Leadership in online influence scoring is becoming embattled territory as services in this area include Klout, Kred, Tweet Grader (by Hubspot), and Tweet Level. But one should note, all are driven by black box algorithms that vye for the title of industry  “gold standard” for anointing online influencers. This isn’t pure vanity either; knowing the level of influence of any player is a PR and marketing professional’s dream solution but nobody to date has provided the silver bullet.

This seminal article on “weblogs” by Clay Shirky (February 2003) remains a classic in the social media cannon and is a favorite around the Nexalogy office. Power Law or ‘Pareto’ distribution, describes the observable social phenomena whereby the majority of content is created by the minority of producers. It’s an unavoidable response to the plethora of choice. Network theory shows how one’s individual choice to read a blog reverberates through their network based even though such choices are sometimes completely subjective – like preferring one style of writing over another or feeling politically aligned with like-minded sources.

The main thing to remember when considering influence graders is that they are at this point blunt instruments at best. They’ve grown from being impression measurement tools trying to measure context and subjectivity, as described above. I haven’t been astounded by the results of Kred so far but I have to say that I’m most optimistic about their methodology because they been quick to slice influence into domains. With Kred, at least social capital is seen as context dependent.

Tweet Grader (the free version, anyway) has long been outstripped especially in the insights department. Surely they can offer me something better than six words in a tweet cloud featuring “RT” as my most used word? Please.

One has to ask, is it a good thing that the most influence is wielded by a small group of people? Social media content creators that reach a certain momentum in twitter followers and blog links become the a part of that small bracket thanks to search engine ranking algorithms and twitter recommendation engines. The impossibility of knowing the blogosphere is exciting the way moving from a small town to a big city is exciting. Pseudonymity allows bloggers more wiggle room to express themselves, opinions are as diverse as they are plentiful and online social mobility becomes possible.

If there is one thing that the Occupy and Arab Spring movements have shown us in the last few weeks and months is that power imbalance has consequences and social media still has disruptive potential  Influence graders are bell weathers of power. I argue that a consequence of grading influence and doing it well will confer merit, power and its multiplication effects for those who actually deserve it.

Will these companies step up to the work for the interests of the 99%?

Special Thanks to Zach Devereaux (Chief Analyst Nexalogy Environics) for his valuable feedback on this post.

Implementing a new system can be costly in subscription fees alone; some enterprise SMA solutions will set you back over $100,000 per month! I argue they’re vastly more damaging to the organization in an intangible way: it’s a huge blow to morale to adopt and abandon if the tool is simply not right for your needs.

We thought it worthwhile to amalgamate the collected wisdom from these critical minds that have tried more solutions collectively than any SMA supplier could ever possibly do on their own. I’ve got a few notes on things to look for and things to avoid:

1. Make sure what you’re getting from your solution is actionable. Infographics are trendy but it’s strategy you want. Charts are useless if they don’t give you a clue as to what to do next.
2. Make sure your solution captures networks of information and not just reporting on social-networks-as-silos. The real insights are in network effects and amplifications, not in short, non-linear relationships.
3. Do for data what hi-def did for TV. This means Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis that are better than “positive, negative and neutral” and pull the qualitative gems from the quagmire. This goes for reporting on metadata that can tell you the who, what, where and when to give you a sense of the diffusion and discourse.
4. Filter spam. Don’t just say you do it; actually do it. Paying through the nose for a SMA with poor spam filtering is like going to Le Cirque and being expected to bus your own table.
5. Creating linkages between networks is what you pay the big bucks for and you want something that uses “sleuthy techniques”, algortihmic-ninja fancy footwork to open up that pandora’s box of the non-obvious.

Before going into any of the above however, I will recall two beautiful latin words “caveat emptor”, which means “don’t be a sucker” in plain english. Writing on Microsoft Word, WordPerfect 5.1 or on parchment has no real bearing on the quality of the prose. Ergo, an SMA tool will never define your problem for you. Dedicate some quality time to your business objectives, how social media impacts them and how you want to measure that.

Resources:

Nexalogy White Paper on Social Media Intelligence vs. Monitoring

Before I left on postdoc I ran across a job application that was looking for particle physicists or astrophysicists to help improve pedestrian traffic in Monaco.  It made sense.  People individually are very hard to predict, (duh) but thousands of people bunched together with strict constraints on where they can move , wouldn’t be that difficult to model.  Lots and lots of people =~ fluid dynamics.  A very viscous fluid but a fluid nonetheless. I had scored a postdoc fellowship and I was already commited to NYC or Paris.  But the Monaco job did peak my interest… It was a premonition of my future work here at Nexalogy.

The short version of the story is that Dave Carroll (a singer-songwriter from Halifax) guitar was broken by United baggage handlers and United Airlines gave him the runaround on compensation for almost a year before simply saying “No” to his claim. So Carroll wrote a song and produced a video – that received 3.5 million views in a few weeks.

Key quote from the post about this story:

We are already deeply into a real sea change, a transformation of the way we organize and coordinate and relate. It affects all our social capital, all our stakeholder relationships. This sea change is technologically based and cost driven, and it is being profoundly accelerated by the emergence of the new social media technologies which are deeply socially enabling. Adoption of these transforming technologies is not optional.

The only thing I would add to this is that for every social media intervention that breaks hugely like United Breaks Guitars has, there are likely dozens of smaller-scale conversations occurring about dozens of other subjects related to any large company. It would be easy to think that they’re not important – but anyone of them could become a big deal at any time.

Companies that don’t take social media seriously are putting all of the work they do at risk. There is a whole range of tools available to companies now – everything from free alerts, to basic monitoring tools, to Nexalogy’s advanced reputational analysis studies that can help companies understand how they are perceived and where problems have arisen or may soon arise. For a company to not avail itself of such tools is needlessly risky behaviour.

Astroturfing is the practice of creating fake blogs, media and/or personas to promote a message in such a way that it seems spontaneous and unscripted; to have come from the grassroots. The blog, http://www.avelocitoyens.com/ is reasonably well executed – and it looks like they have quickly adjusted to the fact that they were outed… Regardless, astroturf is astroturf, and it’s never appropriate in the blogosphere. It’s unethical, and anyhow it serves the client very poorly, because such fakery WILL come out in the end – leaving the brand with a public relations problem it never should have had.

Ironically, a quote from a Michel Philibert of Stationnement de Montréal points to the real challenge for organizations in a Web 2.0 world: “If we had built a blog hosted by Stationnement de Montréal, nobody would have been interested.”

The challenge for organizations isn’t to try and get around this fact by trying to fake out the very public they’re trying to reach. That’s the easy (and dangerous) way out. The true opportunity is to take on the harder but much more profitable challenge of making traditionally-boring organizations interesting enough to gain our attention. It’s a huge opportunity – and organizations that don’t try to accomplish it are serving themselves, and their clients, very poorly.