What IS the formula for calculating influence?
This isn’t a stab at Klout. After reading a number of recent blog posts on influence, and participating in several of the associated discussions, I’m just weary of the chase.
My gut tells me that measuring influence is situational and specific. You simply cannot look at tweet streams, numbers of followers, frequency of @ replies or retweets, number of Facebook friends, etc., and draw conclusions about someone’s influence, and there’s research that supports that idea.
Trey Pennington, Justin Goldsborough, Shonali Burke and Mark W. Schaefer are in the fray (and I’ve commented in a couple of cases), and I wrote my own post on the topic. It’s been an interesting conversation split between the “Klout is useless” – “Klout is making a good attempt” and my fringe element rantings that we need better research to figure out how to measure influence.
The deal is that there are few independently researched efforts to investigate the claims of well-intentioned entrepreneurs. There’s inevitably a black box that contains the algorithms and secret formulas, and no one wants to subject their potential cash cow to measurement that might render it an Edsel.
James Grunig and Linda Hon wrote a seminal paper about measuring relationships that might hold a key to figuring out how to measure influence. To determine strength of relationships, they write, focus on six components: Control Mutuality, Trust, Satisfaction, Commitment, Exchange Relationship and Communal Relationship. Coming up next week, a look at each element and how they may or may not apply to measuring influence.
BTW, I found out recently that my Technorati Authority score is 406. My Klout score is 46. I have no idea what that means. But I want to better understand influence, so I’m going to run this down for a while.
Tags: @jgoldsborough, @markwschaefer, @shonali, @treypennington, authority, Communication Theories, effective communication, engage, Facebook, influence, influential, Klout, measure, measureinfluence, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, Social Media, Technorati, Twitter
Without some additional context, your scores don’t mean much. Which is basically my way of agreeing with you. I can’t say it any better than:
“My gut tells me that measuring influence is situational and specific. You simply cannot look at tweet streams, numbers of followers, frequency of @ replies or retweets, number of Facebook friends, etc., and draw conclusions about someone’s influence.”
Hi Justin – thanks for the comment. The question of measuring online influence might be the next big thing for the Institute for PR Commission on Research, Measurement & Evaluation — at least judging by the last meeting. There are many other areas that need standards similar to the statement on AVE preceding the Barcelona Principles (don’t use it), but reining in the nonsensical “metrics” that are percolating up these days is pretty important.
Cheers for now – thanks again for stopping by.
Sean
Sean, you brought up AVE when you commented on Justin’s post today, and my feeling/fear about single-number scores is the same. They’re easy to spit out, and marketers grab onto them because of that, among other reasons. Then, companies and vendors use them because their clients want them… and they need to keep making money… even if they recognize that they’re useless. So it’s a vicious circle.
I think that’s what’s happening with Klout and scores. I’m so tired of talking and writing and thinking about it, that sometimes I just want to close my eyes and pretend it’ll all go away. But it won’t, which is why we need to keep talking and writing and thinking about it.
I just don’t know if it will make a difference at the end of the day (or decade, or several). I mean, we’re still bashing AVE, and it’s still around!
Hi Shonali – thanks for dropping in. Agree that it’s facile and everyone wants to make it easy (as per my comment on @jgoldsborough’s latest…) As for getting tired of it – we’re the vanguard. We need to remain vigilant and continue to rep-re-sent. Otherwise, we fade into the sunset, the battle lost, the war shrinking to nothingness. FIGHT!