It’s been an interesting few days in the world of social media measurement. While much of the focus over the last few years in online influence measures has been dedicated to link analysis in the blogosphere… some are starting to question this technique. Steve Rubel and team at Edelman have gone so far as to say, “The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead“.

Indeed, if your definition of the term “social media” is interchangeable with the word blogosphere, and counting links is primarily your influence calculation, then you’re missing many pieces of the puzzle.

The word ‘media’ by it’s very definition implies various forms; the ‘social media’ landscape certainly illustrates this. From social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, rich media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, traditional blogging and it’s A-listers, social voting sites like Digg and del.icio.us, to the emerging micro-blogging phenomenons like Twitter and Pounce, social media takes on a lot of forms, only some of which I’ve mentioned here. Regardless of what the service is or the form it takes, the common and recurring theme is that they are all enabling people to communicate (the media part) and engage (the social part).

Determining who is influential in the entire realm of social media can’t simply be determined by counting inbound links in the blogosphere alone. How can you measure anything great if you consider only a piece of what makes it great?

Even what makes someone influential (or, maybe what sort of influencer we are looking for) is being called into question. Duncan Watts, a researcher from Columbia University claims that how far a message will spread has less to do with how important an influencer’s listeners are (think Tipping Point), but more so, how easy those listeners are to influence and how many there are (the reach).

In other words, if we look to where the crowds are actively engaging content, we’ll likely find those elusive influencers. And sometimes, it’s not who you’d expect.

As Edelman has started to describe, any attempt at determining the influence a person holds needs to cast a net across the various channels into which that person injects their message. Further, it should be based on the same metrics that differentiate social media from simply media. Friends, votes, followers, bookmarks, downloads, favorites, engagement, views, comments, etc… oh, and links. It is these displayed ‘badges’ of honor and how they change over time that help us as individuals determine who we listen to.

This is what our customers have asked us for, and what we’re building at Radian6; it’s good to see others are seeing things as we do.