Measuring the Influence

Chapter 4 of The New Influencers titled "Measures of Influence" talked about how influence in social media is measured. Mainly this chapter focused on how influential blogs are. There are types of blogs out there that people classify as being "A" list. These blogs are the ones that are recorded as being the most viewed/influential by people. In other words they are really popular.

Although bigger is usually better this chapter also shed light on how important the small can be. This chapter stated that a lot of big bloggers sometimes rely on the smaller bloggers to give/send them information. This not only helps the big blogger a lot because information can be found easier whenever there are a larger number of people looking for it, but it could help to gain benefit for the small blogger as well.

This chapter's main focus was on how important linking can be. This is the main way to measure how important something is. Links help to see how many times a website has been used for information, or how important a person's blog/web page is. This is were the benefit comes in for those small bloggers that help out the "A" Lister's. Since they are helping to find information there page could get linked back too by the "A" Listers, maybe helping them to gain more readership and an audience. Through links a sites popularity and influence is able to be measured. Although this measurement is not completely accurate it helps to give people a generic idea of how important different topics are on the web.

The Internet can be really beneficial. It helps us to gain information quickly and give our own opinions of different things fast. The Internet does a great job of tying everyone together in some way. But, if an idea is taken from another person it is important to link back to them. It is only right that everyone gives credit to were they found the information that they use.