New Method to Measure Influence & Susceptibility in Social Networks. In a new paper, published today in Science, Sinan Aral, NYU Stern Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, and his co-author Dylan Walker, a research scientist at Stern, present a new method to measure influence and susceptibility in social networks.
Today, finding influentials is all the rage. Companies such as Klout are trying to measure “influence scores” for people in social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, and brands are using this information to target them with advertising. Beyond marketers, parents are interested in whether their children’s peers influence education outcomes; managers are interested in whether workers’ colleagues influence their productivity; and policymakers are interested in whether happiness, obesity and smoking are contagious, and if risky behaviors, such as drug abuse, spread as a result of peer-to-peer influence.
To read the full paper, visit the Science website. Dachis Group: The Challenge of Measuring Social Influence With Big (Big) Data. Online social influence is one of those phenomena that are hard to define, but we “know it when we see it.”
And social influence is even much harder to track than it is to define. Businesses are becoming increasingly social in their marketing, sales and customer service using a wide range of strategies, tactics and platforms. Some work, some work better than others. How big a challenge is measuring social influence online? The answer lies in why we’re asking the question. But correlation isn’t the same as causality. Klout and its mongrel brethren have built simple models defining “influencers” as people whose social messages are repeated repeatedly by others. I’ve wondered what the respected minds in data science think about the challenge of defining, capturing and measuring online social influence. Gilad Elbaz, a Google alum, has a start up called Factual Inc, which the New York Times profiled last Sunday. Gilad Elbaz (courtesy Datafile.com) “It’s just too early in this,” he said.
Klout Is Not A Measure Of Social Influence - But It's A Nice Game. (Editor’s note: this is a guest post penned by Jan Rezab, co-founder and CEO of Socialbakers, a company focused on social media marketing and measurement.
It’s based on his personal experiences, so your opinion may differ.) The Klout score as a fun metric to express your social engagement – why not? People claiming benefits for a higher Klout score – fine. But seeing brands evaluating and granting VIP access exclusively to “influential” fans based on their Klout score made me step out and share my opinion on this matter. Klout is by all means an interesting platform, which aggregates your social profiles to measure your overall influence across social networks. The Klout Algorithm Klout´s biggest mistake is that they wanted to become the standard of social influence so eagerly that they rushed into measuring all the social networks out there. This also applies to most of the other platforms measuring social influence. Let´s Talk Numbers Yet I have a higher Klout score by 4 points.