small business gurus - the blog of Cat & Keith Matson

by Cat Matson

Apparently Google has figured out a way to 'rank' people based on the number of friends they have on social networking sites.... and how many friends they're friends have (read the full article here http://tinyurl.com/3m4fsy).

What that means is we can measure someone's 'influence' in the social networking sphere in the same way we measure a website's popularity with tools like PageRank.  This is pretty cool and has some great implications for selling targetted advertising to very targeted communities... I'm looking forward to seeing how that rolls out...

It will also be interesting to see the impact that it has on social networking.  There will be the existing 'big' influencers that will of course gain a high ranking (like Seth Godin or Chris Brogan) because they have, over time, developed a strong online network by engaging with their 'followers'.  However it will be interesting to see how people try to manipulate the ranking tool.... I see it already in some of the networks I belong too.... people 'adding me as a friend' without 'introducing' themselves or engaging with me after that inital 'friend request' - so in other words all they're doing is building they're friends numbers.

As Dennis Howlett says as a guest on Chris's site "I'm betting that of the near 2,000 people that follow me [on Twitter],less than 10% are truly active".

I'm sure, just as Google page rank recognises 'link spamming' as 'illegitimate' when it comes to trying to boost a site's ranking it will also recognise 'friend collecting' and discount it when it comes to ranking influence.... but it will be fun to see how people try to 'game' the system.

My point then for today is to treat online social networking like you would with any other networking - with integrity, follow-through and engagement.  The purpose of building a network (any network) is to build a community of like-minded people with similar interests.  It's not to see how many people you can 'collect' - whether it's business cards or 'online friends' - it's pointless if you're not really connecting with them.

Cat

P.S. thanks to Anne Bartlett Bragg and her Twitter post for the article that prompted all this thinking