Internet Marketing & RecruitingHOW TO: Measure Online Influence [Mashable.com]
by Micah Baldwin | March 2nd, 2009 | Mashable.com
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.
Understanding influence
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.
Read the complete article: HOW TO: Measure Online Influence.
