A while ago I read Ross Mayfield's post on "Cost Per Influence" advertising and thought to myself "That feels important, but I don't get it." Something was missing, or, put another way, I was missing something. So I gave Ross a call last week and we hashed through it. What I realized during our talk was that the premise for how he got to the idea of CPI was, to my mind, far more interesting than CPI itself, at least in the near term.