The Problem With Measuring Digital Influence
Social media is a required avenue for brands to engage their customers. However, social media engagement is primarily based on conversations and personalized interactions that are difficult to scale. Influencer marketing provides brands …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands in a running argument about whether influence can be scored at all. Back in March 2012, Brian Solis argued that Klout and PeerIndex don't actually measure influence — they measure activity and reach proxies — and two years earlier Harvard Business Review had shown that on Twitter, follower counts don't equal influence. The TechCrunch column extends that critique to the buying side: brands treat social as a required channel, yet the conversations that make it work resist the very scaling that scores promise.
The pickup by voices like Jeff Jarvis and Bill Gross on the day of publication shows the measurement question had escaped the vendor-marketing bubble into broader media commentary — which matters because brand budgets were flowing toward these scores without a settled definition of what they priced.
First-order effects
- Klout and PeerIndex face a direct challenge to their sales pitch: if their scores capture activity rather than persuasion, brands using them to select influencers are paying for the wrong thing.
- Brands already committed to influencer programs must decide whether to keep allocating budget on single-number scores or build slower, conversation-level evaluation in-house.
Second-order effects
- Vendors competing for brand budgets will be pushed to differentiate on methodology — claiming they capture engagement quality rather than raw reach — turning 'what does your score mean' into the core competitive question.
- Measurement skepticism strengthens the case for channels with closed-loop accountability, where ad platforms can show outcomes instead of asking buyers to trust an opaque authority index.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, influence marketing migrates from third-party score vendors toward measurement owned by the platforms where engagement happens — concentrating pricing power with whoever can observe both the conversation and its commercial result.
- A durable gap opens between what brands want to buy (persuasion) and what any score can sell (proxies), inviting recurring cycles of hype, critique, and retooling across every new social platform.
The trend: Digital-influence measurement is moving from single-number authority scores toward outcome-based proof, with each methodological critique narrowing what scoring vendors can credibly claim.