The onset of the New Year has brought with it plenty of predictions on different ways to measure influence in social media.  Of course, in these times when general media budgets are being curtailed and the PR industry is under ever-increasing pressure to provide a financial value to justify their efforts, the lure of accurately measuring consumer generated media is greater than ever.

However, finger-wagger as I tend to be ;-), this article I recently read on First Monday made me sit up and ask the question of whether some of the measurements that are often used to calculate influence in social networks really do what they say on the tin.

The article examined Twitter networks claiming that the daily grind of work coupled with the short attention spans of the general populace meant that there was far less real interaction amongst declared social networks. There is, it claimed, a second, more informal and amorphous network of “followers” and “followees” that post less updates, or none at all, but regularly follow the feeds from a given user.

The fact that a declared link between users did not necessarily result in direct interaction is telling of a gaping hole in efforts to accurately measure this medium.  Given that one of the basic measures of influence within online social networks is the number of “friends” a user has, one has to wonder whether these are valid data points to build the metrics around. Commenting on the First Monday article, Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang asked PR measurement companies like Metrica to devise a method of determining the real measure of influence in social networks.  A deceptively simple question but notoriously difficult on which to reach consensus.

What's your view on these points?  Are you an active user of Twitter and Facebook?  If so, how many of the people in your networks carry real influence with you and how often do you interact (or engage) with them?   In light of this research, do you think it's appropriate to use raw numbers as a key component of any PR engagement or influence metric?  What are your thoughts on how meaningful metrics can be built around the network conundrum?  We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Finally, are you aware that Metrica tweets regularly via our MetricaMeasures account on Twitter? Please follow us at www.twitter.com/metricameasures. 

Image link: http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/