how to make friends, influence people

Well it turns that the answer to being popular is to, er, be popular to begin with. This study of how reputations develop in business school shows that no matter how much co-operative behaviour a student displays, they'll never catch up with those who had a good reputation to begin with. Here's the key point:

It turns out that your reputation for cooperativeness is only affected by your behavior if you're already popular. If you're not popular, it appears that no one takes notice of your behavior, so it has no impact on your reputation. People with lots of social connections can build a good reputation -- or a bad one -- with much more ease than people with few social connections.