Buzzgain

We all love the topic of influence and authority. Its the primary reason any top 10 list exists. There are inherently many pitfalls in measuring and ranking any person’s authority online or offline. The questions that come up:

1. What parameters do you take into measuring authority? – for e.g. a few include: #twitter followers, # of re tweets, # blog readers, # of saved items on delicious? All of the above in some combination?

2. What about influential people that dont have a significant online presence? E.g. I know the Chief Mentor of Infosys Narayan Murthy has not a very big online presence, but every time he says something over 2 million people listen to him. How do we track that?

3. How much weight to you give to the various sources of influence – main stream news vs. blogs vs. twitter vs. any other social network.

We ran an interesting experiment with BuzzGain over the last few weeks. Friend and all around nice guy Chris Brogan was tracked against Indian prime minister candidate L. K. Advani. Here are the results.

1. In overall mentions, Chris is holding fort and in many cases getting talked about a lot more online than L K Advani. This is awesome for Chris, since over a billion people in India know L K Advani, and a lot fewer know Chris. But online, Chris is King.

2. Sentiment for Chris and L K Advani is mostly similar, mostly positive and some negative, but its trending in similar directions.

3. Main stream media news is where L K Advani beats Chris in mentions. Which is expected since the # of news outlets covering the elections in India is far greater than the # of bloggers writing about Chris and social media.

4. In the blogosphere, the exact opposite metrics hold true obviously, since the # of bloggers in the US far outweighs the # in India.

5. Finally there’s a reason he’s called the Mayor of Twitterville. Chris just overwhelms L K Advani in terms of mentions and retweets on Twitter.

This leads us to a new set of questions:

1. How much more influential is Chris than Mr. Advani online?

2. Should we start to leverage circulation numbers for main stream media (offline viewership) to account for their reach when fewer than 10% of users are on the Internet (as in the case with India)?

3. What would you like us to compare next?

Drop me a note or leave a comment and we’ll explore that next in a future post.