Social media: peripheral impact measurement
It’s fairly easy to gauge the impact of a blog on a discussion by the quantity and content of comments, backlinks etc. But I am a lazy blogger: I don’t write very often (it doesn’t occur to me to, I don’t have anything to add, or I don’t have confidence in my opinion).
But I do contribute to debates by posting comments, referring to posts or publishing links (eg on Twitter, in conversation, in documents, in presentations, on web pages, via ’share’ tools).
How can we measure the impact on a discussion of those activities that are peripheral to it? (Obviously the offline examples in the previous paragraph are outside the scope of this post.)
I don’t mean simply how to track an individual’s online activity – there are various ways that can be done – but how to collect instances where that activity has had significant impact on the direction of a debate. Of course, that might be impossible; try defining ’significant’ for a start.
I haven’t looked far into this, so excuse my ignorance of work that has already been done in this specific area. But if not much has, is anyone interested in looking at it further? (A safe thing to ask on a blog that no-one reads!)
on 
on 
Export contact to vCard format
Email me
Audioboo
Delicious
Flickr
Google
Last.FM
LinkedIn
Nurphy
Tumblr
Twitter
For me, the value of having conversations online is that they’re searchable on Twitter search or Google search. So comments and references have just as much value as the original post. This significance can be seen in the way that sometimes a community will gather and organise around the reporting of a problem, I thought an interesting example of this was http://mentalized.net/journal/2008/05/27/stikipad_when_software_in_the_cloud_goes_sour/ which I found in the absense of any official explanation about why Stikipad wasn’t available any more.
As I mentioned just on Twitter, I’m interested in how we could capture offline conversations more meaningfully. We have a remarkable and ever-growing archive of tech stuff chat, of observations about coffee or beer or iphones. But what of all the interesting chat that goes on otherwise, in the offline gathering places? Because it’s still considered quite rude to text while you’re in a conversations, and because it is unnacceptable to ‘report’ everything you heard in a conversation, we don’t have a version of the public twitter channel that would enable people to drop in on conversations and join in at will. Maybe that is how it should be, but perhaps as Twitter’s use grows that will change. Far more people from a much wider social spectrum might become very casual about adding to the Twittersphere and our public dialogue will grow.
Just some thoughts ☺
Definitely Clare, it would be great to fuse the two somehow.
Maybe it’ll never be possible to ’search’ offline conversations though (if that’s what you meant?) because it requires the opt-in of individuals. There have been various projects to develop technologies that capture someone’s life as they live it (Microsoft’s SenseCam for instance: http://tinyurl.com/6hv5d6), which would be storable and searchable; but unless everyone is willing to share that information (or we are required by law to do so: a frightening possibility) there will always be gaps.
I’m interested in how debates are enriched by a mixture of interactions, many of which are indirect, and in how each mechanism for interacting has its strengths but also limitations (for example, we’re having this dialogue having never met, although if we were talking face-to-face there would be much less room for confusion); and in how all that is factored into how the quality and direction of a debate is measured.
I hope I haven’t completely misunderstood where you’re coming from..!
Sorry Clare, that wasn’t supposed to read like ‘I don’t think your idea will work, now back to my thoughts…’! I think your thoughts are interesting and sound.
I actually meant that it would be cool to find a way of capturing and measuring online and offline activity to ensure that public (upper- and lower-case ‘p’) debates are as rich and robust as possible.
hi Michael,
No, I think we’re on the same wavelength. It’s not just how can we gather as much ’stuff’ as possible (I sometimes worry about whether one day the massive store of meaningless chat will overflow from the interweb, drowning us all) but how can we enrich our conversations, how can people be included in conversations going on in other places. It has to be a deliberate, opt-in process. But I’m looking forward to the point where we can simultaneously be involved in those conversations on the street and on the screen. Perhaps we’re not that far in some places with the iphone users, but it feels a long way away in other places. Bridging that gap will be an interesting challenge.
Also, your point about measuring the quality of debate is important – nobody likes trawling through a discussion only to find that it finished three years ago in a flame war. I actually suspect that Google might have that covered – we often search and find discussions rather than blog post simply because enough people, particularly ‘influential’ people have referred to them or taken part. The nice thing about online communities is that things are fairly equal and you only need time and the willingness to learn to build up your influence. There aren’t the same barriers as in the ‘real world’ where it is so often impossible to get round the table with a group of people with power.
Hi Clare.
There’s an interesting post on Google’s blog about The future of mobile, and I suspect not long from now it will be much easier and more socially acceptable to publish, archive and label our thoughts and conversations as we are having them.
To me though it’s not just how to track offline contributions to dialogue, but also how to identify which of those add value to it (eg a comment in a pub may prompt someone to pass it on to someone else who then blogs about it, is taken seriously and subsequently has a real impact on the direction of discussion). I’m particularly interested in how informal interactions can inform civic dialogue, and how to manage this.