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Appearance isn't Everything

Posted by Elliott on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 · View Comments 

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A friend and coworker Ryan told me about a debate developing between Mike Volpe (@mvlope) and Michael Arrington (@techcrunch) regarding Hubspot’s Facebook.grader.com today.  Ryan (@ryanjin) blogged about the debate bringing in some good points that was shortly commented on by @mvlope stating

“I guess my position is that while any “grade” is not a perfect measure, it is better than no measure at all. And as a marketer when someone is talking about my product or service I would like a way to measure their authority or impact. This is one of the uses of a score from Twitter Grader or Facebook Grader. If you get a low score on Facebook Grader, it is not an insult. It just means that you have less influence than some other people. You are right that only targeting people with high grades is a mistake. You need both authority AND relevance. So the grade is one measure, but the relevance to your target market is another.”

@mvlope made a great point however, I disagree that Facebook Grader and Twitter Grader are the tools that one should use to measure a user’s authority or impact.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have been on twitter grader many a time to check my own score when I’m doing some self-flattering ego surfing. However, I don’t see it as a viable source to use as a measurement tool.

Measurement in social computing is complex and right now it is not a fine science. I do give HubSpot credit for putting forth the effort to supply users with a grading system. Nonetheless to measure authority and/or impact, many variables need to come into play besides a users friends, power of network (what defines power of a network?) and how frequent you update.  As seen just today TechCunch released an article People Paying Good Money To Cheat Pointless Twitter Competition. Just like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, friends can be bought but what is there worth when you’re measuring authority and impact.

I think the underlying debate here is a person with thousands of friends does have some authority however is that user actually engaging and influencing their network. Ask yourself this question, what is more valuable? A user with a thousand friends but cannot bring action to his/her network or, a user with a hundred friends that can influence his/her network to take action? The appearance of having a large quantity of friends does not specify the authority or impact of a user. Simplistically we’re looking at a quality vs. quantity debate.

Now HubSpot is not the only company that has measurement tools. Two great companies to utilize for measuring authority and impact are Techrigy and Radion6. Both companies can monitor your brand but can cross analyze users amongst different networks. These tools are much more effective in measuring authority and impact.

Anyways, for tonight I’m going to leave my blog at that. I have a lot of ideas running in my head and I’ll work on them tomorrow. While writing this entry I was reminded of a book called “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. That is highly relevant to today’s debate. I’ll dive into it tomorrow.

Let me know your thoughts on this debate..

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  • http://blog.hubspot.com MIke Volpe – HubSpot

    Our algorithms are not public, so sometimes people don’t understand the detail that they use. I can tell you that on Twitter we do measure the number of @ replies / retweets users get, and that is a factor in the algorithm. I think this directly measures the ability to influence your network – someone who gets more interaction and retweets is clearly more influential over thier network. Facebook Grader is in alpha and needs a lot of work, but it is going in the right direction. I am not going to say it is good yet – it is just too new.

    I would put our measurement of authority on Twitter (Twitter Grade) up against anyone else any day of the week. I do not think Radian6 or Techrigy are any better on that metric. Obviously their software does very different things from ours and we sell to different customers. I am not saying thier software is bad, I have used both and they do some cool things. But on purely a measure of Twitter authority, I have not seen anything better than Twitter Grade. (In fact, one of the social media monitoring companies approached us asking for an API to Twitter Grader to use that as their measure of authority in their software…)

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