of the article. As Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford University, author of “Knowing Doing Gap”) put it nicely – “You need to be reasonably competent to know your level of incompetence on a topic.” If you are unaware of what’s happening on the topic or related areas, the article may not make much sense. The effectiveness here is negative as you invested time and energy to read the article creating an opportunity cost.
2. Informed Bystander: You are a news junkie and a curious cat. You love to devour content related to your space but have no plans of using it anywhere. You wait for the right moment to put this into practice or wait to get “all the details” so that you can take the “right” action. The effectiveness is zero as “knowledge without application” is not worth much.
3. Interpreted Right: You are not only informed but you know exactly how this applies to your situation – be it in your personal life or your professional life. You understand the relevance and apply it every now and then. Most often, this learning won’t go to your background – meaning you will apply this learning when it’s fresh in your mind.
   A good example is to watch people who attend motivational seminars. In the first two weeks, they will do a LOT of new things from the “hangover” of the motivational seminar and after those two weeks, they won’t even remember what they learned.
4. Influenced Actor: You take the learning to the next level and make the most of the learning. You are clearly influenced by what you learn and you probably are considered a “sneezer” ( refer: The Idea Virus by Seth Godin for more on sneezers) and voluntarily spread the lessons and the learning.
5. Inspired Actor: You are inspired by the learning that you take on yourself to go and look for more learning on the same topic. You also apply what you learn so well that you are an example of what someone “could become” when they learn and apply. This is probably where you get the maximum effectiveness from your learning.
6. Insanely Obsessed: This is where you go nuts with what you are learning and rather than using what you have already learned, you start focusing on learning and getting others to learn. You are fascinated by the topic, you talk about it and enroll others to get excited but don’t do anything to apply it. You are, basically insanely obsessed with either what you learned or from whom you learned and sort of “lost in learning.”

There are so many good lessons out there in the world. I hope you take your learning seriously and become “inspired actors” to take your game to the next level.

About the Author: Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. Rajesh maintains a blog at Life Beyond Code. You can also find him on Twitter at @UpbeatNow.