Assessing Defining and Measuring Your Social Media Influence

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Today’s podcast is on defining and measuring your social media influence. Dave MacDonald who is an integral part of our team at Socialized! works on our social media assessment process with our clients. Recently he suggested we add a component to our assessment that measures how well the client we are working with is engaging and connecting with influencers in social media.

The question of course is what makes someone influential? Should we look at the Klout score of the people they interact with? Possibly the number of important bloggers that write about them? Or is it simply how viral or broad their message gets shared? As a guerrilla social media marketer I measure success in profit and net-action or results. For this podcast I want to focus on a section right out of our Social Media Rules of Engagement training module. Here is the basis for what we consider influential:

John C. Maxwell said it best when he said “Leadership is Influence.”

He didn’t say leadership is a good idea, a vision or a title. He said influence. Influence can be defined for our purposes as causing someone to take action (internally as and personal growth or externally as in doing something). So we can imply the following:

Influence = Action

Following are some examples of action:

Message gets passed on
Get linked to
Changing or molding views
Registering and attending events
Solving problems
Getting feedback
Listening and creating brand and relationships
Generating dialogue
Getting press
Capturing an e-mail address or contact info

There are many more. The important factor here is to go beyond the Klout score mentality and realize that people are not an algorithm. I check my Klout on a regular basis, but it’s value of the actions we create determine if we are truly influential. So to summarize this: