Googling Apple for Obama followers who use Firefox
Shel Israel wrote an interesting article on measuring influence versus popularity.? You can read it here.
A couple of snippets:
But numerical totals actually tell you extremely little about influence. People could be coming because they hate what you are saying and want to keep an eye on the opposing side.
That’s true, I do that all the time. So all the visits to Andy Sernovitz, Seth Godin and Brains on Fire are really meaningless from a popularity perspective. They hold no influence.
He goes on to say:
Let’s do a reverse example. Suppose I were a political blogger and I had an audience of just three followers. Those followers were very engaged because they read everything I posted. They commented often. They took what I said and quoted me to other people in other conversations. But there were only three of them. Therefore I would be ranked lower than chopped liver in all the ranking systems. The catch is that those three readers were the President of the US, and the heads of China and Russia.
Interesting point, those three followers are pretty powerful. Of course as a blog owner we have no control who reads?our content. The trick is to stay on brand and deliver content targeted to the right readers. I would imagine you’ll weed out the non interested readers. It’s the same old song and dance…develop your brand identity, live it, love it and be passionate.
So why the headline? Testing Shel’s theory (read his article to learn more).
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