Online influence – here comes Google
Via John Bell, I stumbled across an interesting post by Heather Green at Business Week on Google’s imminent method for ranking influencers. I shudder at the impact this will have on discussion of influence. We’ll end up comparing influencers based on the number of times they appear on a search result or, worse, whether they appear in the first ten returned results.
As John notes, influence is complex and context-specific. The specifics of influence are such that one might be a world expert in a given subject (Scotch whisky, web site development) but have very little authority in an adjacent area (cognac, web site design).
A feature (flaw?) in measuring influence is that you can only measure what you can measure. Google can only measure what it is aware of, which is the frequency and connectivity of web pages. It cannot determine (as far as I know) the impact that reading a particular page has on the subsequent actions of that reader. Did the reader make a purchase decision based on the content of the page, or rush off to sell their stock in RBS? Who knows.
Connectivity – the number of connections an individual has – is a poor proxy for influence. Why? It’s too easy to fake. We all know the people that have 500+ connections on LinkedIn, yet have very limited influence. Likewise with MySpace. The term for people with lots of connections but no influence is Bore.
The longer term, and greater, threat from Google is that influencers are considered a route to market for advertisers. We’ve already seen this sort of thing emerging from Buzzlogic – Google will be able to do this magnified a zillion times.
If Google’s plans get more firms to talk about influence, then fine. But I fear that it will dumb influence down to a few ‘magic’ numbers that have tenuous relevance to real influence.
As John notes, influence is complex and context-specific. The specifics of influence are such that one might be a world expert in a given subject (Scotch whisky, web site development) but have very little authority in an adjacent area (cognac, web site design).
A feature (flaw?) in measuring influence is that you can only measure what you can measure. Google can only measure what it is aware of, which is the frequency and connectivity of web pages. It cannot determine (as far as I know) the impact that reading a particular page has on the subsequent actions of that reader. Did the reader make a purchase decision based on the content of the page, or rush off to sell their stock in RBS? Who knows.
Connectivity – the number of connections an individual has – is a poor proxy for influence. Why? It’s too easy to fake. We all know the people that have 500+ connections on LinkedIn, yet have very limited influence. Likewise with MySpace. The term for people with lots of connections but no influence is Bore.
The longer term, and greater, threat from Google is that influencers are considered a route to market for advertisers. We’ve already seen this sort of thing emerging from Buzzlogic – Google will be able to do this magnified a zillion times.
If Google’s plans get more firms to talk about influence, then fine. But I fear that it will dumb influence down to a few ‘magic’ numbers that have tenuous relevance to real influence.
posted by Duncan Brown at 10:17 am
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