Why Social Media "Influence" Metrics Are Dangerous
Written by Robert Bacal | 
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| The Never Ending Social Media Interview - Business and Social Media |
Q: We are seeing more mention of the importance of "influence" on social media as social media metric, as compared with just looking at the number of friends or followers. What's your opinion on influence as a metric?
Robert: Theoretically, if you COULD measure real influence, you'd have something. But you can't. The people talking about social media influence should really know better, because the concepts are simple. Influence, the ability to affect user behavior has TWO distinct components.
The first is whether behavior ON social media can be affected by the influencer. That is what all the metrics measure. For example, if someone receives a lot of retweets on twitter, that means the person is more of an influencer than someone who receives less. That can be measured, as can how many times someone is mentioned. This has absolutely zero to do with the really important "influence" businesses want to create. None of us make money from how people behave on social media, not directly except for the people who run the social media platforms.
This is whether behavior in "real life" is being influenced. So, if I can influence you to visit my store, or buy something from me, or buy a book I recommend, or somehow act differently in the non-virtual world, then and only then do I have something useful for business. That is real influence, and you can't measure it directly in the general case. You can only measure "it", given enough resources, using survey/self report data which is almost always of poor quality for reasons I've set out elsewhere. Conversion data is an indicator companies can look at but simply doesn't get at the larger issue of influence.
This is SO basic, I can't figure out why even the most enamoured, in terms of social media, can't or won't talk about this.
Q: So, why do you think this is "dangerous"? Isnt that extreme?
A: No, because anything that provides false information also misleads, whether it's about one's own business or the businesses of others. That's because business people should be keying their decisions based on valid information, not on ideas that are illogical or false. For example, if you are well retweeted on twitter, that may encourage you to continue to spend inordinate amounts of time tweeting, when in fact you have zero influence on behavior that affects the health of your business. These days, nobody can afford to squander time. I've long said that time is a resource far more valuable than money, particularly for small businesses, and false notions about the positive values of social media can result in huge losses due to lost opportunity.
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Twitter Skank(Y)
MicroThoughts
Twitter is starting to be the skanky older sister of the girl you go out with in order to get some. She's still has some attraction, but in the end you realize it's a dry hole to plumb, lacking in substance. Even tarted up, she has the odor of neglect.Officially Bogus
It's official. It's now impossible to keep up with the irrelevant data, false claims, illogical conclusions, and plain bad journalism associated with positive claims about social media. No single person could even find most of this, and it's impossible to explain to people why and how the numbers are wrongly interpreted. There are simply not enough hours in the day. The "expert pool" is totally polluted and now mainstream press, who depends on these experts on social media is reporting completely bogus and nutty things about social media success. Bogus, Dude!
Engage:
One of the prime illusions for business using social media is that it appears that "customers" are engaged by the company. It's more accurate to say (if on Twitter) that people are engaged with Twitter, even if they are communicating with the company. In any case, the term is over-used and misleading.
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Scoundrel
You can tell your "social media expert" is a scoundrel or utterly ignorant if they use the phrase "They just don't get social media". The truth is that the expert doesn't get social media, or how human beings work and is unable to come up with anything better to refute arguments or disagreements about social media.
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