When I started blogging a few years ago I quickly got to know Steve Gillmor. I love Steve. He consistently says things are dead - Office, TV and links, just to name a few. Sometimes Steve is right, other times he is way off. But he missed a big one.
The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead. Link authority, as it was called, was good while it lasted. When blogs were where all the action was, this system was king - even though many of us hated it. Good for Technorati for building its own brand around it. Nowadays, however, link authority is a meaningless metric. Jeff Jarvis touched upon the broader measurement issue last week.
The main reason link authority is dead is that there are so many places where people can publish and connect with peers. Often, many of us are active in more than one at a time. You might not think some of these networks are influential, but in fact they are.
Take Twitter, a small example. Lots of people who are on Twitter don't write blogs and vice versa. Still, it's influential. Thousands of people track their friends and the site is incredibly well optimized for search. The TV nets are checking it out too.
Last night on Twitter my friend Robert Scoble and I got into an intense discussion regarding Facebook. Arguably, some 6,000 people (Robert's 4,400+ followers and my 1,500) witnessed it. That's small compared to the reach of our blogs.
However, one of those folks was Dwight Silverman, a veteran tech reporter from the Houston Chronicle He took it all in. (Dwight had to put up with my PR pitches from 1996-2004. Pity him.) Had Dwight written about this, then conceivably hundreds of thousands more would have been influenced. And link authority or impressions doesn't measure any of it.
With this in mind, lots of smart people in our firm have been thinking about online influence and how to measure it. This is a critical issue not just for PR pros, marketers/advertisers, but everyone who wants to monetize content. We're experimenting with a new weighted blended approach and would like your feedback. (When I learned that I ranked highly in their calculations I told David Brain, our Europe CEO, that he fixed this to psych me into relaxing so I Twitter less. My rankings would fall and his would rise!)
The model we have developed is far from perfect, but it's a start. The key is to develop a system that can grow as the channels change. We want a system that we all like - or at least a majority. Feel free to leave comments here or on David's site. Our intent is to create this in partnership with you out in the open. It's in beta but now we need your help. Together we can find something that's workable.
