The long ugly road of measurement and influencers

I’ve been immersed in the world of measurement and influencers since the beginning. I wrote the first book on the subject.

There has been a tremendous amount of progress in testing impact — a lot of money has been devoted to attribution models. But when it comes to finding relevant influencers, especially in the B2B space, it’s been disappointing. Today I will lament that we have made almost no progress in the last ten years.

Influence based on breadcrumbs

The first company to attempt assessing influencers was Klout. Around 2009, Joe Fernandez had his jaw wired shut after an operation and had a lot of time on his hands to watch how the emerging social media streams worked. He noticed that certain people could spark actions on the web better than others and wondered if there was a way to track it and assign influence value scores to certain individuals.

Joe hired a bunch of Ph.D. statisticians and social scientists and came up with a rudimentary system, scoring every person on social media from zero to 10.

The idea was met with outrage. How could Klout possibly measure a person’s influence? After all, they had no insight into our homes and workplaces!