I am delighted to share with you a white paper outlining the thoughts and views of several key stakeholders who met late last year to discuss the issue of measuring online influence.

Download: "Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media" (PDF)

The catalyst behind this document was the publication of Edelman's Social Media Index in July 2007 with David Brain. This attempted to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the 'traditional' method of analysing a blog's inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

The white paper aims to address this issue. It is not written as a fait accompli but rather as a contribution to the conversation. In the true spirit of social media, the roundtable and consequently this white paper, discussed far more than the original question regarding how to measure online influence but also focused on:

• defining influence in the context of social media
• is influence what we should measure?
• should marketers target influencers or the easily influenced?
• what can we be selling that is better to buy than impressions?
• what are the origins of influence?
• the move to micro communications
• being cautious - things to be aware of when analysing influence
• a formula to understand influence
• what makes this actionable?
• what next?

In completing this, my thanks go to the many people who left insightful comments on the various blogs as well as the smart group of individuals who took part in the roundtable, namely:

I welcome your thoughts and comments about this document. My aim when writing this was to continue the debate that the original post sparked - I realise that there are still many questions left unanswered and several more that have now been raised but I hope that this white paper will help clarify some of the complex issues that social media raises.