science of social blog

This post is the first of a two part article addressing the question: How do you know if your influence score is correct? Today, I won’t actually answer this question, but will show you a step-by-step procedure that we will use next time to address this question.

Because nobody actually has any data on influence (i.e. data that explicitly says who actually influenced who, when, where, how, etc.), all influence scores are therefore computed from users’ social activity data based on some models and algorithms of how influence work. However, anyone can create these models and algorithms. So who is right, and who has the best model? More importantly how can we tell and be sure your influence score is correct? In other words, how can we validate the models that influence vendors use to predict people’s influence?

In my previous posts, I defined influence and discussed why brands don’t seem to understand digital influence. Today, we are ready to talk about the missing link in the influence industry. This article builds on the previous two, so I would recommend reviewing the following posts if you missed them earlier:

1. What is Influence, Really? – No Carrots, No Sticks, No Annoyance, No Tricks
2. Why Brands STILL don't Understand Digital Influence?

Last time we explained why nobody can actually measures real influence. So influence vendors must build models that predict someone’s influence in order to compute their influence score.

The problem is that most of these influence models focuses on the influencer. Nearly all models are focused on estimating the influencer’s social capital. Therefore an influence score is merely a prediction on the influencer’s potential to influence.

The topic on influence and influencers is very complex and continues to baffle the industry.

When I started writing about influence and influencer two plus years ago, it was primarily because of two reasons:

1. I was developing an influencer scoring algorithm on our community platform based on Social Network Analysis (SNA)
2. I see a lot of misconceptions about influencers and how influence works in real life as well as on social media

But two years later, despite thousands of articles and dozens of good whitepapers written on this topic, brands still don’t understand digital influence. The interesting question is why?