I wasn't going to post about my colleague Jonny Bentwood's efforts to pull together a formula for measuring online influence until I'd read it. But as serendipity would have it, both Doc Searls and B.L. Ochman have both added to the debate.
First of all, in Can PR get past spinnage? Doc suggests that seeking to fit traditional metrics or measurement paradigms to a radically altered form of communication won't cut it. Specifically:
"Focusing on influence alone suggests that PR is just looking to expand the spin business from old media to new, and from old targets to new ones. There are other corners of the prism, other angles to come at the problems and opportunities in around conversation and relationship..."
I agree entirely with this perspective. As I alluded to in a previous comment on Doc's blog, the risk for the PR industry is that it attempts to re-model the social web into ways in which existing practices and business models continue to work.
This worries me. While the industry can talk about how this new medium has radically changed the communications landscape we can't then pretend we can measure it in just the same way, using exactly the same metrics as before.
It won't work.
Meanwhile B. L. Ochman argues that while her presence on another 'Top 100/10/25 etc' is flattering, lists in themselves are not an effective way of measuring popularity/influence/whatever:
"the criteria for each list is largely subjective, and, as soon as there’s a list, there’s someone who figures out how to game the list. Not to mention that most lists are created as a way for the creator to game search engines so the list-maker’s site will increase its search value. Therefore, just about all such lists are meaningless."
Again, I agree. In fact perhaps lists are almost the wrong tool entirely to measure the social web.
The social web is multitudinous, easily sorted, filtered, and organised by abnd around the individual. It works in a million - and probably more - ways tghat can be adapted and re-shaped to a your personal perferences .
There doesn't have to be just one way of organising something any more. And in this respect lists are exclusive rather than inclusive. That is proprietary - which is not how things are done any more.
Luckily for me both Doc and B. L. admit to not having the exact answer to this problem (is there one?). I'll get back to you on that one!
Technorati tags: PR, public relations, measurement
For what it's worth, my blog with its old URL peaked at #16 at Technorati's Hot Whatever, and was down to #600-something before I had to move it to a new URL, with which it dropped to #million-something. It now has a rank of 3,521 and an authority level of 845, whatever that means.
Meanwhile many other Top Whatever lists have come and gone. I've been on some, not on others. I don't see how it makes any difference.
I have been called an "A-list" blogger in the past, by Newsweek among others. Though not as much lately. I see personal blogs as one-celled animals. Being an A-list blogger is akin to being an A-list paramecium. Not sure it's all that flattering. Or helpful. Whatever upside that label may have delivered (and I can't think of a single one right now), the downside -- being called a "gatekeeper", for example -- has far exceeded it.
For what it's worth, traffic at the blog is the same as it has been for many years: in the low single-digit thousands. So has my own sense of "influence", participation, or whatever. I perceive little if any difference between my old blog and my new one.
Okay, I just checked. Today there have been 2884 visits to my blog. In the whole month of January, there have been 20663. This is also the first time this month I have bothered to look at those stats. All they tell me is that I have a few thousand regular visitors. That's cool, and that's enough to keep me writing.
Bottom line: I do not want, and cannot begin, to imagine a metric that makes any more or less sense of my "influence" that what I feel in my own gut, which I have no urge to measure, lest it make less sense to me.
That sense is centered on the ideas I share, rather than on who is sharing them.
All that said, I do know that PR agencies need metrics for what they do. But I also know that the real issue here isn't the metric part but the "what they do" part.
Companies need help, but not with "delivering messages" and crap like that. Instead they need help trusting employees to talk with customers and other parties in the marketplace, and participating in market conversations that cannot be controlled -- and work better when they are not. And I say that as a journalist writing for a tech publication that has a very hard time trying to talk with rank & file engineers doing actual work, rather than to company brass and their factota, both of which work hard to stay "on message" and to keep their employees silent behind an informational firewall.
Opening up whole companies to dialog with markets has almost never, to my knowledge, been the job of PR in the past. Can it be in the future? I hope so, but have my doubts.
Still, I salute Edelman's efforts. They're doing hard pioneering work here, and deserve both credit and help with that.
Posted by: Doc Searls | January 22, 2008 at 04:22 AM