Picture from Onalytica Blog, in a blogpost explains how Person A might intially influence many, but those do not go on to influence many more. While Person B does not influence many in the beginning, those influenced go on to influence more and more.
While measuring the outcomes and return on investment are good ways to determine if a social media tool is affecting other people, another place to look would be to influencers. Your blog may be popular, but popularity does not always add up to influence. You want to know if the people you are influencing are in turn influencing more and more people. You will want to have a chain reaction instead of a one-stop situation.
Heather Yaxley, a teacher of CIPR qualfications and a part-time professor at Bournemouth University, states that real influencers have credibility and can be trusted as a spokesperson. Even if you reach a large number of people, can they be trusted to influence other people, therefore bringing a larger audience back to you?
These ‘real influencers’ that you want to reach are an active audience. They reach another audience that might be beyond your initial scope, but are another active audience that will get drawn to you, because of the first set of influencers. This is the kind of chain reaction you are looking for. You are looking for the influence, not the popularity.
Yaxley references Google as the “word of mouth on steroids.” A Google ranking is a measurement of a site’s popularity, but not necessarily it’s influence.
So how do you really measure influence?
Flemming Madsen, publisher of the Onalytica blog, gives an example of how influence is actually measured. He wanted to find out who the world got information from about the bird flu. They wanted to know who people relied on the most, which would be the person with the most influence.
To measure influence, they used the method of citation analysis. This is where you collect everything that has referenced a certain topic, which then creates a specific equation that will provide the relative influence of each journal, article, website, etc. The equation figures out who was referencing whom. It looks at how the chain reaction was created and identifies the influencers.
March 17, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Thanks for the link – interesting post and you are quite right about understanding influence rather than simply popularity.
I like your points about creating a chain reaction of influencers, although I’m not convinced that is simply a linear process of multiplication. Once other influencers pass on information, the message begins to travel in different directions, within groups, out to new people, maybe to mass audiences as well as niche ones and so on.
Also, we should consider the ultimate aim – which might not be to influence the many. Sometimes we are just trying to reach a select few people and the trick then is to identify who is influencing these individuals.
So in the left hand diagram, if the aim is to reach the single guy in the last row, then our chain has done its job.
March 18, 2009 at 1:41 am
Heather,
I agree that popularity and influence are two different things. A blog may be popular to a core group of people who may or may not be influencing others. I find your chain diagram to be interesting. It helps explain citation analysis with a visual. Although you don’t want your blog to be a one-stop destination, sometimes blogs might only be trying to reach a specific target audience. In this case, the process might not be as smooth and linear as the diagram appears. The message may take different paths to reach various groups of people.
I still strongly feel that personal brand, trust and expertise aid the process of measuring influence. I would recommend checking out, http://mashable.com/2009/03/02/measuring-online-influence/. In a recent post, Micah Baldwin discusses how to measure online influence. She starts off by describing influence and how one becomes influential, and then goes on and explains how to measure influence.
March 19, 2009 at 12:01 am
Heather, I agree that aim is an important part to look at when you are determining who you want to send your message out to. It might be only a few people, or it might be many. It all depends on the type of company and what they want to accomplish.
Also, thanks for the resource, Mandy. It is interesting to see different perspectives on how one might become influential and how to be successful at it.
March 31, 2009 at 12:39 pm
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