The following is a Strumpette exclusive interview with social media guru, Chris Heuer, president of the Social Media Club. In it he suggests that the name "Social Media Press Release" may no longer be applicable.

NOTE: This interview was made possible by the New Media Release Workgroup and the tireless efforts of Shannon Whitley, Alison Minaglia, Andy Arnold, Dan Zarrella, David Weiner, David Parmet, Jason Ryan, Michael O'Connor Clarke, Paul Dyer, Paul Pritchard, Steve Kayser, Susan Watiker, and Todd Van Hoosear. Special thanks to Todd Defren for inventing the SMPR.

Also note, an mp4 of this video is available for download and can be viewed at Blip.tv.

Would you like to be manipulated? Would you like to be influenced, managed shrewdly or deviously, tampered with variously... and all for someone else’s gain? If yes, then you’re just who Edelman PR is looking for.

Yesterday, Edelman PR, the world's largest independent ambiguous marketing agency, leaked their master plan for online Web manipulation. Titled “Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media,” it claims to be a first step in adding method to the Web 2.0 madness. It sets out to: "1. Develop a metric, or set of metrics, that allows publishers to more accurately quantify their value as a medium such that they can attract more and higher quality and relevant advertising and sponsorship revenues; and 2. Provide advertisers and marketers a metric that helps them with a more scientific way to plan and measure the outcomes of their various campaigns." Scientific distributed manipulation! YIKES!

Anyway, as PRs are instinctually prone to do, the "whitepaper" (i.e. PR sales brochure) first sets out to spin the word “influence.” According to the paper, it could be defined in multiple ways such as: “It's a noun and a verb; It's an action and an outcome; It's credibility – having someone pay attention to you; It's personal and builds from the inside-out and the bottom-up, generally one person, or one personal network at a time; and It’s not a purely rational thing.”

With “influence” now otherwise redefined and emasculated, the paper then gets down to business. Here are a few key excerpts:

- The marketer’s Holy Grail of influence is the ability to recognize patterns and optimize outcomes.

- For someone to be influential, they will likely be either a meme starter or a meme spreader. That said, marketers face the continuing dilemma of how to gain the maximum impact for their investment. Understanding that there are very few meme starters or spreaders, the question is whether the most effective target would be the easily influenced as oppose to the few influencers.

- Influence is only influence when you reach a critical mass that inspires people to act.

- The more we know about an individual, the more it is possible to manipulate.

- Communicators who desire to build and measure influence need to think about the ethos of each venue, devise the right kinds of appropriate programs, and set up methodologies for measuring the impact of their efforts.

In other words, as an agent, the objective is to otherwise strategically, directly and measurably cause an individual or group to align with, and act out, a client's agenda.