Chapter 4 - Measures of influence

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To understand influence in social media, you need to buy in to the power of small markets. This is difficult for people who were raised in the last half of the twentieth century, when “big” was synonymous with “important.” People of my generation were taught that successful media companies had broad reach and big audiences. Big stories were those that interested a lot of people, even if they didn’t affect many of those people very directly.

This mile-wide-inch-deep mentality dominated media for the last 150 years, but small markets have always had value of a different kind. The audience is highly engaged and often passionately interested. Often, it’s because the topic relates to their work or a cause that concerns them. People are avid consumers of information in small markets, much more so than in large ones. But until recently, there were few cost-effective ways to address many small-market needs.

All that is changing, driven by the evolution of technology that enables networks of individuals or small groups to behave like big companies. Marketing guru Seth Godin writes in the introduction to his new book, Small is the New Big:

Small means that the founder is involved in a far greater percentage of customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them quickly. Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change your business model when your competition changes theirs. Small means you can tell the truth on your blog. Small means that you can answer e-mail from your customers. Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others while you keep all the power because you invent something that’s remarkable and tell your story to people who want to hear it.

Influence online is a matter of small influencers affecting big influencers. Its the small guys who are closest to their markets and who are in the best position to say what should happen there. In the last half of the twentieth century, marketers became fixated on big influencers: national newspapers, broadcast TV networks and star radio personalities. Now the pendulum is swinging back. Small is cool. EBay can act like a large company because there are 400,000 people who depend on it for their living. But eBay is really quite small.

My own experience is a case in point. In 1999 I left a large, established technology publication to join a startup Internet company. TechTarget’s business plan was to build a portfolio of technology websites aimed at targeted audiences of information technology (IT) professionals. At the time, the IT media market was dominated by a few large titles, each with circulations of more than 250,000. Those publications saw IT professionals as a single group. TechTarget saw them as dozens of communities of people with special interests.

Conventional wisdom at the time was that the IT publishing market had no room for new competitors. But as we began to build the network of what would eventually become more than 30 websites, we found an enthusiastic and committed audience who appreciated the efficiency of the TechTarget approach. When the tech market crashed in early 2000 TechTarget continue to grow its business, doubling revenues every year for five years.

I gained some important insights from that experience. One is how difficult it is for publishers to understand the power of small markets. During the first three years of TechTarget, we constantly looked over our shoulders for fear that one of our giant competitors would catch on to our model and stamp us out of existence. But that didn’t happen. In fact, it was three years before the industry leaders caught on and started their own targeted publishing products. By then, TechTarget had too big of a head start.

Another revelation was that the economics of publishing were entirely different on the Web. At the weekly publication where I worked for 15 years, a staff of 60 editors was needed to produce each issue. Production alone required a nine-person copy editing staff. When you added in circulation, sales, marketing, administration and logistics, more than 200 people worked full-time on one publication. And that’s not counting printers, shippers, mail handlers and other contractors.

At TechTarget, the editorial staff for most sites was two people. Most sites had a single sales person and there was a good-sized staff of technology professionals who built the sites and ran the servers. But the fully amortized staffing requirements across the network of websites averaged out to about six people per site.

And some of those sites made a lot of money, several million dollars a year in some cases. That made them smaller than their printed counterparts, but the margins were much higher because the costs were so low.

The rule of thumb in publishing is that a new magazine of 50,000 subscribers or more costs at least $5 million to launch. Much of that cost is in circulation development, a grossly inefficient process that usually involves dropping millions of pieces of direct mail. Ongoing circulation renewal efforts add millions to the costs, as even very successful publications typically churn a third of their readers every year. Publications must constantly mail new list universes to keep their readership fresh.

Marketers pay for all those costs. That’s why a page in even a modest trade publication often costs more than $10,000. Print publishing is inefficient and those inefficiencies are borne by advertisers. Online publishing is cheaper. But the economics of personal publishing put all other media to shame.

Which brings me to my third revelation: the power of small markets. It’s not new information that small markets can be profitable; newsletter publishers have known that for years. What’s new is the power of the Internet to deliver these micro-markets with an efficiency that was previously unimaginable. And syndication technologies like Google AdSense and Commission Junction enable marketers to target focused groups of users at low cost.

Small markets are more efficient than large ones. That’s why TechTarget succeeded. Customers found that response rates to their messages were two to 10 times higher than what they could get with broad media. TechTarget had some of the highest prices in its market but doubled its business every year for six years. The targeted buy was just that much more efficient.

Social media’s leverage is even greater. Many bloggers work for a pittance, though for-profit networks are developing that bring pricing discipline to the market. And as we shall see later[1], good timing and a little luck can deliver a response far beyond anything attainable in conventional media. A viral or blogger relations campaign typically costs a small fraction of a TV or print ad.

Most bloggers and podcasters spend nothing on circulation development. In fact, most don’t even seek advertising until their readership runs into the thousands every day. Production costs are almost nil because services like Blogger, TypePad and SixApart give them away or sell them for a low monthly fee. The blogger is writer, managing editor, production artist and often head salesman. Large blogs like Techcrunch support six staff members but most are solo affairs. Google Blogoscoped generates four million page views a month with a total staff of one.

There are risks to that, of course. Because they are organizations of one, bloggers and podcasters can walk away from their business on a whim, leaving advertisers stranded. Rocketboom, which was one of the most popular video blogs on the Internet in the spring of 2006 with 300,000 daily visits, abruptly shut down in June, 2006 when host Amanda Congdon and producer Andrew Baron had a falling-out. The site was down for more than a week while Baron scrambled to find an interim host.

In my interviews with bloggers for this book, several acknowledged that the daily grind of writing or podcasting was tiring at times and that the urge to throttle back or just quit was at times overpowering. And some prominent bloggers, including Andrew Sullivan, whose Daily Dish is ranked #116 by Technorati, do log off for a while. However, most prominent bloggers so far have returned. Blogging, they’ve told me, is like a drug. Once you start, you have an insatiable urge to continue.

The importance of links

Hyperlinks are the most important indicator of influence in blogging. Links are the essence of the Worldwide Web, of course; the “http” that precedes Web addresses stands for hypertext transfer protocol, which is the standard for linking between pages. Google’s PageRank algorithm, which revolutionized search, is based on the assumption that a page’s importance is defined by the number of other pages that link to it. Technorati and BuzzMetrics, two of the leading companies that measure influence in the blogosphere, give more weight to links than to any other factor.

Bloggers have developed a rich culture around links and they treat links with respect, even reverence. Links in blogging are equivalent to eBay’s well-known feedback system. If you are a regular ebay user, you know how that works. Buyers and sellers are assigned positive and negative ratings by their commerce partners based on satisfaction with the transaction. The rating is expressed as a percentage, with 100% positive being perfect. Feedback is so important to the ebay ecosystem that members will engage in vigorous debates over the assignment of a single negative rating. The feedback system has been called one of the most important innovations eBay introduced to the Internet.

Linking is the blogosphere’s version of feedback. Bloggers show appreciation and recognition of other bloggers by linking to them. A link is a way of saying, “I read this information, I found it interesting are useful, and I respect the author for creating it.” Links are even be bestowed on content which with the blogger disagrees. The link is a sign of respect more than a sign of agreement.

Successful bloggers are link freaks. Look at a page in Instapundit or MicroPersuasion and you will see a dizzying number of links. In large part, this is recognition of those bloggers’ understanding that they have a responsibility to the community to drive traffic elsewhere. In fact, the burden of being a top blogger is the knowledge that one influences the plight of lesser bloggers to a disproportionate degree. Small bloggers continually appeal to the most influential writers in their in hopes of gaining a link that may drive several thousand page views.

Statistical reference

The fact that linking is an important component of influence has been documented statistically. HP researchers Eytan Adar and Lada Adamic the it examines the phenomenon in a 2004 research study. They found that “blogs linking to one another have about a 45% chance of mentioning at least one common URL.” But in addition, their model for “infection” - or the spread of information from one blog to another - “indicates that infection is six times more likely when this happened previously.” In other words, bloggers develop an affinity for other bloggers, begin start writing about the same topics and referencing each other on a regular basis..

This has important ramifications for understanding influence. When a prominent blogger mentions a story, there is a high likelihood that it will be noticed and mentioned by other bloggers within that person’s sphere of influence. The more bloggers who cite and comment upon a story, the more likely is that their comments will be noticed by someone else. A link can thus spread from a major network node to a minor one, and back to a major one, depending on who is linking to or reading the minor network node.

One effect of this cycle is to create small pockets of highly influential bloggers, most of whom have practiced their craft long enough to accumulate a large number of inbound links. PR blogger Steve Rubel calls these people “supernodes.” The supernodes can create a swarm of activity and commentary about a topic almost at will. If they mention it, it’s important. How do people come to acquire this kind of influence in such a democratic medium? Author and social media researcher Clay Shirky demonstrated in a 2003 study that it’s almost inevitable that, in a vast audience of equals, power will come to be concentrated in the hands of a few people.

In “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality,” Shirky analyzed links in 433 blogs:

…the top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them The top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and the top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links. A second counter-intuitive aspect of power laws is that most elements in a power law system are below average, because the curve is so heavily weighted towards the top performers. [Of the 433 blogs analyzed,] the average number of inbound links (cumulative links divided by the number of blogs) is 31. The first blog below 31 links is 142nd on the list, meaning two-thirds of the listed blogs have a below average number of inbound links. We are so used to the evenness of the bell curve, where the median position has the average value, that the idea of two-thirds of a population being below average sounds strange. (The actual median, 217th of 433, has only 15 inbound links.)

A February, 2006 article in New York magazine explained how this concentration of power occurs:

Imagine that 1,000 people were all picking their favorite ten blogs and posting lists of those links. Alice, the first person, would read a few, pick some favorites, and put up a list of links pointing to them. The next person, Bob, is thus incrementally more likely to pick Alice's favorites and include some of them on his own list. The third person, Carmen, is affected by the choices of the first two, and so on. This repeats until a feedback loop emerges. Those few sites lucky enough to acquire the first linkages grow rapidly off their early success, acquiring more and more visitors in a cascade of popularity. So even if the content among competitors is basically equal, there will still be a tiny few that rise up to form an elite.

So common sense would dictate that marketers should focus their efforts disproportionately on the most popular voices in social media, right? Well, not exactly.

Minor influencers

No one can be the all-seeing, all-knowing source of information about even a narrow subject. And top bloggers tend to write about big topics like global politics, major industries or the state of media. Most A-list bloggers actually select at least half the items they choose to highlight from tips sent in by their readers, many of whom are small-time players. So the supernodes actually get their energy from satellites of much smaller influence who have their ear.

This is one reason why influence is so difficult to measure; even small players in the blogosphere can exert an unusually high level of influence depending on who is reading them. It is a modern version of the six-degrees-of-separation model. The blogger without much influence may actually be a linkage between two bloggers who have significant influence.

If a blogger is following protocol, these sources would always be acknowledged. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Some may mention a source without linking to it. Others will find their way back to the original source of information and link to it, bypassing the blogger who alerted them to the information in the first place. Over the long term, though, it’s clear that bloggers in some markets continually serve as primary sources of information. If you can identify them, you can take your message to the influencers at the source.

The link economy

Nielsen BuzzMetrics monitors 30 million blogs yielding 500,000 to 1 million posts a day. The service provides marketers with insight into what’s being discussed in the blogosphere, as well as what’s being said about their products. Links are the best indication of a blog’s influence, says Natalie Glance, Ph.D, a senior research scientist. “Readership is a good proxy for influence,” she says. “The more readers a person has, the greater their reach and the more likely they are to influence somebody in mainstream media and reach beyond the blogosphere.”

Nielsen mainly looks at links. It crawls the blogosphere daily for new posts and harvests links to other blogs. Proprietary technology separates blog posts from, say, newspaper articles, and filter out disruptions like spam blogs and link farms.

Not all links are treated the same. Blogroll links, for example, aren’t counted because they’re persistent and most bloggers don’t scour their blogrolls every day. The correlation between links and readership is elusive but measurable. To establish the relationship, Nielsen BuzzMetrics found sites that list traffic meters and then correlated link activity to those sites. The truth: the more active links a site has, the more traffic it gets.

While links are important indicators of influence, they can be situational, Glance says. Entertainment and celebrity sites, for example, don’t generate much cross-linking activity, while tech sites are notable for having a copious number of links. That’s where comments are figured into the equation. Sites that don’t generate many links often spark a lot of comment activity. Gadget blogs have a lot of both.

Influence in different markets is, therefore, different. Link counts are relative to the overall link activity in a market. In other words, a site that doesn’t generate links or comments may still be influential if its competitors don’t either. That also factors into the BuzzMetrics equation.

Glance acknowledges that influence measurement in the blogosphere is still primitive, and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, like other measurement firms, is refining its craft. One idea is to categorize blogs by topic and measure their metrics against each other on the assumption that overall activity is relative to the topic being discussed. Another is to weight different blogs differently, so that a link from an A-list blog is assigned more importance than one from a lesser-known outlet. Mainstream media is also not currently figured into the equation.. The service can measures links from blogs to newspaper articles, but not the reverse.

Two things are clear, Glance says. One is that the blogosphere be a very different place without mainstream media. “There’s more linking to mainstream media in the blogosphere than there is to other blogs,” Glance says. Mainstream media is the principal source of information upon which bloggers comment. Another truism is that blogs about sex, movie stars and Parris Hilton get a disproportionate amount of traffic. “The most popular stories in the blogosphere aren’t necessarily the most important ones,” she says.

BlogPulse is an excellent window on the blogosphere with a lot of interesting metrics and search tools. If you’re a Technorati fan, check it out because you will find new and interesting tools there.

Hidden influence

Digital Influence Group, a social media marketing agency, is combining input from most of the major search services to create an index of influencers. “We try to identify the 10 or 15 influencers that relate to our client’s business and not as they related to internet rankings,” says Cinny Little , executive vice president at the Waltham, Mass.-based firm. “Influence can be with a competitor, or someone in your organization, someone that you have very little visibility now but huge visibility in the niche the client is trying to reach.”

Digital Influence subscribes to most of the major influence ranking services and then combs through the results looking for patterns. Influence is about much more than Technorati or Alexa rankings, Little says. For one thing, influencers may participate in multiple media and venues. In the travel industry, for example, prominent forums include BootsNAll.com and America Online discussion boards, as well as hundreds of individual blogs. In the technology market, ITToolbox maintains scores of email lists, called listservs, that function as virtual discussion groups. The influencers might also including analysts whose reports are never published on the internet but who have credibility with a small number of important paying clients.

Other factors may affect influence without creating a link ranking:

• Is the influencer frequently quoted in mainstream media?
• What’s the competitive environment? How many other influencers are targeting this topic?
• How many comments does the influencer get for each blog post? An infrequent blogger who doesn’t draw many links may still be well respected whenever he or she does draw comment on a topic.
• Does the influencer work in multiple media? Someone who maintains multiple blogs, podcasts and writings in other venues may have inbound links spread out over multiple properties.

The bottom line is that influence is hard to measure and doesn’t lend itself to a single number. “The biggest misconception a lot of companies have is that some engine will provide you with one definitive “ranking” of a blogger, a community site, or an area in a social network,” Little says. “At the end of the day, you have to consider both quantitative and qualitative measures, and you still have to build relationships. You have to learn who the influences are and understand what’s relevant to them.”

So many variables are involved in measuring influence that even the most astute measurement firms can’t give definitive guidelines. The good news is that corporate marketers who are wrestling with this problem aren’t alone; no one has figured it out. The bad news is that any effort to influence the influencers are almost necessarily haphazard and error-prone.

Blog swarms

A single reference from a top blogger is sometimes all it takes to kick off a “blog swarm,” which is one of several terms used to describe a massing of blogger activity around one topic. Kevin Whalen, a public relations professional who hosts a weekly political radio program in the Boston area, was a catalyst for one swarm involving Michael Yon, a military blogger and former Green Beret.

Yon had paid his own way to Iraq to write about and photograph the war, building a large audience of readers following his blog in the process. One photo he took of a soldier cradling a dying young girl in his arms was selected as one of the top 10 photos of 2005 by Time magazine.

The U.S. Army thought the photo was powerful, too, and distributed it without Yon’s permission. Yon sought compensation but the Army refused, saying he had abrogated some rights as an embedded blogger. A couple of newspapers picked up on the story but the situation wasn’t resolved until Whalen offered to rally bloggers to the cause.

“The post was picked up by major traffic bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Mudville Gazette and dozens of others,” Whalen wrote in an e-mail interview. “General [Vincent] Brooks [the officer in a position to resolve the issue] received several hundred emails in a matter of hours and contacted Michael. The seven-month long dispute with the US Army was over within 24 hours. Absolutely amazing.”

Philipp Lenssen, the 28-year-old programmer who built Google Blogoscoped to one of the top 30 blogs on the Internet, explains the phenomenon this way:

A major blogger won't find all the news bits, whereas someone who finds the news bit might not have a regular blog. Often it works like this: Peter snoops around someplace, finds an interesting bit on Company X and blogs it. David is Peter's friend and reads his blog. He sees the news and passes it on to popular blogger Frank, who covers Company X. Frank posts the news in his blog, exposing it to many readers who like to hear Company X news. Some of the readers get active and send around emails. Some employees of Company X hear the news and spread it inside the company. The blog post is submitted to highly trafficked sites like Digg, Slashdot, Boing Boing, Waxy, Metafilter and such. Mainstream news sources pick up the chatter on Company X as well, further escalating things.

Major blog swarms are still rare, but they are happening with increasing frequency. AOL had the dubious distinction of being the victim to two of them almost simultaneously. Shortly after the Vincent Ferrari customer service incident, AOL mistakenly released data on more than 20 million search terms entered by 650,000 members.

Michael Arrington of the influential TechCrunch was the first major blogger to jump on the story. “AOL is hitting bottom when it comes to brand image,” he wrote. Actually, the bottom was still to come. Technorati recorded more than 600 daily posts in the blogosphere on the subject each of the next three days. The story quickly jumped to the mainstream media, where it made headlines for days. Again, the first news of the embarrassing privacy breach came from a blogger. Other bloggers fanned the flames before the first mainstream media (which was, interestingly enough, OhMyNews, a Korean venture in community journalism) caught wind and turned the story into a blockbuster. More than 1,000 articles have been published in the mainstream press about the incident, to go along with 13,000 blog posts.

Blog swarms can strike terror into the hearts of marketers because they appear to come from nowhere and can reach momentum that is seemingly out of proportion to the actual importance of the story. They can also just be flat wrong.

“If blogging is journalism, then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from [disgraced former New York Times reporter] Jayson Blair,” wrote Daniel Lyons in “Attack of the Blogs” in the November 14, 2005 issue of Forbes. “Many repeat things without bothering to check on whether they are true, a penchant political operatives have been quick to exploit. ‘Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won't print. So they'll give those stories to the blogs,’ says Christian Grantham, a Democratic consultant in Washington who also blogs.”

There’s no question that character assassination or the profit motive play a role in some blog swarms and that people and businesses have been hurt. This is where the role of the A-list bloggers becomes more important. In my interviews with top bloggers, many admitted that they will publish information based on speculative sources. The benefit of this approach, they say, is that it allows them to get the story first. They rely on their readers to fact-check the information. It is, essentially, a public draft-and-revise process, but it makes many people distinctly uneasy.

However, there may be no turning back. “Blogs are the future of journalism,” says Larry Weber, a leading public relations executive. “Journalists don’t like to hear that. They say nobody validates blogs. I say what do you mean? Two million people are doing the fact checking that newspapers aren’t doing any more because they can’t afford the people to do it.”

In an analysis of the Dell Hell incident, in which A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis’ frustrations with Dell Computer customer service became an international incident (see Chapter 2), a U.K. research firm stated that misinformation and poor fact-checking on the part of bloggers contributed to a negative and unfair image of Dell in the media.

Bloggers do operate in packs which predominantly reference one another. However, by conventional journalistic standards bloggers have characteristics that weaken their individual influence: They single source stories and are themselves referenced by stakeholders who single source stories. Bloggers gain prominence and link volume by being outspoken and partisan, but this prominence comes at a price. As they lose balance, they weaken their credibility with key authorities (ie do not cite more than one source)

It is clear that one person’s perception of a brand, if it chimes with that of others, can materially damage that brand. Dell’s customer services now have a somewhat negative perception. This may not be the result of Jeff Jarvis’s blogging, but he is viewed as an authoritative source on it. Any attempt to redress the public perception of their customer services by Dell will have to pass via Jeff Jarvis’s influence[2].

Mainstream media also has an important role to play in addressing the accuracy issue. Once a newspaper or broadcast outlet picks up the story, the information acquires a level of legitimacy that gives it new momentum. For this reason, blog swarms that stay in the blogosphere generally stay small. Once they jump to the press, however, the news can spread with alarming speed. Experts advise marketers to monitor developing blogger conversations carefully but to stay out of the discussion until that stage. Use the insights gained while the story is still small, though, to have your response to ready when the first newspaper story runs.

“Ignore [the story] initially unless it starts gaining credence,” says Bill Comcowich, whose CyberAlert service monitors a variety of news and consumer sources, including blogs. “Answer only if it is gaining credence and answer openly, not surreptitiously. Answer only where the information has appeared. You don’t have to respond in the New York Times because Joe’s blog tweaked your president.”

A new breed of community websites is also coming to exert great influence. Slashdot.org is a site for computer techies that was one of the earliest group blogs. Slashdot has huge clout in a community of software developers, who read and comment enthusiastically on the stories it posts. It can drive tens of thousands of page views to a site with a single mention. In fact, “the Slashdot effect” even has an entry in Wikipedia.org describing the trouble website operators can experience when Slashdot sends an unmanageable amount of traffic to their sites.

More recently, Digg.com and Fark.com have joined Slashdot as key influencers. Both sites give their readers a say in choosing which articles are deemed to be the most important and readers debate these choices in active forums. If your blog post is mentioned on Digg or Fark, you can not only see a huge increase in traffic, but scores of other blog posts may be created linking back to your comments. Slashdot, Digg and Fark don’t play favorites. They claim to make their decisions based solely on the quality of the content. Thus, a small blogger can become a bigshot in cyberspace just because he or she has a big idea or something interesting to say[3].

For all the statistical analysis and academic studies that have been performed on the early stages of social media, there is no one metric, formula or service that can reliably measure influence. Nor do any of the experts I spoke to believe that there will be a reliable metric in the near future. The best strategy is to gather together as many tools as you can, so that you can make informed decisions about how to engage when the time comes. “The first step in any strategy is to be aware,” says CyberAlert’s Comcowich. “The major use [of monitoring services] is to spot trends.”

In chapter 10, we’ll talk in more detail about the tools that are available. In general, though, the best strategy is to narrow the range of influencers that really matter to you. The analytical tools will do a pretty good job of keeping you started . At the very least, they can tune you into what is being said in the conversation. But at some point, you need to put your head down, start reading and come to some conclusions about what motivates those influencers that matter to you.

The rules of thumb apply no matter who the influencers are. You must engage with people at their own level.

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[1] Chapter 10 covers viral marketing in detail.

[2] Measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation, Market Sentinel, Onalytica and Immediate Future, Ltd., Dec., 2005

[3] Digg was embroiled in controversy in the fall of 2006 over allegations that a small group of members colluded to promote their favorite stories to top positions on the site. The incident highlighted the limitations of the community model when it comes to deciding the value of information.