Global Neighbourhoods: Measuring Influence vs. Popularity

Description

I had an interesting talk with some folk on Twitter this morning about not mistaking popularity with influence. In fact, I find this to be among the most misunderstood issues in measuring social media. Popularity is easy to measure. All you do, is look at the total number of visitors and/or the frequency of visits. You can increase sheer numbers by a few tricks the the SEO crowd will tell you about, or by posting frequently or by extending a conversation cited on TechMeme. You need to be frequent and you need to drop a lot of big names names like "Google," "Apple," or "Obama." A killer headline for the SEO folks would be "Googling Apple for Obama followers who use Firefox." You'd get a ton of traffic, but would it be relevant to your purposes? And would you be influencing anyone at all. But numerical totals actually tell you extremely little about influence. People could be coming because they hate what you are saying and want to keep an eye on the opposing side. I follow a couple of political blogs, for example, where I fundamentally and passionately disagree with the authors. For a very long time, the site was called Naked Conversations, which made good sense since it was started

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