Social rank or simply rank is a hierarchy based on one's perceived importance in society.
In modern usage, the term is somewhat ambiguous; is this importance to be determined in the traditional sense, based on class and lineage (or breeding) or are factors such as wealth, education and notoriety to be considered?
Social rank has usually been a somewhat fluid concept, depending on social mobility in a given place. In some countries and eras, social rank was indicated by a strictly-observed order of precedence. Now social rank will take on a new meaning relative to your presence in social networks and the effectiveness of you social media.
Google Just Released FriendRank
Chris Lang writes FriendRank, the new PageRank for Social Marketing Profiles
FriendRank is actually called "NETWORK NODE AD TARGETING" in the patent application but has already been dubbed FriendRank or FriendRank ala PageRank.
Filed on December 29, 2006, Google has been tweaking this Friend Rank algorithm for quite a while. Now public as of July 3, 2008.
Google is going to provide an advertising server, that will target advertising to all, some or just on the profile of the most highly ranked (by Google) social site user's profiles. The most important part of this so far is that Google has....
Been doing this since before December 2006,
And That Google can currently and in the past, determine which social site users are "influencers" as Google in their own words says that they "rank" users of social sites.
This will depend on:
- How active you are (submissions, votes, comments)
- Your interests depending on your participation
- How many friends you have and their interests
- Who and How active your friends are and their submissions, votes, comments
- What groups you AND your friends are in
- Who else is in those groups, their rank and your friend status with other users
Google was going to come up with a way to decide what posts were actually real submissions, from real users that posted the content because it interested themselves and they REALLY wanted to share it with their friends and participate in the network for more than their own gain.
Now with the public release of this patent, it is not the posts that are going to be judged, but the profiles of who submitted them.
What Does All This Mean?
Organizations and individual's relevance will now be ranked not only by traffic but by substance to the markets they serve. The game has changed and you will now be ranked on the value you add, the amount of the value and the frequency in which you deliver value to your markets.
In other words the network of relations you maintain will have to be more than satisfied with the value your bringing to said networks. Otherwise you may loose your rank whether you're a business or an individual. The stakes just went up several notches. Get it?
What say you?