Measuring the influence of social media users

You may have detected from this blog that I’m less than convinced by the hype over Web 2.o and it’s impact on influence. Certainly, from our research work for clients, blogs rarely feature as a key influencer.

Part of my problem is that the degree of influence is asserted, measured by the number of links or some other dubious metric. So I’m intrigued by an emerging method of determining the influence of blogs and other social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn. Hat tip to James Governor who linked to David Brain’s sixtysecondview blog. David runs Edelman PR in the UK, but otherwise seems a good chap…

David’s idea is to measure not only the links that one gets on a blog, but also the links on LinkedIn, friends in FaceBook, Twitter friends, Flickr photo uploads, Diggs and other social media activities. The concept is premised on the trend for people to have more than one social tool in use. Sheesh – I can barely keep up with blogging.

I can’t help thinking that for all its diligence in tracking the various media it’s still measuring links, and links don’t necessarily imply influence. My beef with the links=influence assertion is that it’s easy to fake links, and that links are only a measure of one dimension of influence – connectedness. There are other dimensions, such as expertise, that are much harder to measure. And what about the value of particular connections? Connections are not equal – I know who matters more to me in my LinkedIn network.

But David’s composite score does help because it evens out some of the biases that would be present in just one social tool. By measuring half a dozen or so, an average score emerges.

What I find worrying is that in order to demonstrate and exert influence through social media one has to use multiple formats. I could spend all my time doing just that, but I have a proper job as well. Those that have time to keep up with the social media demands of influence run the risk of ignoring the other dimensions of influence. Plus the most important risk of all, which is forgetting who, why and how they are trying to influence in the first place.

Today’s state-of-the-art influence modus operanda is one-to-one communication, by meeting people face-to-face, telephone conversations and email. In that order. Social media is a distant fourth at the moment.

The influence of LinkedIn

We’re hiring at the moment at Influencer50. Having exhausted my small network of sales people I've worked with that I would hire, I thought I’d give LinkedIn a go. I’ve never really invested much time and effort in it (though I know others that swear by it).

I knocked up a quick job description and sent it, via LinkedIn, to 20 people that I thought might have some useful contacts. I could have sent it by ordinary email, but since LinkedIn’s purpose is networking, I thought recipients would (a) read it and (b) mind less than an email out of the blue.

I had eight responses. Not bad return on 20 emails. What’s more, each came with a personal recommendation from someone I trust. I was really impressed by the quality and interest of the people that came forward – presumably they’d checked us out on the web before making contact.

It’s how the web is supposed to work. It’s also how influence works, much better than blogs. The best blogs are those written collaboratively between friends or colleagues. Influence is localised around communities, or issues, or some other common ground. Like a personal network.

We hope to make a hire in the next few weeks. But I’m converted. If you’ve met me at some point in the past, watch out. Prepare to be linked.