Ratios of engagement, influence rates ... but this would not people?

Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler - Albert Einstein

Last week in this blog, Laura Alfonso engagement we spoke of certain existing brands and public figures in social media, and we brought up the index Socialbakers defined a few months ago for this purpose.

This formula, at first glance, obvious aspects that are important to my jucio. Giving the same weight, as elements of engagement, to likes (s +1), comments (replies) and sharing (retweets) causes can be considered a valid formula to indicate the rate of interactions per tweet / update Account / Profile, but not for generating measuring engagement thereof. ( Pyramid of engagement with Altimeter )

Shortly Socialbakers analyze the formula, I read through Zite (a must for those who enjoy an iPad or iPhone) a post of CEO of the American online marketing agency Nuspark (agency created in 2010) in which made an approach to what should be, from his point of view, the control panel type for a social media project . On this occasion, a formula is also contemplated to visualize the rate of engagement which generates a mark / person social media. Although this model if given different weights to different types of intereacciones, forgets, among other topics that we will see at the end, when essential aspects of establishing a ratio or index, as is the number of publications on implementing formula.

I guess the desire / dream to establish an index or formula that could become standard in the market, leads in many cases to make simplifications that leave these formulas without sufficient rigor to be considered valid.

Finally, a thought popped into my head when Klout announced, this week, new changes in their algorithm (claim to have included 300 new variables) in order to introduce a "necessary dose of reality" influence your meter. And after spending years hearing that social media are defined by the relationships between people, and that the engagement is the result of the emotional bond between people and brands, all these attempts to establish measurement standards are difficult to assimilate me.

Where are people in all these indices measuring? What benefit do we get to put all the information we collect from our social media presence in a formula and make it a number?

But I am an optimist and think positive almost always presents revenues. So a couple of days after meeting Versvs a post that gives me the answers I sought .

When I propose using tools like Klout , but I can not rule out their use. These tools fail, fail much. And fail because the reality is that mapping a network requires a true approach to the network, its members, its interests and motives.

And it is that knowledge of our community, of individuals who form relationships and bind them, are the breeding ground of that information to help us in making decisions related to the business of our brand.

And on the contrary, we must avoid any rate, ratio or mathematical approach that attempts to define a community or qualitatively the influence of certain brand / person regardless of the factors that determine the very existence of a community (eg network interactions among individuals)

But the mapping and mapping of networks is a complex issue and leave for another day in professional hands ;-)