AWOM Weekly Tip: Measuring Influence

Posted by Kevin Spidel on Jul 22nd, 2009 | Comments

In the coming weeks we will be releasing details behind our measurments tools. Until then, here are some tips and tools to assist you in measuring  your network’s influence.

People engage the social web for many different reasons, but mainly to connect with others.  There are so many social engagement levels, measuring your network’s engagement with you is difficult.

There are several third party applications that measure parts of your network’s engagement level. If you are looking for basic evaluations of your impact, here are a few great sites we recommend. If you are looking for specifics, well… of course, come see us ; )

How much influence  does your brand have on the Blogosphere and Twitterverse?

Social Mention is a decent site that  measures your network’s strength, sentiment, passion, and reach on blogs, Twitter, search engines, video sites and more. Sounds great right? It is, for a quick survey. However for details, the automation fails. The algorithms that calculate these measurements are not semantic enough for accuracy. Example “bad” could literally mean bad, or slang for good. This type of semantics is not recognized in these measurements. Passion is denoted as repeated posts, but does not discount bots that retweet, or google picking up content that is syndicated from blog ads or spam bots, etc.

If you market a blog, then you are very familiar with Technorati “Authority.” For those that do not, this is a standard within this market that reports the influence/traffic/and quality of a blog. Technorati has a service called Twittorati. This uses the principle behind Authority and measures your brand’s presence on Twitter. Some great ranking tools, but at the end of the day only measures your over all ranking. If you want to find your influencers, quality of initiatives on the social web, etc. you are out of luck.

TweetStats.com, Hashtags.org, and Twittercounter.com are also great metrics tools for Twitter. But again, it is just for one network.

At the end of the day, measuring your ROI on the social web takes a lot of work.  Our Social Web Impact formula can be used to measure any social network’s influence and include all types of engagement actions and user generated content…but more about that later this month.

The above tools can help give you a quick, unscientific, look at your impact. We hope these tips help you as you venutre onto the social web.