While I was away, David Brain and Jonny Bentwood provoked a fascinating debate by proposing a new measure of how influential particular internet people and publications are, what they call the Social Media Index.

The gist of the idea is that the traditional ‘A’ list of bloggers, the Technorati 100, has become outdated as a guide to how influential ‘internet people’ are, with the rise of social networks and services. Activity (or lack of it) on services like Twitter, Facebook and so forth might mean that individuals are more or less influential than the ranking of their blog would suggest. A formula that combines and weights a person’s presence on all these different services would come up with a ranking that embraces far more than the position of their blog in the Technorati hit chart.

This makes a lot of sense. I can see that someone with over 1000 Twitter followers, like Jason Calacanis, is exerting influence well over and above what appears on his blog. It also democratises things somewhat – counting inbound links to a blog means that it’s largely just other bloggers who decide which are the most important. And most people don’t blog at all. However, most (WASP) people are on some sort of social network. Their ranking (number of friends) on Facebook arguably provides a more representative indication of a person’s influence than the number of bloggers that write about what that person has written. There are a lot of issues to be overcome, of course, as the authors freely admit, in exactly how different services might be weighted. Is a Twitter friend worth less than a Linked-In contact, or more? Is a MySpace profile more valuable than one on Piczo?

The original post provoked more than 90 responses and some very good debate – the sort of grown-up discussion that makes you proud to be a blogger. Much of this, I think it is fair to say, concerned the mechanics of the weighting, so I’m going to leave that alone here and just raise a couple of points about the overall idea.

Individuals and Institutions

The top blogs on Technorati are written by teams, not individuals. They’re Engadget, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Techcrunch and Lifehacker. While some of the individuals behind these publications are undoubtedly active in other social media services, their publications, generally-speaking, are not. Is Engadget no longer one of the most important influencers on gadgets because it doesn’t have a Facebook profile? I’d suggest not. While MySpace allows team profiles, Facebook does not. The social media index favours individuals over institutions.

In some senses, this is absolutely fine, of course. Engadget and the rest are made of individuals when push comes to shove. And if you were seeking publicity, it would be a good idea to approach the most influential person on a publication rather than the one that sits at the back. At the same time, though, these publications are bigger than the sum of their parts. I’d be hard-pressed to name more than a couple of people who work on any of those top blogs, but I know that what they say as a blog creates big waves.

Making ‘Friends’ is Easy

There are around 1000 business cards mouldering away in my desk drawer. If I suddenly got organised and started typing all those email addresses into Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter, my Social Media Index rating would soar. Would I then have become more influential? I’d suggest not, or only in a very small way, since more people would become remotely aware of what I’m up to.

I’m sure we’re all aware of professional link-hoarders. The people who have 1000s of friends on every social media platform you could care to mention. Are they very influential, or are they simply self-publicists, desperate to garner attention? A bit of both, I’d suggest, in many cases. To some extent, everyone on the system is playing this game. The average number of friends on Facebook is 89. When it comes to real-life friendships that we actively maintain, the average number is 33.

Similarly, we all know people who Twitter or blog or status-update their every breathing moment. Their name flashes up again and again wherever you go. Are they influencing you more because they are so loquacious, or are they just always there, like the old guy at the end of the bar in your local pub?

On the other end of the scale, there are plenty of people that I would argue are highly influential who don’t do anything (as far as the Index is concerned) but write articles (I hesitate to use the word ‘blog’ in this instance). Nick Carr, Paul Graham and Clay Shirky come to mind – a very modest rate of output compared to the typical social media tart, but enormously influential because every word counts. When these guys get round to writing something, we all sit up.

So I guess what I’m trying to say there is that just because someone gets a fair amount of attention, insofar as automatically counted friend numbers and so forth is concerned, it doesn’t mean that they’re influential. People can get a lot of attention for the wrong reasons, too – there are a number of ‘top’ bloggers whose entire readership appear to hate them, judging from the comments on their sites, though I would not be so rude as to name any of them.

Influencing who about what?

The most influential internet person, according to the experimental Social Media Index, is Steve Rubel. Discounting any arguments about how the sums are done, he’d still come up pretty high on any revised version of the Index. He’s a prolific writer with tons of fans, a great blog and a very rounded presence on a large number of social media sites. Rubel is certainly very influential.

When it comes to social media and PR.

But would you ask Rubel for horse-racing tips, what to order in a curry house or the best women’s perfume? For all I know, he may well be an expert on all those things, but with hand on heart, I don’t think anyone would say that that is where his influence lies.

So the Social Media Index would seem to me to be a good indicator of who is influential about social media. All of the top names on that list write about social media to at least as great an extent as anything else. And when you live and breathe this stuff every day, it’s hard to remember quite how trivial all that appears to the vast majority of people.

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