How is Social Media Influence REALLY Measured? [Pic]
I’ve just been wondering lately what exactly constitutes “influence” in the social media realm, and made this graphic as another way to ask that question. I went to wefollow to see who they consider the “most influential”, and there was Ashton Kutcher at the top of several lists. (Strangely, he doesn’t appear on the ‘Celebrity’ list at all, but tops out in the ‘Entrepreneur’ category).
Does the number of followers you have mean you’re the most influential? I’d argue there’s more to influence than that, and that quality of content weighs in more heavily than quantity of followers. What’s Ashton’s SROI (Social Return on Investment)? Until there’s a good metrics for social capital, are we just playing a numbers game?
what’s social media influence? by Venessa Miemis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at emergentbydesign.com.
I would probably say, like you did on Nokia’s Ideas Project, that measuring and visualizing Human Capital would be a great step forward and allow for new collaborations and creative thinking!
The question you raise is: how can we build and share the relevant metrics?
I just thought of an interesting attempt in that direction by Institute for the Future. They launched a game last year I think :
http://www.superstructgame.org/
In that massively multiplayer forecasting game you earn badges that kind of represent something like Human Capital :
- High Ping Quotient – 2 points
Responsiveness to others’ requests for engagement and the ability to reach out to others in a network.
- Longbroading – 4 points
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles.
- Open Authorship – 5 points
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors Sample winners:
- Cooperation Radar – 7 points
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission.
- Multi-Capitalism – 8 points
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual.
- Mobbability – 10 points
The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration.
- Protovation – 11 points
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure.
- Influency – 14 points
Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.
- Signal/Noise Management – 18 points
Filtering meaningful information, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice.
- Emergensight – 21 points
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation, and collaboration on extreme scales.
I am not sure all the criteria are relevant or applicable but they nonetheless open up interesting paths to follow…
Emile, fascinating. I had heard of that game, but didn’t make the time to explore it, so thank you for bringing it back to the top of mind.
This just makes another correlation in my mind about this notion I’ve been having about these concepts, and what it’s really all about. I’ve been starting to draft out these ideas for a book I’m writing, which is about what I’m calling “metathinking”.
Anyway, there are a few other good resources I’ve found for thinking about these metrics. One is from a white paper written by Henry Jenkins, called Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. (http://newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf). It is an excellent read, and he lists the “core new media literacy skills” that are necessary, many of which overlap with the list above. His paper is framed in terms of skills necessary to be taught to K-12 students, but I would argue that these are essential 21st century skills for everyone. Period.
Another excellent post from just last week, Evaluating the success of Open Innovation & Idea Platforms, written by Sofus Midtgaard (http://ow.ly/yk3C) also digs into how we create metrics for something abstract like thinking, learning, and ideas.
Again, thanks for the resource!
Thanks for the ressources: I had identified Sofus Midtgaard’s post but not the other about media literacy skills… brillant!
There’s plenty of thinking to be done on that topic but I am sure we can find something better than counting followers on twitter, friends in FB, or connexions in Linkedin…
The goal would of course be to open up new opportunities for collaborations and idea generation, enhancing social networks…
I will be looking forward to further discussions with you on this topic (and reading your book when it comes out
)
LOL. That image rocks.