When I first started thinking about the technology that became BuzzLogic, social media was just beginning its rise. Yet, even then, people were arguing about whether blogs were relevant, if conversational media was worth paying any attention to, which mystified me, because humans have been recording conversations since the dawn of time. Conversations are how we learn. The discussions between Socrates, Crito and other Greeks still shape our thinking today. The stories in Gilgamesh and told by Homer are records if people planning and acting together--social exchanges are history, so we should always pay attention.

Social media dramatically expands the challenge of determining what matters. With so many conversations recorded, which matter? For the marketer, this is a question of context, not of absolute values and eternal principles. Many names have been proposed for this phenomenon. Wirearchy, emergence and "wisdom of the crowd" have all been applied to it, but we think "influence economy" is the most apt name, because it wraps in the notion that leadership is valuable. Influencers are the leaders in this market, it is more democratic than any previous market because, today, leaders can come from virtually anywhere, not just the editorial departments of a few media companies.

What ideas are you interested in? The evolution of those ideas matter to you, whether it is a discussion of your brand, a political topic or a hobby you care about. I'm certain that if you are interested in the public perception of genomics that you may be interested in the the blogs of researchers studying the canine genome but that you won't want to know about my daughter's blog musings about the cuteness of Corgi dogs. Want to know what 11-year-old girls like in dogs, you may want to tune into my daughter. Wondering about the breeding of the Corgi? Now you may want to see how the preferences of 11-year-old girls are shaping the goals of canine geneticists.

Mass media metrics were a Newtonian approach to understanding the vast forces that shape opinion and sentiment, relying on the notion of reach to account for the most powerful mechanism of influence. The larger the audience, the more influential the

Nathan Gilliat posts an insightful analysis of the question of defining influence. The central argument comes in these segments:

On the other hand, everyone is an influencer online. Big news stories--and big company problems--don't always flow from the most influential bloggers. Part of the beauty of social media is that everyone has a voice. With a sufficiently compelling story, any voice can start the conversation. Call it the Long Tail, call it Chaos, or just call it a really big job to monitor. The problem is that any mention of a company (including products, promotions and people) could be the first appearance of something that's going to be a big problem. (Or, being optimistic, the beginning of a great opportunity, but those tend to be less urgent than the problems.) The macro approach catches the problem as it gains traction in the larger conversation; what's needed is a micro approach to provide early warning, too.

How do you do micro reputation monitoring? You can use the do-it-yourself approach with vanity feeds and a feed reader; the problem is, that doesn't scale. It works for companies who aren't mentioned a lot (which is a lot of companies, just not the household names). Some of the high-end monitoring services may be able to catch the single-post indicator of an approaching storm, but I suspect that this is an area where a human reader is still most effective.

We recognize that everyone has influence in conversational environments--I've been writing about this for many years--but how ideas spread does have recognizable patterns. Some folks are influential from the get-go on a particular topic based on their regular attention to the subject while others can gain influence based on a well-written posting that gains traction. Yet other folks perform a different role, spreading messages. This is why we talk about the people who shape the discussion and those that amplify it.

Seven years ago, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Chris Locke and Rick Levine introduced The Cluetrain Manifesto, which redefined marketing as a conversation.

With Doc's kind permission and Cluetrain's explicit instructions ("Rip it, steal it, web it, mail it, post it. This message wants to MOVE!"), we want to spread these ideas and rewrite them as the market comes to recognize itself as a conversation, so we have loaded the manifesto into a Cluetrain wiki workshop on our site where you can participate in recording new insights and by commenting on the important ideas Cluetrain unleased in 1999.

The wiki is open to editing by all comers. As BuzzLogic has researched and developed its influence analytics over the past two-and-a-half years, the second thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto has repeatedly proven itself true: "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors." The really interesting thing about the very specific measure of influence we produce is that it elminates the generalizations of demographics. Instead, legitimate voices stand out on their own merits, with their own unique qualities.

Even in the wake of Cluetrain, a lot of marketers make the mistake of confusing the demographic characteristics of the individual customer for that person's personality. They look for something to hook a message onto in the person's demographic profile when they really need to just listen and respond to that person. When you can look into the conversation, you see not just the influencer but what they care about and who they are.

That said, jump into the Cluetrain wiki workshop and help write a new chapter in marketing.

There is an interesting debate about the value of visualization of the blogosphpere going on between David Armano of Digitas and Matthew Hurst of Data Mining (and Director of Science and Innovation at Neilsen BuzzMetrics), as well as a separate discussion by Lilia Efimova at Mathemagenic about documenting the evolution of a relationship.

Both raise an important issue that we need to keep firmly in mind as we design systems to help people understand influence and the relationships between people: All knowledge is representation of the world, so the challenge is to make the significant visible.

The comment that got me thinking about this was Matthew Hurst's response to a critical commenter, who said his graphs "didn't tell any story." That actually was what Matthew was trying to demonstrate, and he replied: "Arguing that the big ball picture is not accurate - it is 100% driven by data" and therefore completely accurate. But it is not particularly useful and Hurst's argument is, in this thread, that words would do better to describe the social network.

Well, not if the data or the words don't succeed in conveying the meaning relevant to the viewer. We've always combined the visual display of information at the macro level with very specific link-level analysis, because that's what our customers tell us they need. It's not an either/or problem, rather one of how to develop an user interface that combines modalities to get the relevant information across to people.

When Emporer Joseph II told Mozart that his opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, had "too many notes" he was conveying the layman's predicament with complex information. Everything in the data may be valid and necessary to the whole work, but much of it is noise if you are looking for a particular thing. Joseph II, a dilettante who preferred simple melodies, was distracted by all the rest of Mozart's music—but Mozart's music was transcendent, so the we can say "the hell with Joseph" because there's more to the composition than those "extra notes."

Here's a little inside history from BuzzLogic to show how we've thought about and evolved our mapping to accommodate our customers' need for clarity and comprehensiveness.

A number of postings about "Web 2.0 analytics" that have me thinking about the two faces of sociability, attention and influence. We're going to need them both to get a complete picture of behavior in the evolving networked conversation.

Jeremy Zawodny and Evan Williams have been discussing the practical problem of measuring attention thttp://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.htmlo a "Web 2.0" page written in code that changes the data displayed without having to refresh the page, so the tried-and-true notion of page views have become obsolete. Ev's posting provides several graphs that show how jumbled "audience" metrics have become--take a look. Jeremy wonders:

What's the right way to count the activity that Wall Street and advertisers care about?

* messages viewed
* ads requested
* active users
* time on site
* clicks

What subset of the possible metrics is both meaningful and not specific to a web mail application? That is, which metrics are broadly applicable to sites that employ similar technology for very different activities?

All of the metrics Jeremy suggests can be used to reward a particular behavior, such as beginning the process of a sale (messages viewed and clicks) or paying attention to an interruptive message (ads requested). We also need metrics that give an unincentivized view of behavior.

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.

Our good friend David Churbuck posted today about his preparations for an upcoming column on Web metrics:

The reason that numbers matter, aside from the tyrannical rise of the “measure to manage” actuarials in the CFO’s office who worship at the altar known as “ROI”, is that marketers are still buying at the head of the long tail –where things like “mass” and “reach” seem to matter.

Indeed. The market still believes in the mass media and mass products designed for selling through those millions-of-eyeballs media. In conversational markets, successes can be built by connecting with people, growing networks of influencers who evangelize enthusiastic customers that spread the word and sales of a product. As David puts it:

The only statistic that matters for a person renting eyeballs is this: did it work for me? Did the traffic to my site, the click through on that search term, the download of that funny viral yield anything of value to me. In other words, stop pointing a radar gun at the pitchers. Worry about whether the catcher is on the ball.

The industry is still talking about reach and popularity in isolation, because it is easy to record hits on a site or downloads of a podcast. People still believe the uncountable post-impression transaction advertisers in television, radio and billboards promised were happening but could only be seen indirectly.

Ideas like engagement, raised recently by Robert Scoble of PodTech, are new aspect of the relationships formed online.

Last week, I pointed to an algorithm commissioned by Congressional Quarterly for predicting the outcome of Congressional elections based on a number of factors, including the occurrence of the candidates' names and certain keywords on Google, the performance of presidential candidates in the 2004 election and others. Search Insider today comments on the algorithm's performance (3-of-4 correct), saying the consumer search is not the ideal way to predict an election.

We agree, but we differ with Search Insider on the point that the algorithm was misdirected. Search Insider says "[The algorithm’ author]'s mixed record ... speak(s) to the unpredictability of elections. Consumer search behavior was never designed to be an indicator of election results." In fact, the algorithm made no use of consumer behavior. It merely counted the number of hits on a phrase, which is not a search behavior but a characteristic of the data set that is the Web.

Moreover, the exactness of the calls where the algorithm was correct were remarkable. Not only did it call the Virginia Senate race as a squeaker won by Democrat Jim Webb, it correctly anticipated the relatively handy victory by New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez over an opponent who was thought to be narrowing the race. It also called the Montana Senate race correctly.

The algorithm was wrong on one election, the Nebraska Senate race, won handily by Democrat Ben Nelson. But, as we pointed out last week, we all knew that was a flaw in the algorithm at the time. CQ said it was wrong and it turned out to be so. The algorithm needed some tweaking.

But, let's be clear, it was not an algorithm for winning an election, only for predicting its outcome. Winning an election requires a plan and a lot of flexibility.

To illustrate this distinction in a blog setting, let's look at the recent discussion of AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis' blogging strategy, which involved blending his name with those of celebrities and sports teams to raise his Google Page Rank:

First, he started blogging. In January he launched "Ted's Take," his personal blog, posting daily snippets of his life that offered glimpses into the world of one of the area's richest businessmen. For example, in an entry from Nov. 6, Leonsis shares his busy schedule: He gave a speech at the University of Maryland's business school. He met singer Lionel Richie, who gave a private impromptu performance. And he watched the Caps lose to Atlanta from his box at the Verizon Center, where he played host to the rock band Barenaked Ladies.

He planned his rise in the search rankings. But he did not, as Nick Carr suggests, control the conversation. He applied a search engine optimization strategy and measured the results (by Googling himself), building on successes while dropping efforts that weren't paying off. As Leonsis told The Washington Post how he achieved his goal and sent messages to friends saying, "My job is done!" Not even close, if we are talking about doing more than gaining PageRank.

Social media is represented as a crisis punctuated by brand-harming firefights like the Dell Hell event. It's time to put that notion aside and think about what social competence looks like.

We already know what it's like to become socially competent, having assembled the tools and habits that allow us to engage first with other children and teens, then other students and professionals. It's never easy growing up into the complex world of human society, which is what many companies are experiencing today with a twist. Instead of maturing into a system of communication, the system itself is changing from the hierarchical top-down-and-mass-broadcast approach to projecting a monolithic message to the marketplace into one where many more facets of social knowledge and agility are required.

Word fights and brand disasters are happening today because companies are not equipped to understand the customer as an individual. In the case of social media (which covers a lot of ground, from blogs to social sites and, even, media sites where readers are commenting or posting counter-arguments in video), companies are starting to realize they need to recognize who their key influencers are, which general-interest maven can assemble a movement directed at their market, and so forth.

That said, imagine that you could sit down in the morning and see who was talking about your topics, with insight into who does so regularly, their influence on topics of interest to your company, as well as who is joining the discussion and what they bring to it. Roughly speaking, it is the kind of social competence one feels when walking into a room full of people at a party—you begin by spotting the social leaders and dangerous wastes of your time. The former you may want to engage with, if you have something you want to get across, while the latter you have a small catalog of ways to disengage gracefully (e.g., "If Doug brings up politics, I have to say I see an old friend and walk away rather than make the mistake of engaging.")

When you can begin to look at the incredible tangle of conversations called "social media" in this way, you move past worrying about where the next unexpected attack will come from to confident engagement based on your available resources and a sense of where they can best be used.

Britt Blaser, a community thinker who consistently penetrates the thicket of theory to deliver plain commonsense language, has an exceptional posting on the problem we've been building BuzzLogic to address: Five principles for understanding the flow of influence in networked conversations.

In a nutshell (but go eat the meat of Britt's ideas):

1. The size of your audience confers limited power

2. A network's value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)

3. Network nodes are significant only when they're verbose

4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes

5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most

As David Weinberger writes of Britt's posting, "The points are engaged with one another and with their readers (as Chris Anderson makes clear in his nuanced book, The Long Tail). Yes, Long Tails are conversations, too."

National Public Radio suggests that bloggers, particularly the Talking Points Memo site, and not the mainstream media, are driving the U.S. Attorneys story that has threatened the Bush Administration with subpeonas and the taint of scandal. Over at DataMining, Matt Hurst shows the flow of keyword occurrence on the topic is increasing rather than, as the White House must hope, falling off.

Source: BlogPulse

So, I decided to take a look at what is driving the story in BuzzLogic's tools. And, indeed, NPR's analysis is correct. TPM is the biggest influencer amongst blogs because it has published the #3, #4, #5, #6, #12, #19, #20, #21, #30 and #34 most influential articles about the story. But it is not the top influencer in terms of acting as a source on the story by a long shot.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the top TPM-published story, published on March 16th, is lightly connected, but has links from popular sites that are focused on this issue. Because the site has published frequently on this topic, however, its light reach through many stories has propelled it to the top of the blogging world's list of influencers calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' resignation and subpeonas for White House aides. Many other blogs are involved in this dialog, some more than most (see more below).

Source: BuzzLogic

Instead, a mainstream news story, McClatchy News Service's March 1, 2007 article, is the most influential single piece of media about this topic because many more sites are using it as the source "facts" when talking about the subpeonas issued by Congress for testimony from several of the dismissed U.S. attorneys. More than 300 postings--most of which are very popular--point to this, the most influential posting.

Source: BuzzLogic

If we examine the rest of the top influencer group, bloggers dominate. In addition to TPM, the Swamp blog at the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, MyDD.com, Marc Cooper, The Carpetbagger Report, and Think Progress fill out the top 20.

NPR is correct that bloggers are driving the story, but it is a combination of blogs and mainstream media that is supporting the story as source data and in terms of keeping up the conversational momentum. Reach remains important to a story's becoming viral and it is notable that this group of bloggers in the case of a national story does not rely on familiar names like The New York Times and The Washington Post as primary sources.

Max Kalehoff and Pete Blackshaw are talking about conversation overload. It is true the term is dominating the vocabulary of most savvy marketers. At BuzzLogic, the word is always there. We use, it, our customers use it, our entire business is built on it! So its difficult to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We all have internalized phrases like markets are conversations and dont have a one-way conversation, be a part of it. Sure, the concepts intuitively make sense, but what do they really mean?

Obviously, we have a vested interest in understanding conversations, and figuring out how marketers can make sense of them. A helpful way to distinguish the meaning of the word conversation in a marketing context, is to think of it in two ways (1) a conversation between a brand and its various audiences, and, above that (2) the organic conversations that exist between all web users, including the brands which choose to participate.

Focusing on the latter for a minute, the Internet is a go-to platform for networked interaction, and the technology that enables social media, like blogs, social networks, media sharing sites etc, provides rich fuel for that interaction. The ease with which you can share, extend, build on and syndicate a conversation across the Web is pretty astounding. Our view is that some, not all, of these consumer conversations can be followed and harnessed in real time to inform marketing.

Kind of like what is happening right now. Pete wrote something pretty interesting on his blog, Max took it, and added his own thoughts to it, and now I am responding with my post. The explicit actions we take to link to each other indicates we have begun to engage in a conversation that has left a lasting footprint as proof. Moreover, the relationships between us have very interesting implications for marketers, depending on how much attention this conversation currently attracts and how much influence its participants generate.

Conversations as networked content? That is one way to ground the dialogue in something real.

Agree, disagree? We should continue, for lack of a better word, the conversation.

Its officially 2008, and as we kick the New Year off, its always good to revisit basics and best practices, especially in an online world this fastpaced and chaotic . To that effect, we came across a some useful insight from some of the folks who influence us, and wanted to share.

Check out ReadWriteWebs 36 tips for start-ups, which cover everything from software engineering to PR. Even if you are not a start-up company, there are some excellent recommendations in here - we certainly took notice!

Robert Scoble throws his 2 cents in with a great addition to the PR suggestions - add something meaningful to the conversation. Whether its tapping enabling technologies like Twitter to forge new relationships or push a message, creation and distribution of your own unique content, or simply showing up and chatting with people at local meet-ups, being an authentic contributor to the conversations you care about is key.

And, to that end, we thought this recent post by Mike Manuel of Media Guerilla was worth a shout out. A great reminder that "its all the unspoken, unexpected and undervalued stuff that must happen every day to keep a healthy 'conversation' going. For this reason, its a huge defining factor between the success or failure of a social media program." A great reminder for all companies looking to drive any kind of marketing or PR program via these new channels that it's not always about what social media can do for you...but what you can do for social media.

Heres to a 2008 full of healthy, productive and colorful conversations!

Katie Paine, founder of KDPaine & Partners stopped by for our latest episode of Vino Diaries. Besides being an all-around fun person, Katie "Champagne" Paine is the Queen of PR/marketing campaign measurement. She provided some great insights on how the landscape has changed over a glass of bubbly. For more info, check out her blog here.

A few tidbits from the conversation:

How PR Measurement has Changed: In the olden days, it was about how to get the all-important sphere of journalists and analysts to say great things about you. Today, Katie says it's also about the public relationships you form and foster with your customers. Measurement is no longer simply about eyeballs - it's about relationships, conversations, and the degree to which you are influencing customers.

Engagement's Many Different Faces: Click-throughs, subscribers, downloads, number of users - today's definition of engagement takes on many forms. Engagement is about what people actually do, and how that directly impacts sales.

Big Brands on Board: Katie listed several companies at the forefront of truly listening to customers and measuring the "right things": Facebook, Epson, HP, Microsoft and P&G among them.

Politics & Social Media: Understanding the level of consumer engagement with a candidate's social media campaign is critical. For example, when it comes to YouTube videos, Katie's firm looks at not only downloads, but whether videos are being passed along, rated and the velocity of comments. The reality is, online engagement can translate to offline votes, despite early skepticism about the Facebook/Myspace constituency's propensity to take their passion to the polls.

You Can't Divide By Zero: It used to be to get ROI you had to calculate investment and divide that by the return. But it doesn't cost anything to upload a YouTube video. Case in point: Barack Obama's Yes We Can video - roughly 30 million people saw that video and it cost zippo. This is a major factor to consider when applying ROI analysis for any PR or marketing initiative using free social media tools.

Check out Vino Diaries episode 4 here.

MediaPost today reported on a study from Canadian research firm Pollara that concluded people trust friends and family online more than so-called “influencer” bloggers. The conclusion is that blogs may not be as influential as some marketers have been led to believe.

What's interesting about the study, however, is it positions the recommendations from family and friends online against a product endorsement from a "well known blogger." According to the study, if the two parties were recommending a product, the majority would go with the family member or friend’s two cents – not the blogger’s.

Makes sense at first, but when digging deeper, this logic becomes problematic, especially without context. While a trusted relationship certainly serves as a key component to how people are influenced to buy, it's not the only factor. In fact, depending on the context, a trusted relationship may not factor into the purchase decision process at all. If you are thinking about buying a new laptop, would the recommendation from your mother trump advice gleaned from a credible online expert? Even if a family member did have experience with the very product you are looking to buy, does this person have the exact same interests, requirements, applications and expectations as it relates to the product or service?

Pete Blackshaw makes the very insightful comment that popularity does not equal influence. We agree: while popularity is certainly a factor in the overall influence equation, we know social media has enabled the rise of millions of niche bloggers who have powerful sway over smaller audiences on very specific topics.

However, it appears the report’s definition of influence is indeed popularity (based on the use of the words “popular” and “well known” to describe blogs). So perhaps the conclusion is not that influencers in social media are losing steam, but that the power of influence is simply moving in a new direction.