Smarter Social Media Influence Index

ROI-graphLast week we published the list of the 100 Smartest People in Social Media. We received a huge response. Many people commented that they were honored to be on the list, while others questioned our methods for compiling it. In reality the list was a based on the subjective judgments of the Smarter Social Media team. But the demands for a quantifiable system has gotten us thinking.

I spoke with a number of people on the list to congratulate them on their inclusion. When I was speaking with Brendan Cooper – London based social media consultant who started Porter Novelli’s social media practice – he suggested that we create an index.

By pulling quantifiable data from around the web we will be able to rank the influence of the members of our industry. While this will undoubtedly be a fun, competitive, ego boosting endeavor, I also believe their is real utility in this kind of index. Just a few weeks ago BusinessWeek ran an article that compared the masses of social media “experts” to snake oil salesmen. Last week Mashable pointed out that there are 15,740 self-identified “social media experts” on Twitter. As businesses grapple with doubts about social media ROI and the benefits/risks of increased transparency, our industry will face increasing scrutiny. An index of influence will help to tell separate the wheat from the chaff.

And so I need your help. What variables should we consider for this index? Speaking with Brendan has helped me to come up with some good ideas and I’d like to hear your thoughts about them:

Blog: PageRank, Technorati Authority, Traffic and Number of Comments.

Twitter: Number of Followers, Number of List Inclusions, Number of Tweets Retweeted and Number of @ Replies.

Facebook: Number of Friends and Number of Facebook Fans.

LinkedIn: Number of Connections.

Other: Number of Clients, Power/Influence of Clients – this would be a qualitative judgement ranked 1 through 10 where 1 is Joe the Plumber and 10 is Coca Cola.

Thoughts, Critiques, Suggestions?

2 Comments on “Smarter Social Media Influence Index”

  1. 1 Bryan Davis said at 4:10 pm on December 30th, 2009:

    Wow. That’s exciting. Finally there’s someone who’s wise enough to try and weigh social media experts’ influences. Looking forward to that!

  2. 2 Christopher Jiles said at 4:36 pm on December 30th, 2009:

    Just because you have a thousand followers, doesn’t make you an expert.

    There should be a high degree of congruity between these 3 functions:
    what you say, what you do, what other people say about you.

    If you don’t make at least 6 figures from your social media efforts then you are far from an expert.

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