SIM Scoring: Social Media Influence Metrics are an Art

Influence metrics are growing up. According to Adage, Razorfish is about to introduce "the SIM score, which stands for social influence marketing." The new score is covered by Abbey Klaassen in What's Your Brand's Social Score?. Social media marketers have long sought (relatively speaking) a standard measure of social media ROI. I don't know that this SIM score is it. Let's have a quick look.

The SIM score is apparently a social media version of the Net Promoter mode. Adage puts it like this: "How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?" (To get the score, subtract the "highly likelies," or promoters, from the "unlikelies," or detractors.)

And according to the article, the Razorfish SIM score seeks to capture the strength of social media as a medium for organically surfacing recommendations. Quoted in Adage, Shiv Singh, VP-global social media lead at Razorfish also recognizes what many social media marketers have long known: the conversation is out there (like it or not):

"Any mention of a brand, as long as it's not negative, serves a brand-awareness purpose on the web because once it's there, it stays there."

The score comprises of a net measure of sentiment as captured in social media mentions. Again, from Adage:
Razorfish worked with TNS/Cymfony to capture social media content and the net sentiment of a brand: the positive and neutral conversations minus negative ones, divided by total conversations about the brand.

As most folks in the social media analytics space know, as I'm sure is familiar at Razorfish and Cymfony, social media do not make it easy to obtain sentiment and semantic metrics. There are several reasons for this, some of which are specific to the medium and some of which are behavioral:

• The 140 character limit on tweets puts significant pressure on context. Context is often left out of tweets where it can be assumed by the reader. Crawlers of course have difficulty recognizing the implicit references and context of tweets, so some if not many tweets are simply missed.


• Expressions in twitter are colloquial, if not also abbreviated, shortened, and clipped. Again, expressions often don't explicitly reference topics and content (brands, industries, products included).


• People make recommendations in twitter shaped in part by who they follow and who's following them. One can't remove the act of recommending from the audience the recommendation is made to or in front of. People will often make recommendations not only to share their feelings about a product/brand, but also to publicly identify with that product or brand. References made in social media like twitter reflect on the twitterer. Tweets can show a person identifying with something or someone, attracting the attention of someone, showing gratitude to someone, showing affection for someone, and so on.


• In public social media like twitter, a recommendation may also serve the purpose of building a person's credibility or reputation as an expert, influencer, trusted authority, and so on. Consider the difference in recommendations made by @Scobleizer and @GuyKawasaki and @jowyang. Each of these heavy users and influencers has his own way of watching for, filtering, selecting and then tweeting or retweeting. @guykawasaki has influence as a newswire, more than @jowyang, whose influence rests more on his personal and professional authority.


• Recommendations can come as answers to solicited or unsolicited requests for help or information.


• Recommendations may be made as a means of introduction on twitter -- sometimes to get followed back, to get noticed, or simply to be helpful.

These are some of the ways in which recommendations might be distinguished in social media from recommendations made face to face or by other means (as measured by the Net Promoter method). In conversational media, the act of communicating is difficult to separate from the information communicated. Recommendations and the act of recommending can be measured differently, and have different meanings: the intention behind the act, the message or information provided, motives inferred by recipient to the act. (Person A tells person B to go see Harry Potter, hoping to get the question "Oh you saw it?! Was it good?" and instead Person B ignores Person A, wondering to herself "Why is A telling me to see Harry Potter? Don't they know it's not my kind of thing?")

There are also ways in which recommendations may elude attempts to simplify sentiment captured from social media. There are also ways in which social media provide information about a brand's "influence" that are not in what people say but in how they say it, to whom, and what happens when they do. Some of this is what we can call "envelope" information (tweet addressing: to whom, for whom, citing whom, or @name, @reply, RT).

The rest of it is in the distribution: reach, volume, velocity, acceleration. These are aspects of flow and are among the attributes captured by some social media analytics tools. In marketing speak:

• How quickly is brand retweeted?


• Who retweets?


• How deep down a social graph does the retweeting go?


• How far across a social network does the retweeting go?


• and so on

I know that these aspects of social media activity are difficult to track and measure. But it would be great if there were an industry-wide effort to define and codify some of the attributes of social networks, relationship-based communications, and common types of expression in order to better represent conversational activity in social media. The results would not only paint a more accurate picture of brand presence in social media, but would also match the real social mechanics and dynamcis of online conversations. It may take a while for algorithms and tools to emerge for this. In the meantime, I would supplement SIM scoring with insight from a good community manager.

Influence on Twitter

I have little time this morning to write the post this topic requires, but it's been on my mind for a couple weeks and rather than wait, I'd like to put a few things down on the page. The issue of influence on twitter is not as simple as it might first appear. Twitter is becoming an increasingly differentiated social space, as we'd expect, but its lack of social structure and its limited forms of interaction engender a lot of social distortions. If it is the case that a social field exists on twitter, and I think it's clear that ones does exist, then social differentiation is an anthropological and social necessity. People want to know who they are and where they stand vis a vis the rest of the audience.

Influence has been the most popular way of differentiating people on twitter. In its simplest form, influence is just popularity, as measured by total number of followers. But we know that doesn't really say much. It's a kind of "circulation" model, akin perhaps to circ numbers in the print world, or viewers and listeners in tv and radio. Not very sophisticated, we have to admit, and far less than what interactive media can offer. That said, influence as popularity is, well, a popular metric.

So let's try to break this down a little.

For starters, a few observations. Influence is not absolute, but is relative. Power is not absolute, it is relative. And sociologically speaking, influence can be understood as a form of power. There are different kinds of influence.

Some types of influence:
Social influence, as rank or position within a community: the community may be defined as everyone, or a subset of everyone. Some influence metrics for twitter, such as Twitalyzer, measure one's influence against the entire twitter community. Others, like Klout, must lop off the celebrities (with 250k followers, they are outliers and skew results dramatically) and provide a more meaningful influence score. A simple rank of one's position among all twitter users strikes me as meaningless. (Although it must be fun for those at the top.)

Local influence, as rank within a social group or local community: It makes more sense to measure influence within a circumscribed group of people. The question then becomes "which group?" One answer might be: whatever group we can observe and measure. But let's not limit ourselves to what we can observe and measure today. Let's instead consider some different ways of qualifying influence theoretically:

Influence among followers, those a person follows and those who follow, differentiated by reciprocated and non-reciprocated follow relationships. (Note that without going into details, there is a high degree of distortion here, and dirt in the data, for some people deliberately ignore, say using Tweepler, and some ignore inattentively and coincidentally, and some ignore accidentally. A lot is missed on twitter, and not all people manage followers in the same way.

Influence among an affiliative group, the types of affiliation ranging from industry to social or cultural topic and context, profession, place, and so on. This is difficult to determine today, but over time can be extracted using hashtagged tweets, linguistic markers (words, topics, people names, event names, industry terms and so on), retweets (who is retweeted, what associative affiliation does it suggest), @replies (ditto), and twitter profiles. Scraping other social network profiles will help to qualify this. Here, Peoplebrowsr strkes me as a strong contender but one which, if it catches, will change user behavior also.

Influence as social capital, which might seem like social rank but involves more of the person's actual and perceived social capital. What do I mean by this? There's a well-known distortion in the follower influence/rank model on twitter: people increase their own influence by following the highest-ranked people on twitter. The crude version of following, in which a person follows popular people, probably involves associative social ranking.

By association oneself with a celebrity, influence travels back to the fan (in their minds, of course, but this doesn't matter if a lot of people perceive it). It is an act of following that involves mimetic desire perhaps, and is both strategic and indirect: the person who follows john mayer, with nearly 400,000 followers, is possibly benefiting from John Mayer's huge social rank.

As I understand it, social capital is more than simple popularity, is more than numerical or quantitative popularity, but is a qualified popularity. John Mayer, who follows 19 people, cannot have conversations with his followers. His fans are listening to him, but he's talking at them, not with them. Social capital seems to me a measure of influence in conversational media, and thus involves the expenditure of social capital through conversation and social interactions. It is more than perceived value of capital (John Mayer). it is transactional capital. Because the currency of social media is attention, social capital involves a unique kind of influence: it increases as it is spent, and spending it costs nothing. Social capital involves relationships, and increases with reciprocity. It is engaged and participatory, both of which suit the online medium more than they do the broadcast medium.

One question to come out of social capital as influence is whether or not it is transferable. Does it belong to the person, or can it be extended to what the person talks about? Can it be transferred from a person to a role or position? Do people with lots of social capital transfer it to companies or brands they might represent? Because so much of social capital is built on authenticity and integrity, I think these are as-yet unanswered questions.

.....

Moving on then, there is more to say about influence. There are influential practices. Strategies of accruing influence (macro level influence) and tactics for maintaining, spending, and exercising it (micro, or tweets and "conversations" themselves). Influence in conversation, for example, is an interesting one. Who do we trust? Who do we believe? And for what? I'd like to make a couple points about strategic influence before raising some hairy questions about tactics.

Nietzsche, the philosopher of power and force, taught us that there are two kinds of power: power projected and power attracted. It's bi-directional. Similarly on twitter, there is influence projected and extended, and influence attracted. Jean Baudrillard got himself in trouble with feminism with a book called Seduction in which he described the projected force as male, and the seductive force as female. Without getting into a discourse on the politics of power, we can safely say that projective and seductive forces are at play in cultural influence and identity, and are similarly at play on twitter. Twitter is after all real people, and its lack of a clear social field only amplifies some of the strategies and tactics we use to differentiate ourselves from others.

There is plenty more to say on specific strategies and tactics, but I'm seriously running low on time and need to move on quickly to a final set of distinctions.

Personalities on twitter are distinct. Personality distinctions in social media explain differences in how people see themselves, how they see and relate to others, and in how they interact and engage in social activities. Personality types are not the distinctions made by market segmentation, but are psychologically-based insights into how people behave and why, grounded in interests and motives. While personalities can explain what's really going on, however, they complicate the influence metrics that broadly apply to a population at large. That said, influence becomes much more interesting when we view it as something exercised and as a social distinction that motivates participation. Here generalized models of influence fall way short of explaining individual behaviors.

Without getting into details, for a separate post on "How we tweet" will be required, we can highlight a few personality distinctions relevant to qualifying different ways of exercising influence. I have grouped personality types into Self-oriented, Other-oriented, and Relational-oriented types. These correspond to monological, dialogical, and triangulating social behaviors. And to monadic, dyadic, and triadic social organization. Everything social can be built on isolates (one), dyads (pairs), and triads (three). The modes of talk, or in our case tweeting, would be Self-talk (telling, talking at); conversation (beginning with the other person, or replying); and triangulating (mediating a relationship between two other people).

(the following types are mentioned in my personality types presentation)

• A pundit, for example, may exercise influence by building a reputation, following, and in largely talking at that audience
  
• A buddy may exercise influence by being highly responsive, attentive, and reciprocating
  
• A critic may exercise influence by aggregating and distributing content that belongs together (impersonally)
  
• An expert may exercise influence by talking to a topic in which s/he is personally invested in demonstrating expertise
  
• A harmonizer may exercise influence by becoming involved in small group and social runs on twitter, often event-related
  

and there are more....

The measurement of influence on twitter is fascinating, especially when we move from quantifiable influence to strategies, tactics, and practices of influence. At this point in twitter's evolution as a social space, we're going to want to map the social field and begin to locate and delineate social distinctions. It's what we do when social spaces first appear and populate. But twitter is a highly individual social media tool, and an understanding of what we do with it, and how we each relate to its social organization, can really only be understood if we involve the psychology of behavior online. And that requires an understanding of how we see ourselves, others, and social activity overall, and will be expressed in the different ways that personal and social influence can be brought into play through the conversation and social action possibilities afforded by unstructured social tools and communities.

Related
Twitter applications and extensions: a list


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

It's all words, but some words are more equal than others

Words. Wrapping up west wing last night (I had left the final episodes of season 7 dangling unseen for months, obtaining, as is the law of desire, more pleasure from anticipation than from the satisfaction itself, though I hope this does not apply to the current election year), I got a real kick from the show's depiction of political campaigns, and messaging in particular. The show's characters, brilliant beyond what is possible in the swift repartee and back-channel corridor correspondence they so effortlessly carry on, day after notable day, in the hallowed halls of the White House, drop political messages as culturally on target as they are tactically on point. Practically inventing policy from the wings of power, they print flights of fancy on poetic updrafts that, as if in winged migration, rise above the current political climate's spin cycle like the bouncy air that escapes a laundromat. Their words lift, and with them, our spirits.

At risk of overburdening the better angels of our nature with the heavy load of worn laundry, however, I'll cut out the preamble and let old Uncle Abe be.

All words are equal but some are more equal than others.

A philosophical moment here, then, on social and conversational media , on what we do with them and how analytical tools can make sense of them. And on the differences in both Kinds of Talk and the markets that are moved by them.

Strategic talk: this kind of talk wants to move the recipient, the listener, the audience, and without sincere concern for what s/he/t/hey *think*, produce a response or action.

Communicative talk: this kind of talk wants to maintain a relationship, create and build understanding, if not agreement. And even if it fails to produce consensus or peace, at least bridge differences and create some common ground upon which might grow a common wealth.

Professional and business needs and interests: are PR, marketing, advertising, branding, sales, and so on, and have an interest in distributing their message as well as in tracking audience follow through.

End users: more often than not, simply want to use the tools without hassle from the salesforce, for the purpose of coordinating daily realities and building and enjoying friendships online

Problem: Arriving at what is the unit of meaning that matters.

Solution: Varies by the profession, business interest, in other words the beholder in whose eyes value takes recognizable shape.

Current conversation and social media analytics still focus on words. Words can be searched. Sentiments cannot be searched. Opinions cannot be searched. Friendships cannot be searched. Influence cannot be searched. And attention cannot be searched. Yet.

Words look the same because the medium flattens speech into text, eliminates genre, idiom, style, and relationship from the form of writing analyzed.

In the case of speech, the utterance, utterer, and meaning uttered do not coincide: what a person says, and means in saying it, offer two distinct acts, and the listener can watch the person talking, or take what he says at "its word." But the speaker is not present for the production of meaning online, and only the words remain. Context, stylistics, intent, and so on can now only be inferred.

Words. We search them and from the results, try to obtain narrative, message, opinion, recommendation, review, conversation, even relationship, expertise, and psychology. We find the patterns we can see, and miss those we do not yet know how to map or model. The use of conversational and social analytics across social media is still focused on words, and the patterns we use rely on a coincidence of word use across all forms of online writing and talk. What we see is often what we want to see, what we can do is what we can think of doing.

The needs of PR
PR is about articulating messages that both define facts and seek to shape opinions. It's a form of impression management in which the burden is placed on the messaging to present the best face, the most appealing story, with the least controversy, and yet in a voice of measured integrity and with as much corporate sincerity as possible.

PR is an art -- the art of practicing strategy and executing tactically in forms that border on the personal. The press release is not so much a statement issued by a company as it is a statement already written about the company. Produced by an inside or outside department or agency, it takes the public's position on the company. This alone makes it interesting, for in taking the position of the consumer, outsider, market or what have you, the press release is highly suggestive: "here's what we would like you to think about us, in words you might find easy to pass along or quote" -- the release heads off controversy and anticipates challenges to the extent that it can, and is already a first cycle in spin.

I say this without judgment -- PR is an interesting form of discourse, and not a simple one. It requires a certain amount of knowledge not only of the company being written about, but about the audience being written to. PR is useless if it doesn't fly. But PR is even more valuable if it is picked up by end users, consumers, and so on, and passed along that way. There's no competing with the power of a message voiced in the first person consumer.

Some of the ways in which PR can benefit from social media and conversation tools like twitter would include:

distribution: how far has the message been distributed?
influencers: by whom?
pickup: with what kind of impact and pickup?
citations: where has it been cited/linked to?
On message quotes: where do we see direct citations, and by whom?
Off message quotes: where do we see topical citations, but reworded (and why? for credibility? or as a challenge to our message?)

Speed and acceleration: how quickly does our message get out? is it rapidly reported and then tails off, or does it accelerate? can we map that distribution path?

Tracking PR through social media:

• track messaging
  
• track mentions
  
• track links
  
• track circulation
  
• track comments and commentaries
  
• track reactions (sentiments)
  
• track influencers
  
• track social media pickup
  

The needs of branding

Branding has to do with the impression a brand makes on its customers (as well as a broader audience). This impression is part image, part message, part feeling, part tone, style, class, taste, and so on. Some brands want to be easy to identify with. Some play hard to get and out of reach. Some brands enjoy broad popularity, others seek to stand at the pinnacle of perceived value... Brands have historically sought out the advertising and branding media that suit their messaging and brand the best. And the internet has not historically been a site of deep value. Rather, it's seen as a medium that flattens out the differences between brands, that reduces margins to zero, laughs at loyalty, and which replaces the market of scarcity with one of surplus. It is hard, brands may feel, to rise above the sheer volume and availability of goods sold through commerce online. 

Might social media offer new possibilities? Audiences that want to show their brand allegiance publicly? Groups that enjoy brand affiliation? Markets that subscribe to a brand and buy with affinity? Consumers able to show their brand identities -- motivated by the social rivalry and mutually reinforcing "desire" that capitalist forces are meant to unleash when more people want the same thing than can  have it? 

Would users make brand announcements in their status or feed updates? Would they place brand decals on their facebook or myspace pages? Create slide shows, animations, videos, and other mashups in which they recontextualize pop culture, friends, and brands into one living and dynamic expression of co-branded personality and style? Or sign up to brand pages on social networking sites, track and subscribe to feeds, event announcements, participate in boards, forums, and so on and so forth?

Branding is about listening, watching, and possibly about leading consumer messaging and uptake -- but with an interest in seeing one's brand embedded in common discourse. So in this sense, yes, a brand wants to track conversations on social media: for the impressions made, for expressions in which it is embedded, for the phrases, images, and other kinds of statements that end users (consumers) add to the brand. For sentiments expressed about the brand, to whom, in front of whom, and so on.... Some brands may want to become conversational -- that is, reduce the separation between themselves and their consumers, and instead welcome and participate in dialog, trust-building interactions, and mutually enlightening exchanges. Not all, in fact most brand will not do this -- it is risky (or seen as risky), it takes control away from brand managers, and it can be seen to reduced brand equity (insofar as equity is "distinction" not provided by the common person)... But many may try, and those to do so first stand to benefit from the novelty of social media branding the most.

Tracking branding through social media:

• track impressions
  
• track sentiment
  
• track propagation
  
• track social media mentions
  
• track authentic speech for phrases, expressions
  
• track markets for affinity groups
  

The needs of market research

• track competition
  
• track trends
  
• track culture
  
• track society
  
• track mass media hits
  
• track social media cultures
  

The needs of sales

• track sales
  
• track seo
  
• track propagation
  
• track clickthroughs
  
• track interest
  
• track social media links, feed, profile page mentions
  
• track competition
  
• track reviews
  
• track recommendations
  
• track ratings
  

The needs of event promotion

• track word of mouth
  
• track reach
  
• track influence
  
• track trends
  
• track anticipation
  
• track sentiment
  
• track buzz
  
• track social graph adoption and pickup
  
• track changes over time as event nears
  

Note: this post is "ongoing".... 

Of Military and Men, or Influencers in the mass and social media

<embed> Influencer </embed>
<type = "military man">
<look = "uniformed">
<display = "next to anchorman">
<play = "when Iraq goes poorly">

<repeat = "as necessary">


According to a feature-length story in the New York Times this sunday it seems that the military has been using Influencers to get its message out. These are the guys that you see on TV news and talk shows extemporizing on their personal and professional experience to lend unique perspectives and insights to what's happening "on the ground" in Iraq. Some of them speak to military strategy and tactics, appearing on TV, and sometimes in uniform, to guide news anchors and civilian discussants.

Apparently these guys have been courted by the Pentagon for years, and during the Rumsfeld years even provided him with talking points. How to reach the audience and simplify the story for them (us).

The military's been doing Influence marketing-style, but in mass media. (There was no mention of these guys having blogs, and I haven't the time to check.) A couple questions spring to mind: Are we surprised? (probably not.) Could this happen in social media? (probably not.)

Mass media according to the rules of corporate media, which is to say that they are owned by large profit-making concerns. While they are as keen on making the news interesting as the blogosphere, their tendency will be to weave new information into a tight and closed narrative form. They tell stories. We in the blogosphere opinionate, bug, goad, poke and disclose. However, the mass media still believe that their best narrative structure is the story. And when the story itself lacks a clear beginning, middle, and (in this case particular) ending, use of experts and authorities shifts the burden from narrative to narrator.

In this they have the gist of Influence nailed, absolutely. But in that Influence is embedded within official and even ideological, partisan, or agency dogma, its utility as promotional speech is exhausted on behalf of official and biased needs and interests. The influence of (ex) military consultants borrows from the professional role and position. It is not the same kind of influence that social media marketers, for example, use when embedded in messages among cultural influencers. These military experts must be brought into the mass media if they are to have and exercise influence. It's not influence borrowed (as in social media) but influence regenerated. Influence not from self-presentation but from re-presentation.

The common challenge facing those of us in mass media is commerce and maintaining the line between commercial and everyday speech that separates advertising and sales, which are discourses lacking authenticity, and ordinary talk, which do lay claim to authority and credibility. The type of influence used in the case noted by the New York Times, however, is one of "officialdom" and the power of position and normative authority.

If in mass media, influence of position and authority can be better maintained than in social media because mass media are top-down talking head news and reporting, sustained by the credibility invested in the medium and business of journalism and broadcast news. The medium, as well as its mode of distribution, more easily maintain the cycle and engine of legitimation that culminates in the appearance of professional experts on broadcast talk shows and the evening news. This is legitimation by control, by production, and by fabrication. It's expertise subject to the editing room.

Social media seek (in theory and in word, at least) a different kind of influence: peer review and approval. The medium and the form of discourse that it supports are wide open. In fact they can approach forms of conversational talk, even. This is no medium for the accreditation and credibility of the role and position -- it's a medium in which credibility is obtained from the risk and exposure of participation and interaction.

All influencers are equal, but some are more equal than others.