Quantifying Authority

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In “Measure What Matters” by Katie Paine, Paine mentions a subject which caught my attention. The subject is quantifying the authority of a writer or poster on social media. Paine provides a list of ways to determine the influence or authority of the writer. Some of the list items seem quite obvious, but one surprises me.
The more obvious list items used to determine authority on social media include:

·       The number of followers the user has.

·       The number of special references and citations the user has on Twitter.

·       The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted.

·       The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people.

·       The frequency at which the user posts updates.
Clearly, a user can be seen to have more authority when he or she has more followers and is more active on social media. I think it is also important how Paine uses the word “uniquely.” This is important because a user may have many followers and is very active on social media but if the people they interact with are not important, they may be considered popular but do not exactly hold authority.

What surprised me is when Paine mentions blogs as a way to determine authority. She says, “authority can also be assigned based on the number of links to a blog site.” Although this statement seems straight forward, I am a little confused. Is she referring to the number of links to a blog site within a user’s posts, or is she referring to the number of links to the user’s blog site in other user’s posts? The second option does seem to make more sense, but she does not clarify. Why does this surprise me? Well, I never considered the importance of blogs. I never thought people could have high authority based on blogs.

All in all, Paine brings up an important point. If a user says good or bad things about your company, you need to consider their authority. Do they have high authority where you should really tune into what they have to say, or do they have low authority. Luckily, Paine provides a lists of things to consider in order to determine this.

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 2, 2018 at 8:47 PM

    Crystal,

    I too was confused about Paine's description of using blogs as an authority. I gathered that the links to blogs implies that the number of times that a blog is referenced by other media sources shows how powerful it actually is.

    ReplyDelete

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