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= Digital Influence = Digital Influence is the potential to create an effect in indirect or intangible ways, develop ideas and behaviours, and achieve quantifiable outcomes online.

Overview
Digital influence is mainly a phenomena of social networking. Nowadays users are constantly bombarded with noise that sometimes can be mistaken by information resulting in a lack of individual judgement and an abundance of group judgment or and individual judgment based on a group judgement made by other online users. When an individual is pondering to buy a new product, his or her first reaction is to get friends opinions, search for online reviews, read online comments made by digital influencers, in order to arrive to their final decision. Digital influence is the outcome of three considerations.


 * Reach: How far will the information go across the social spectrum. More accessible or popular topics will travel farther then unliked ones. This should be seen as a wave of a tsunami – the bigger it is the farther it will go.
 * Relevance: It is important to create information that correspondents with what individuals want to see, what is trending. This is a very time sensitive matter as what is relevant to someone today might not be relevant for them in a matter of days due to external circumstances.
 * Resonance: The continuing and spreading results of an event or action, also known as a ripple effect. This will determine how long a conversation on a matter will last as well as how many people feel engaged enough to express their opinions on the matter.

These three conceptual cornerstones must be kept in order to describe digital influence even though it is not enough. A true digital influence should, as a mission, contribute to some sort of change or effect on social networking users.

The Importance of Digital Influence
Going back to basics is the best place to start when defining a strategy. Some on the most frequently asked questions that should be taken into consideration are: ‘What is influence, and what makes someone influential?’, ‘Who is influential in social networks and why?’, ‘How can I recognise influence or the capacity to influence?’, ‘What effect does digital word of mouth have on my business?’, ‘How can I measure successful engagement with influential consumers?’. With the help of these emerging social media influence services, even businesses with a restricted amount of money and time can finally shape and steer positive conversations resulting in desired outcomes. This will be vital for businesses to promote themselves by expanding their reach within budget.

How Social Capital Becomes Influence
The Pillars of Influence (People, Interests and Options) contribute to social capital, which will show the probability to influence behaviour, but a score does not predict or translate the resulting actions or outcomes. Scores can only be a measure of social capital as it only represents the capacity to influence without having into considerations other variable, defined by the Pillars of Influence. Influence can only increase due to social capital. When an individual holds a certain position within each network it can directly affect behaviour or, on the hander hand, cause an effect.

The Business of Influence (250w by Camilla De Luca)
Until 2012, online creators that built their fame via video, blogging and interactions with their audience, did not generate any profit from the numbers of views, interactions and in general from their popularity. After 2012, some strategy experts started recognising the potential for these online personalities' influence to be transformed into revenue. This 'first wave of influencer managers' took care of leveraging influencers' stories to obtain brands sponsorships. A later second wave emerged instead from already exisiting talent-seeker companies that applied the same strategies they used in celebrity and modelling campaigns, meaning they imposed strict instructions and paramaters, ignoring the creative freedom online creators were accostumed to. This resulted in failed or not very successful campaigns, that the public perceived as inauthentic. It became clear that audiences were attentive to the level of authenticity involved in the promotion of a brand or product. Brands on the other hand leverage the close relationship influencers have with their following and gain more value for money since influencers take on the creation of the content.

Another issue consisted in the difficulty to connect brands with influencers, so platforms were created where brands can be matched with influencers to partner with - such as YouTube's marketplace FameBit.

There is no standardised monetisation model for digital influencers. Revenue is calculated via data analysis on platforms such as Launchmetrics that provides insight into luxury brands' ROI. Brands are increasingly turning to influencer marketing as a form of established online marketing, with market speculations saying that brands are set to spend $15 billion on Influencer Marketing by 2022.

= Social capital = Social capital is the membership in a group. It is defined by the collection of actual or potential resources that allow an individual to have a solid network of relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition. This allows an individual to acquire and share a set of values that not only allows them, but the people within their surroundings, to work together in order to achieve a common purpose and, that way, make society function as effectively as possible.The extent of social capital an individual has depends on the number of connections they possess, how effectively can they make those connections and on the volume of capital they have, let that be economic, cultural or symbolic. Social capital is never completely independent of the set of agents due to the fact that the exchanges to get mutual acknowledgement going, require the reacknowledgment of a minimum of objectives that need to have the same standards, and because it exerts a multiplier effect on the capital he possesses in his own right. To simply put it, the network of relationships corresponds to the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously targeted at establishing or reproducing social relationships that can be directly used in the short or long term, that is, at transforming quotidian relations such as those of neighbourhood, the workplace, or even family relationships, these often imply long-term obligations that are subjectively felt (feelings of gratitude, respect, friendship, etc) or institutionally guaranteed, i.e., rights.

The reproduction of social capital entails an endless effort of sociability, a never-ending sequence of exchanges in which acceptance is constantly confirmed and reaffirmed. This work, which requires time and energy and therefore, directly or indirectly, financial resources, is not profitable or even conceivable unless one invests in it a specific competence (knowledge of genealogical relationships and actual connections, and ability in using them and so on), and an acquired willingness to acquire and keeping this competence, both of which are essential components of this capital. This is one of the reasons why the profitability of the labour of accumulating and retaining social capital increases in direct proportion to the size of the capital.

= Reputation = Reputation is a variable, unpredictable and personal characteristic made up entirely by the perception, observation and acceptance of others. Building a reputation is an on-going process of building an image and managing the perception people have of something, therefore, it is never constant and definite. Historically, reputation has been known to be the reflection of one’s qualities, work or achievements. Today, the possession of reputation as little to zero connection with a person’s work or accomplishments. It is determined by the effectiveness of attention-getting skills a person has. Reputation can be achieved through various ways, such as expressing feelings and sharing opinions online. Digital reputation is the representation of a person’s affective bonds, their social impact and their digital activity. Before the digital age, knowing the full extent of a person’s social relationships was impossible. Now, with platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, a new ‘protocol’ for social relations has been created. Social media allows people to make their connections ever-expandable, more durable and shared publicly. It also allows individuals to see the number of relationships a person has and assess what is the nature of those relationships as well as their affective quality. Digital reputation is built on the basis that what used to be private is now public and defining of a person’s reputation. The rise of public display of emotion and affect has been proven to be linked to monetary value, an example would be reality shows. Reality shows make the emergence of something called ‘General Sentiment’, termed by Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen. Benkler and Bauwens, defend that this change in social relations changes the nature of capitalism, centring it in socialised production, immaterial labour and social capital. Alongside General Intellect, the gathered knowledge of all individual, digital reputation is becoming the new ‘standard value’, directly becoming a component to capitalist production.

Online Reputation Management (250w by Camilla De Luca)
Everyone’s digital footprint generates material that can affect their online reputation. Using a search engine to search the name of an individual or a brand/company is a way to discover the online conversations that are occurring around the subject. In recent years there has been a surge in online reputation management – also called ORM – companies which provide services to individuals and brands to control their online reputation by concealing negative trends and highlighting quality elements that are beneficial to the person/brand perception. Examples of negative content include gossip, scandals, bad reviews of a service or product, social media content that causes a backlash, fake news. Hackers can infiltrate malicious material into social media platforms or use a brand's name to scam customers.

Reputation management specialists cannot erase content because of legal obligations, but they can promote the positive content so that it ranks in the first pages of a search. Google also advises its users to change sharing settings on social media platforms in order to restrict the audience that can view certain content and to choose websites that allow to modify privacy settings. Reputation management involves these activities: monitoring, hiding content, customer claim management and crisis communication management in the extreme cases.

Studies have shown the importance of controlling one's online reputation for professional reasons. A survey from CareerBuilder UK resulted in 53% of employers saying they include social media screening in their recruitment processes and 43% of employers saying they rejected applicants based on what they found about them online.

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