There is a very productive conversation underway (with lots of debate) about the measurement of distributed influence in Social Media. Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media added to the discussion this week. My comment on his post is quoted below. If you are interested, the discussion was started by Jonny Bentwood who introduced a concept called the Social Media Index. It widened the concept of influence beyond that of “only” blogs and its corresponding traditional measure of influence: links. He then published a whitepaper on distributed influence which Jim was responding to. If you like this discussion, you might also want to check out other thoughtful contributions on the subject from Kami Huyse, Jason Falls, Chris Newton, Clive Thompson.
My comment on Jim’s post:
Hey Jim,
You make excellent points. I think your point about context and topic is very central to this whole discussion. This is exactly how we approach influence at Radian6. Influence is context specific and topic specific, as you say. That is why our measurement of influence needs to be context-based (by topic) and not only personality-based. Now, there is a factor (let’s call it popularity instead of influence), where “by their nature” someone has a greater potential to become an on-topic influencer, but this potential does not make them an influencer (yet) until they become active in that topic and they begin to generate the conversational dynamics that demonstrate their influence (i.e. posts/memes, comments, unique commenter, on-topic links, engagement, etc.).
In terms of your proposed ideas, I would love to see this “white pages” directory materialize. There are several attempts underway (Spock, lifestreams/Tumblr, etc.), but none of them have tipped yet. In our monitoring tool, we already analyze contribution levels from multiple sources and measure topic/context-based influence down to a user level but each of your online personas would be identified and ranked independently. If we had such a directory, we could unify them in a snap. We are thinking through various ways extract these persona linkages, but a directory would be great, even if it was just a simple lookup.
Marcel LeBrun
CEO, Radian6
February 2nd, 2008 at 5:26 am
Marcel,
Good response. I left one as well. His Wite Pages idea is good, but lacking. Here’s what I said:
“It struck me as I was reading, and forgive me if I’ve misinterpreted, but your white pages idea is a striking one, but omits the important part of the equation. Social media influencers, or those influential in the space of social media, have little to do with the greater world around us. (i.e. Steve Rubel has little influence on the women’s shoe market.) We are just talking to ourselves wondering how the rest of the online world is behaving. Sure, you could catalog influencers in other areas, but how? They don’t care to be studied and quantified by us social media trade geeks. They just want to gnosh about who they saw a Spago (okay, lame 90s reference … my bad). Sure, studying the social media trade influencers might give you a sample of the rest of the world, but there’s a big, big Internet out there we are only a small portion of. Knowing how much influence Owyang, Rubel and Scoble have matters not to knowing how influence is spread.
“Find the people who are passionate about the topic in question. Give them the tools to spread the news. Viral will happen. Stop looking for the big dogs … they don’t run fast. Gather up a herd of chihuahuas and more people will hear the bark.”
February 4th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Thanks for the mention guys. You make good points (as does Jason in the comments).
What Plaxo is doing may be a step toward what I was suggesting, and may give the additional carrot that Jason correctly suggests is needed.
Check out: http://blog.plaxo.com/archives/2008/02/introducing_pub.html