I am nameless

The likes of Klout and Peerindex have been around for a while now and are an OK way of measuring social media influence. Tools such as these are a good way of general benchmarking . However, the introduction of The Times Social list has got me thinking.

Much like the Time Rich List the Social List also examines wealth, but not wealth in the traditional monetary sense by how much money you make, but by how rich you are socially.

The format takes into account activity across four ‘social networking’ tools, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and Linkedin. Once a day the system counts up your social networking activity (as well as your friends and colleagues’ responses to it) and assigns points to each interaction. The more you do and the more interactions you have, the more socially wealthy you’ll become.

Being a bit of a nerd, and after a few pints out with the missus, I got thinking about the real time cost of gaining social media wealth, and if I attempted to up my social media wealth would it have a detrimental affect to my real wealth. For example, the majority of places I check in via Foursquare or Facebook (at present) tend to be social venues such as bars, restaurants, or venues, whereby in order to be their I have to part with some real time funds (or cold hard cash as I like to call it). Therefore this has a negative affect on my real world worth. The same apply to certain Twitter interactions.

On the flip side, the majority of my Linkedin and Twitter interactions tend to be in working hours or linked in some way to my professional life. Therefore I can attribute a positive financial value to them.

Taking this into account I’m planning to do a three to six month experiment, whereby I measure my real time worth against my social media worth, attributing a positive or negative value to my interactions. I’m still figuring out how to measure this, but I’m aiming to update every Friday on my progress.