Sunday, August 8, 2010

Anti-Pied Piper: The Difficulty of Leading for the so-called Influencer

A discussion of the file-sharing utility 'Dropbox' reminds me of a nagging problem that is only slowly surfacing in my consciousness as an ongoing issue: the difficulty of "leading" people when you're supposed to be an "influencer."

It's wonderful to have friends, and followers, and club fellow members, and all the other relationships, but it can be disillusioning when you actually have a chance to test your influence over others, and get to see just how far it goes.

Or doesn't.

I subscribed to the Web file service Dropbox because it allowed me to send photos to an editor without worrying about file sizes. These days, even the simplest camera generates pictures that are two megabytes in size each, and attempting to email a dozen or so to friends and family can be a discouraging experience: Many people have emailboxes that fill up rapidly, and/or won't accept messages with more than a couple of megabytes in attachments.

But if you have someone you exchange pictures with regularly, if you both have Dropbox you can just drag as many files into a Dropbox folder, and after a while they can drag the same files out of their own Dropbox folder on their computers. It's easy, free, and painless.

Well, setting up a specific shared folder can be a little head-scratching, but it can be figured out eventually and only has to be done once for each correspondent.

Still, I have found it surprisingly hard to get my friends to set up on Dropbox. Even ones who download and install the software put off the folder sharing setup. And even those who have gotten that far can't necessarily be nagged into clearing out their folders of photos and videos and other documents you're sending them. I have two daughters and three other friends who have left their Dropbox folders sitting there with my offerings untouched for months. It's irritating.

Mainly because it underlines once again how little actual influence I have on the actions of others. I am a member of two winetasting groups, and organizer of one of them, with 30 members each. I used to do a wine-events newsletter to one of the groups, until after a year of piecing together the newsletters each month I finally realized that nobody was using the information. They were reading it, and often commenting on how they enjoyed it -- but nobody went to any of the  local events I listed! OK, once -- one couple came to an event, once.

Some Pied Piper I am!

When my consumer Web startup went into beta testing, I invited the same wine group members to sign up, to see if our site's group and events features would do a good job of organizing our monthly wine parties. Half a dozen signed up; the other two dozen didn't even respond. And I see these people every month at the wine event! I post wine tasting notes to my blog and manage to get only a small handful of my 400 Twitter followers to click on the link and go read a posting! Only three of the wine club members Follow the wine blog directly!

Our site will be launching in a week, and I worry that I won't be able to lure more than a small, guilt-ridden handful of my many friends will go to the trouble, despite my determined nagging, of visiting the site and considering signing up. 

Biblical quotes about voices crying in the desert arise unbidden as I consider my  status as the non-Pied Piper of my circle of friends.... Most discouraging.

 Mac McCarthy
Editorial Director

No comments: