Measuring online influence and the elephant in the room

Measuring online influence and the elephant in the room | MackCollier.com.

Klout is super hot right now among social media talking heads because it’s attempting to assign a number to measure online influence. We in the social media fishbowl love numbers, because they tell us who is ‘winning’.

But I think there’s a huge potential issue facing Klout and any of the likely competitors that will soon be popping up that will also want to measure online influence. That issue is, what happens when people start trying to game the system? When people begin to understand how to influence their influencer score, then the score won’t be measuring influence, it will be measuring our abilities to game the system.

Any decent attempt at measuring online influence has to evaluate existing behavior, not influence future behavior.

Continues @http://mackcollier.com/measuring-online-influence/