A lot of folks, responding to the announcement of the top blogs by influence in various countries, are finding that influence metrics are subjective. Writes WebMetricsGuru:
Depending on what factors are chosen, blogs will be in a different order. The charts also show the reason for HitWise's dominance on Web Analytics blog ranking - their Blogline Subscribers are much higher than anyone else's, as is their Alexa Rank and Inbound Links.Time for bed ... been wanting to get this off my chest - how your blog ranks depends on what you value and how you count.
It's been true for ages that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Excel unleashed a vast reservoir of insight along with dump trucks full of misrepresentation. But the key to its succes was that the functionality was in every individual's hand, so that they could check the work of others as well as do their own analysis of original data.
This is what the Sabermetrics hobbyists who analyze baseball statistics all day are doing--working on the same data and coming up with different conclusions about which they can argue. From those clashes of perspective new insight is constantly emerging.
At BuzzLogic, we decided at the very beginning to make a system more like Excel than a monolithic source of authority. We imagined our customers disagreeing with our specific weightings of variables used to calculate influence.
We're launching with a sort of "best estimate" of influence as the default setting in our dashboards, but we intend to let users, once they get comfortable and feel able to apply their own sophistication to the analysis, to get behind the scenes and twiddle with the algorithms, just as they do when working with Excel.
Learning systems can help improve the performance of a social metrics system, but human insight is at least as important to tuning results to reflect the priorities of the analyst. It is a problem, both in terms of marketing and social mobility, when someone claims to have an external system that imposes authority or influence rankings that define the attention that will be paid to a particular blogger or media site.
We acknowledge that influence is constantly changing--that's the essence of social evolution. We made our tools to grow with our customers' challenges in social media.
In social media, analytical flexibility with the ability to verify and recalibrate metrics will be key to evolving with the media instead of having to constantly replace one form of measurement with another, destroying any semblance of continuity.
