How can you measure influence?

Social media has given rise to a rather ugly term that I use far too often myself – ‘online influencers’. Every social media campaign at some point becomes obsessed with reaching the influencers – those with the most popular blogs, the most followers, the most retweets, the biggest Facebook groups. It’s easy to see how this came about. In lieu of any real accurate measurement techniques, we decided on ‘influence’. Reaching the right people online, those early adopters, those trend setters, that meant your campaign had really made it. It’s ultimately what’s resulted in this race for numbers, because that’s how we found ourselves trying to define influence. And it’s not necessarily the right approach.

How do you measure influence?

Getting straight to the crux of the argument, this is ultimately the biggest bone of contention. The problem is that we’ve tried to apply a numerical fix to a human attribute.  And the problem arose because we switched from a media of ‘things’ to a media of people. Sure, it was once easy to measure your marketing  – you could choose from readers, site traffic, page rank, column inches, anything you want. But when social media emerged, we then tried to find a measurement of all these people that were out there talking about us and contributing content. So we settled on influence. The only problem is that there is no real way to measure this and any that try will risk getting themselves tangled up in a mess of numbers that ends up telling you nothing. And the outcome of this approach is that now tools have emerged that supposedly help us measure influence.

Klout is one such example. It’s selling itself as ‘the standard for online and internet influence’. Now it certainly seems the best of its kind so far, extending beyond simple metrics available such as follower/following, propensity to retweet etc.. It takes into account things like how many spam/dead accounts are following you and how influential the people that retweet you are. Now while I don’t doubt the power of the site, and like I said it seems like one of the best in class right now, the danger is that you become preoccupied or even obsessed with the shininess of a tool like this, and don’t see the wood for the trees. An example for you. If I put in the Twitter name for Marie Boran, I see a klout score of 44, which is actually equal to mine.

First problem – well I don’t really have any context around this number. If I put in just one name this doesn’t really tell me anything. Given that the score is out of 100, then Marie is coming at out just under half. The second problem is that I know Marie. She is one of the most respected journalists we have in Ireland, and in the top 3 for technology journalists. If she were to retweet a client of mine for example, I know this is huge. But the tool isn’t telling me that. It’s not taking into account her whole other online life, but more importantly, it can’t take into account the fact that I just happen to know how influential she is among her peers (and rightly so!). Sure I don’t expect this tool to really be able to tell me that, but that is why it’s important to not get sucked into something like this. It may seem like it’s giving you the magic number, but unfortunately you’ve actually just put the wrong calculation in.

The Fast Track Project – A Practice in Influence

Right now we’re lucky enough to be able to experience a fascinating human experiment into online influence – The Influence Project. The aim is to find the most influential person online in 2010. At the heart of it is a desire to show how online communities can be mobilised into action. Fair play to them for sticking their neck on the line, but for me it just feels a bit too gimmicky to really reveal any substance at the centre of it. The problem is that influence is subjective. While one person might argue that Steve Jobs is influential because he’s the one that’s going to tell you first about the new phone that’s out, you could easily argue that the authors of engadget are actually more influential because they’re going to tell you if the thing is good or not. Is it about knowledge (being the first to tell someone something) or persuasion (being the first to recommend you buy it). Both are influential, but in different ways and neither lend themselves to a number.

By  now you can probably tell that my argument is erring on the side of  ‘you can’t measure influence’. Not least because this isn’t something you should try and be measuring. This isn’t to say that influence isn’t important, but to try and tie this down is simply too big of an ask. Influence is too intricate a concept to lend itself to this, and you can’t hope to personally know everyone that you reach through a campaign, to assess just how influential they are. The other big problem is that influence is in the eye of the beholder. When you start to really assess influence away from numbers, it become subjective.

Finding Influence

Given how important influence is, it’s not something that you’re going to completely disregard when it comes to assessing the success of your social media efforts. If influence is something that you really want to look at, then my advice would be to not look for a quick fix. With the example of Marie Boran above, it’s something that comes from really knowing a person. Not knowing them personally, but knowing their background outside of how many followers they have, or how many comments are left on their blog. It’s something that requires time and unfortunately I’m not sure a tool can ever automate this process for you.

It’s also important that you’ve agreed on your definition of influence. Is it going to be the one that writes about the success of your marketing campaign for X chocolate bar from a digital media perspective, or is it actually going to come from the person that recommends it to their 500 friends on their Facebook profile. Both influential for different reasons and both ultimately conforming to completely separate goals. More than anything you need to make sure that you’re looking for the right thing. In his excellent post – Jason Falls argues that Its’ not about influence, but about trust. He quite rightly points to the fact that influence doesn’t go deep enough. Both exist together, but are ultimately different.

So think hard when looking at influence the next time and if all else fails, read this