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.

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.

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.