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Thoughts on Online Influence: Social Media

Posted by Gautam

Am not sure if you saw this, but I was named one of the 25 HR Digital Influencers of 2010.

Now that could be hilarious.

It’s important to remember that influence/popularity/power in the digital world is totally different from the real world.

The issue is that the online world enables one to measure a lot of things – like impressions, number of readers, followers, fans across various platforms – which are collectively called “engagement metrics” because they show the number of people interested in the content you put out and the community that you help build.

On top of that there are things like PageRank by Google, Alexa Rank which show over a period the number of people who link to you and hence the “authority” you have.

It’s no wonder that there are enough services and information providers that slide and dice this data to enable people to make sense of these numbers.

Earlier there were directories like Technorati.

Then there came lists like the Career 100 – which combined data to rank blogs roughly in the same domain.

However with the rise of social and information and professional networks – and movement of the focus from pure content to the people behind the content – services that track “influence” based on Twitter numbers, Facebook fans, and Linkedin connections rapidly are making strides.

The demand is being driven – primarily in the western world – by companies who believe that “social influencer marketing” is the way to reach out to an increasingly splintered audience across these networks.

Enter services like Klout (my profile here) and About.me (my profile here) which want to enable people and others track their “reach” and “audience”

Then there is traackr which use algorithms

However, it’s early days yet and these systems can be easily gamed.

Let’s see how it evolves in the future