What is a Social Media Whale
Image via CrunchBaseI posted the question “What is a social media whale” last night on a number of boards to find out what the phrase meant, and got back a very good definition of what a Social Media Whale is.
A social media whale is a person who is attracting a large audience and has the ability to sway opinion because of the large audience that follows them.
Mike was the one who passed this along, and indeed the answer when applied to Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, Techcrunch and other sites/people can sway opinion on a number of technology and social issues. There are also whales that exist in their own niches like Beth Kanter for non-profits and social media, as well Ask the Admin, a site that seeks to help people with their windows issues.
How can this be converted into a metric is another concern, when dealing with social media, you are only as good as your last article. While there might be a long tail involved, it is your new stuff, and how it is promoted by others that will define how well you really do. It also depends on if you hit a meme of the day, like when I covered the Facebook social engineering malware, that article popped at 2400 readers alone, but when I opine on something else, it might barely cause a blip like when I am showing off my latest book cover.
Overall readership can help, but then measuring readership can be difficult in the social media environment. We have all the systems we feed into, we have RSS, and we have the main web site that people go to. I’ll get 200 people a day on one web site, but 200 people will be reading it via RSS, and then it will get liked on Friend Feed, or Clipped on social median. It might get stumbled upon or put into Digg or Reddit where random acts of people voting the article up or down might not equate to readership. It might show up on techmeme, where people read the headlines and move on. People will see it, but few will actually read it. Rather on some of the social networking sites, they don’t equate to traffic, rather it equates to a form of influence based on headlines rather than on actual content.
A proposed metric then might be
Number of readers on web site + number of readers on RSS + AVERAGE(social media clips) / 365 and then treat this as a floating index tagged to the day to incorporate media blips or days when someone writes something very popular, against the average number of readers at any given time. Smooth the data out as a CHI Square, figure out the deviation, and slam that into a graphic for easy understanding by the occasional passerby.
That way we could really determine who is a social media whale and who is not, at the very least this would be interesting for ego surfing, and finding out where you stand on the internet in terms of your ability to influence others. If there is a computer programmer out there, it would be interesting to see this algorithm brought to life, and see what it really looks like. Give me a shout, maybe we can work on it.
Tags: social, media, whale, metric, popularity, clipped, stumbleupon, digg, reddit, social media, interesting
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I’ve never been called a whale, but will take it as a compliment!
LOL Beth, What I find interesting about this is when people compare me to someone else. Frankly I don’t see it, don’t have the traffic, don’t have the readership, and just don’t care.
Probably a good thing that I refuse to believe the hype
But it does make you wonder how momentary internet fame works, why it works the way it works, and how that can be turned into a metric that means something.
Know any programmers?