Just posted on the Collective Intellect blog my opinions related to the whole issue of measuring influence in social media. This is an important question for folks in marketing, advertising and PR these days, because everyone is trying to figure out how to monetize (I know, hate that word) social media.

What concerns me about that whole “making money” aspect is that too many agencies will convince their clients to jump into social media before they (the agencies and the clients) understand what they are doing. This already happens — in fact, we were just arguing about that in the office this morning when one of our partners asked for ideas for a social media campaign. It was clear from the request that the partner is still relatively clueless about good potential uses for social media campaigns.

The result is that users will just jump on the next bandwagon (newer app, fewer advertisers) to try to get away from the onslaught. It’s time for advertisers to realize that the whole model is broken. Why do you think TiVO’s are so popular?
Anyhoo. Back to the influence measurement. Since social media is dynamic, you cannot measure influence like you do in traditional media, where influence remains relatively static. To find out more about my opinion, visit this link to my post at the Collective Intellect blog.