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My Choice Is Participating With Influence, What’s Yours?

Every morning I look for new thought leading article and inspiring writing about social media and Twitter.  I am very impressed with the thoughts laid out here by Micah Baldwin.  I trust you will find it informative, through provoking and engage your mind in ways to create new ideas of how you can apply these principles to your business TODAY.  We are in a time now where influence is not controlled by the top any longer.  It is only as powerful as the participants will accept their own influence and claim it.

Otherwise it is like my friend Heshie Segal (from JetNettingConnection) says “It is like one hand clapping”.  Look at how you can step into your influence and recognize that the playing field is being leveled like never before in history.  Will you be a part of the game or will you be a spectator whinning “I saw it happening but didn’t want to risk it as it could have failed and besides I am just a little guy” mentality.

HOW TO: Measure Online Influence

Here is post by Micah Balwin from Mashable (You can click on his name and go to his blog post and leave him a message)

Obsessed with the idea that Google () doesn’t have the one right answer, in late 2008 Micah Baldwin joined Lijit Networks–his sixth startup–which believes each blogger has a right answer.

Influence is difficult to ascertain online. What about that guy on Twitter with 25,000 followers? Isn’t he influential? What about that woman who has 5,000 RSS subscribers? She has to be influential, correct?

People who are truly influential become conduits for human based filtering and content discovery within their communities, as members of the community look to the person of influence to connect them to people and content they should trust, and fuel positive community growth.

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Understanding influence

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Influence is defined as “implicit or explicit effect of one thing (or person) on another,” which online can be further simplified to “can someone’s words (and/or video) make you think or do something?” While this certainly can be negative (think of Jim Jones or David Koresh), let’s focus on the positive.

It becomes easier to understand influence when it’s broken down into its core components: Brand, Expertise and Trust. While there is much debate around online branding, it is clear that personal branding is important to online influence.

Interestingly, Google does not provide a definition for personal branding but provides 48 million results on the topic. What is personal branding? Corporate branding is the messaging effort by a company to make people feel positive about their products. Personal branding is the sum of your online activities and sets an expectation about who you are.

Personal brand is truly an aggregated representation of online activity. Can you build a personal brand by interacting on only one social service? Sort of, but it’s incomplete. It’s impossible to gain a true picture of who you are simply by looking at your photos on Flickr (), or just reading your blog. Trust grows by being able to view a person’s social content in aggregate. This is why life streaming applications like FriendFeed () have grown so rapidly.

In terms of measuring online influence, the stronger the personal brand, the more influence one wields online. The most important component of online influence is trust. Trust is defined as creating a consistent expectation that a person will always act in your best interest when given information.

Expertise is another core component of influence. One can gain knowledge on a specific topic, but expertise is a title that can only be given.

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How does one become influential?

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How does one get the title of expert? In the simplest terms, other people trust the knowledge you have accumulated. It’s why self-proclaimed expertise is not respected.

Personal Brand, Trust and Expertise. Understanding each is imperative to measuring influence, which can be expressed as:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Trust * Expertise)

Of course, since Expertise = (Knowledge * Trust), we can further refine the equation to:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Knowledge * Trust2)

Which shows the increased importance of trust. You could refine it more and extract trust from Personal Brand, but that begins to complicate things.

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Measuring influence

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Now that we have defined Influence mathematically, how do we measure it? Well, it is difficult to apply direct numerical measures to each component, but here is a starting point:

Incoming Traffic - Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers

Incoming Links - Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links

Reader Engagement - Internal searches, time on site

Recommendations - Retweets, share stats

Connections - Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites

Track Record - Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement

Engagement - How often and long a person has engaged with a service online

If we look at a blog as the center of someone’s online universe, several blog tools/widgets together start to provide an interesting picture into someone’s online influence.

PostRank - By taking several measures, PostRank provides a quick overview of the general “importance” of specific posts. They have a widget that surfaces the top posts based on “engagement” metrics (derived from such services as Twitter, Delicious, and Digg ())

Outbrain / WP-PostRanking - A rating widget that also collects scoring data. Has a “top posts” sidebar widget that lists your top posts based on rating data.

Feedburner / TwitterCounter - Both provide chicklets that show respectively RSS subscribers and Twitter followers. Certainly a measure of trust and expertise.

Zemanta - a recommendation widget that works alongside your post as you are writing it. Interestingly, it also allows you to build a related content list at the bottom of a post by hand, which, because of the explicit action, makes the related content almost a personal recommendation for similar content.

While these widgets give you a quick view of online influence, and since Technorati’s Authority Rank stopped consistently updating (read: lost the trust of bloggers), there hasn’t been a single tool for measuring the potential online influence of an individual blogger. Until that happens, the best measure is getting recommendations from friends.

After all, there is nothing that will beat a simple recommendation for uncovering influential people both online and offline.

Micah Baldwin is VP and Lead Evangelist for Lijit Networks, a search widget that allows a blogger to make all of their social content (Flickr, Twitter, Youtube (), etc.) and some trusted sources searchable from one place, their blog, demonstrating the bloggers expertise and influence. Lijit also offers detailed search stats and an ad network. He can be found on Twitter () and at his own blog at LearntoDuck.

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Oh yeah, How are you building your know*trust factor?

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