Who is Listening to You? (Measuring Your Personal Influence)-Part 1 of 2

I had a lot to share on this subject, so this will be the first post of a two-part series. The second part will be posted tomorrow.

Update: The second part is available here.

Over at the Forbes CMO network, Marian Salzman recently wrote an article regarding the measurement of personal influence where she discusses the growing realization among marketers that anyone can be a brand.

Building an online sphere of influence can be a powerful way to market not only your product or service, but also yourself. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an employee, social influence is going to continue to grow as an important part of your professional credentials.

Creating an influence network (or Tribe) is a powerful engine you can put behind your ideas and your career. I see this influence being quantified by a mix of statistics and metrics, similar to the way we track online advertising or database marketing.

Audience:
# of Twitter Followers
# of Facebook Friends
# of LinkedIn Contacts
# of Monthly Blog Visitors
# of Blog RSS/Feedburner Subscribers
# of downloads of an eBook someone authored (along with languages it’s been translated to, or number of countries it has been downloaded from)
# of attendees at meetups held by the individual
-Success on social news sites, such as reddit or digg. (like, reddit karma points. Or total number of diggs to articles submitted).
-Google PageRank of their personal site, blog, etc.
-Search Engine results around terms (e.g. having a high placement for searches of “small business marketing”)

Frequency:
# of Twitter Updates/Facebook Status Messages
# of Monthly Blog Posts
# of Monthly Comments on other blogs
# of Meetups organized by individual

Engagement:
# of comments on their blog by others
# of LinkedIn recommendations
# of referrers to their blog/articles/tweets (are they stirring debate and discussion in their community)
# of page views by a visitor to their blog (are they just driving traffic, or building loyalty)

There are more of course, but you get the idea. While it’s unlikely we will see questions about these metrics popping up on job applications, the smart marketer/applicant will start promoting themselves in this way. As job applicants continue to talk about the diminishing returns provided by resumes and cover letters, offering a snapshot of their social influence will make much more of an impact.

Tomorrow we will take a look at the two different ways this influence will be used to make people more valuable.