Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

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Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Rob Strobel — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:41:54 -0000

Hi Micah

Great post man. I would totally agree that social media can have a massive influence in either a good or bad way on a whole range to things. I have recently written about what I consider some of the negative effects of Social Media on our daily lives, and how easily we can become "addicted" and give it an unparalleled place in our lives in terms of time and effect. My post can be found at http://robert-strobel.com Have a look and let me know what you think. I'd appreciate your feed back.
Thanks
:o)

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

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Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

tippingptmedia — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:15:36 -0000

The element of trust is not unique to Social Media, but I believe that the wise person realizes that not everyone is who they seem when they meet on Social Media. When you have face to face meetings, one can use body language as a way of gauging the speaker's sincerity. This is more difficult using social media. Using the tools mentioned above are ways to establish longevity, expertise and knowledge of the person, but you need to have interaction to better gauge sincerity and trust.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

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Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Brad — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:08:14 -0000

influence - nice - great article - thank you - exponential snowball effect is where it is at....

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Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

dijkstra — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:47:51 -0000

If you want to have influence on somebody, they firstly must know who is behind the nick!

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Celeste — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:32:16 -0000

Agreed. Just because you have a big mouth does not mean people are listening to you.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

zionaetzion — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:19:24 -0000

I think influence, at an emotional level, is governed by the atmosphere that you create around you.

It is your integrity, your style of communication, your ability to listen to the opinions of others (even diverse ones) and your ability to know how to respond.

@Nick DiGiacomo Interesting analysis

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Dave Forde — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:37:01 -0000

A few months ago we sought out to fine the most influential Canadians in social media, here's the list that we found - www.profectio.com/most-infl...
Depending on what a person is influential in makes a difference what tools can be used to measure.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Nick DiGiacomo — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:31:44 -0000

It's quite true that "people who are truly influential become conduits for human based filtering and content discovery within their communities..." And when blogs were fewer and the online crowd smaller, you could depend on those few strong voices to tell you who - or what - to trust.

But the scale and complexity of online interaction has overwhelmed the ability of any person - or group of people - to digest and process what goes on in individual online communities (e.g. Facebook or Twitter), let alone across the entire web and blogsphere. To measure influence online, you have to process not only original facts (news reports), but blogs (opinions) and comments and votes (opinions about opinions). And you can't just measure it at a moment in time - you have to track the ebb and flow (e.g. reposting and re-tweeting) to get a true sense of what's important and what isn't.

So - to accurately measure influence online, you have to collect the information from the communities (including the individual influencers), and then process it using some serious science. Not simple arithmetic or even standard statistics, but the kind of science that's used to filter spam and to detect fraud. If you can pull it off, you can detect trends and patterns (signals in the noise) that no single individual - or influencer - can.

We've been trying to do this for company reputations - marry an active online community with a processing engine that can take in the ebb and flow of stories, votes and comments about how companies treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, and spit out quantitative scores and rankings - and then find hidden patterns of influence.

If you're interested, check out the site: http://www.vanno.com/ . And you can read about some of the influential patterns we've been able to uncover here: http://blog.vanno.com/index...

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Rational νεόφυτος — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:31:36 -0000

My site's influence is great amongst the spambots...

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Theodor (@skipet) tollefsen — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:38:48 -0000

This is a good example of a post where the comments are as (if not more) meaningful than the post itself. I totally agree with many of the comments who highlight that measuring influence is a bit more complicated.

In my experience clients to a larger extent question influence when its measured in traffic related numbers. It doesn't matter how much traffic or activity time one is able to generate if it doesn't lead to an increase in sales, OR gives the client added value to their brand so they can charge a larger premium because of differentiation.

In my opinion the sole focus on traffic related numbers from internet marketers an PR, often will come around an bite them in the tail...

At the end of the day: influence (at least from my perspective) boils down to the ability to convince (directly or indirectly) someone to purchase/pay a premium/join/have an opinion about.

The act of making someone look at something is not influence in my book.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Leslie Poston — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:11:53 -0000

Micah never fails to educate me - definitely one of my go-to brains online :) Thanks for a thought provoking post and a new twist on considering influence.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Rob Domanski — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:30:27 -0000

Great article. What is really boils down to is finding metrics that analyze both the quantity and quality of one's influential reach in cybespace...

http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-to-measure-online-influence.html

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Simon Fairbairn — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:16:34 -0000

If I remember rightly (it's been a while since I did any real math)

One trust = pi x expectation + (respect * hope) / hate * sqr rt of jealousy.

Therefore

Influence = (Personal Brand * Knowledge * (pi x expectation + (respect * hope) / hate * sqrt jealousy)^2)

I'm a little rusty, so correct me if you see anything wrong here.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Micah Baldwin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:28:46 -0000

Tim, sure - except trust equals predictability of ACTION not reaction. You will always do what I expect you to do when I feed you specific information or stimulus. I can trust babies to always poop their diapers after a big meal. They have no knowledge/expertise....right?

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

StevePole — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:22:25 -0000

"Now that we have defined Influence mathematically" -sorry micah, but you've done anything but define influence mathematically. The very fact that your equation contains "trust^2" is laughable, you fail to explain the numeric value of one "trust", so how on earth would I square it!?

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Phil Ryan — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:41:25 -0000

The article shows there are a number of ways of measuring influence and in part some of that measurement is based on subjective views. And there lies the problem, until there is a standard measurement you can’t compare like for like and really begin to analyze the bigger picture. We are currently developing a tool that will hopefully give users a way of applying the same criteria over time to build up a more accurate summary of how influential online media is and who they should be targeting.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

marta — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:20:06 -0000

Hi Micah
I would add that influencing is a rather complex process with many uncontrollable factors, we can try through controllable factors though (i.e Twitter)

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Engago team — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:49:27 -0000

Great we have several posts rating 7 and even 8 on PostRank.
Why do we rank so low on Technorati?(Authority 14 - ranking 450,000)
Seems different measurement systems.
Of course we prefer PostRank.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

swag — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:56:56 -0000

Isn't some of this a bit self-contradictory? You go to lengths to spell out for influence: "can someone’s words (and/or video) make you think or do something?” And then you back off by itemizing a number of heuristics based on links, trust, track record, etc.

With regard to actual influence, most of those heuristics are irrelevant. Just as in physics where Work = Force * Distance, you can apply all the force in the world, but if your object doesn't budge it's all for naught. So what if you have 25k Twitter followers, 5k RSS feed readers, 10 years of experience posting in an online community, and all the trust in the universe. If you cannot influence a single person to alter their behavior in a specific constructive way, you've failed. You've merely achieved being someone everyone knows or likes to talk about, but has no relevance to their lives -- a sort of online Paris Hilton.

Furthermore, trust isn't everything either. Influence doesn't flow exclusively in the positive direction.

I think you approach something that could come close to approximating the potential for influence. But your heuristics really need to take things a step further to measure actual online influence. For example, Amazon.com is not going to care about my self-proclaimed "online influence" just because I've posted 5000 product reviews -- unless we can trace that I've been able to convert a non-purchaser into a purchaser or influenced a buyer's decision in a specific way.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

TimothyJ — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:50:36 -0000

I agree with apowerpoint here. You have to delve further into what trust means in order to better quantify influence. Trust equal predictability of reaction. Trust is then built up by both interaction and authority (knowledge). Once an author is able to demonstrate authority by repeatedly posting on a topic and getting favorable response from others who have also demonstrated authority on the topic then influence is a graph analysis of an individual's influence and the influence of those influenced.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

apowerpoint — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:30:44 -0000

Agree that trust relates to expectation; trying to understand how that expectation is formed creates the basis for implementing programs. Trust is the result of a sequence of helpful events over a period of time that help make a decision. Therefore marketers need to be in this for the long term.

Re: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Micah Baldwin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:28:05 -0000

Don, great points. The mathematical formula is really just an explanation of the components of influence and how they interact with one another. Brand, Trust and Expertise are the only components of influence. In addition the squaring of trust is important because trust is the single largest influencer on influence. If you dont trust someone, they have little to no influence.

Yet, each measure is subjective and individual, which circles back to the concept that influence is truly a 1:1 activity.

The individual metrics are measurable. If one were to believe that those are the metrics that influence is comprised of. In that case, each is measurable, and therefore you could come up with an influence scoring mechanism that could provide insight into whether a particular person was (or was not) influential online.