Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I recently stumbled across the Infographic of Who’s Who of Social Influence Measurement and while it’s no surprise to see the social influencer industry growing, it’s a little worrisome....

No influencer app can ever accurately measure sentiment by running keywords through a program, because it can’t account for the different contexts of human conversations. Only a human being can do that. And heck, that can even be challenging for humans to determine when they are solely reading words and aren't able to see people’s facial expressions and body language as they speak.

But as organizations try and continue to justify the ROI of social media, there is a lot of pressure to produce lengthy reports to illustrate how they are preforming – thus the growth of influencer apps and products. My advice? Take influencer scores and reports by Klout, Kred, Twitalyzer, etc. with a grain of salt. If you are really engaged with your community, you will manually see how influential you are within your niche community....

[Good reminder that apps can't do it all -JD]

Most of us are in love with the idea of influence.

Some time back, Malcolm Gladwell came up with an easy to understand model of influence. It seemed to resonate with many of us who are deeply immersed in the web and have seen, first hand, the apparent randomness of online sentiment and human digital behaviour. His book, The Tipping Point took its lead from Stanley Milgram’s principle that we are all only separated by six degrees – suggesting that within a network, the “hub” or “connector” plays a vital role in the transmission of information across that network.

I have always viewed this theory with scepticism – preferring the strength of weak ties model popularised by Duncan Watts. It’s a shame in a way, as the Gladwell model – the Tipping Point – is easily articulated and understood, while Watts’ approach is more complicated, random and difficult to apply in the real world. Yet, even a casual glance at the social media landscape will show you just how difficult it can be to boil “influence” down to a single factor or variable. Klout has tried it as have PeerIndex and Kred – and there are dozens more on the horizon offering different versions, metrics and tools that attempt to measure the chaos of our behaviours and patterns of indifference.

Ultimately, when it comes to influence, I keep returning to one important point –> it’s not about influence, it’s about trust. And until we, as business leaders, as marketers and as publishers of information and content, understand this, we will continue to dance around the real issue....