As reported in the Wall Street Journal Online, there is a new game in town for all the social media movers and shakers. The number of followers you have on Twitter? That’s so 2010. The number of friends you have on Facebook? Please. The hot ranking today is your social media influence score—as provided by services such as PeerIndex, Klout, and Twitalyzer using proprietary equations that evaluate your activity across multiple social media outlets.
Businesses, and especially retailers, are eager to court individuals with high rankings, sometimes going so far as to send them on free vacations or invite them to exclusive parties. In return, the businesses hope for word-of-mouth—or is that word-of-tweet?—buzz they couldn’t buy otherwise
Eager for the attention—and the freebies—some social media mavens are seeking to game the system, doing everything they can to raise their rankings. As the WSJ reports, this may involve “one night stands,” the practice of following someone on Twitter so they’ll follow you in return, then dumping them after a short amount of time. You see, having more people following you than you are following is a sign of influence in social media circles—or at least the circles that attempt to quantify ever-elusive influence. Which raises an important question—are these social media influence rankings really indicative of significant marketing power in the real world? The science, if it is a science, has probably not been around long enough to say one way or the other.
More troubling perhaps is the ethics at play here on both sides. Trading gifts for favorable opinions, though a common practice, is also known as a bribe. Companies concerned about their ethical standards, not to mention possible legal ramifications, should certainly shy away from this practice. As for those individuals willing to game the system to garner influence, they may find themselves in the same boat as the “friend” who calls after years of silence and immediately launches into a sales pitch for the latest multi-level marketing scam. The first word in social media is “social” after all, and socializing purely to advance one’s own goals will likely win a person no friends—well, maybe Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but that’s not really the same thing, is it?
Jon Strother
Social Media Manager