After having read all the given articles for this week about social influence and diffusion, I decided to focus on social influence particularly. I found some interesting articles related to the topic. According to Huzar, social influence raises skepticism about whether the information of influential individuals is meaningful and whether it is possible to build models of influence. Referring to the research of Watts, it is not the most influential people, but the people who are easy to influence. Another research shows that roughly 48% of the transfers (information, social or work related), occur among direct online friends, the remainder occur between users that are not friends (Basky, 2009). All of these researches have given new insights in the field of social phenomena and show that your social influence extends way beyond your personal connections.
The two tools that I chose related to this topic, are CrowdBooster and MywebCareer. Both programs are useful tools in measuring your social influence on social network sites. Crowdbooster is a social media statistical program that determines which of your online posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ receive the most interaction and influence among your visitors and it shows your top viewers, commenters and retweeters.
The other tool that I discussed: MywebCareer, analyzes data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, web results and from stock markets, to determine one’s personal influential career score. This score is calculated by means of your social media presence and the size of your network. It is a really good tool to create a general picture of your influence within your professional network.
