PR and marketing people love a good list and Andrew Smith has done a brilliant job in creating some stellar PR business lists with his PRWeek Power Players of Social Media and PRWeek Power Book 2011 lists. Both Klout and PeerIndex attempt to ‘measure’ influence using a combination of factors such as authority, activity and audience. For understandable reasons neither reveals the exact algorithm that they use to calculate scores. For pure fun I thought it would be interesting to compare how they both score a sample of highly influential individuals. A major downside to any online influence measuring tool is that it only measures ‘online influence’ and not real world influence. The PRWeek Power Book claims to be a list of the UK’s most influential PR people and the criteria used to create it is also shrouded in mystery, but in this case by influence it does mean real influence, which is a combination of real world and online influence. That’s why I decided to take a look at the top 10 on the PRWeek Power Book 2011 list. I used Andrew’s PeerIndex list and added the top 10 to a Klout list ((Klout only lets you put ten people onto a list) to see how the rankings compare.
It’s absolutely just a bit of fun and means absolutely nothing, but it’s interesting that the only two people that have the same rank in both lists are at the top (Andrew Bloch) and 10 (Steve Earle). Second and third place switch between me and Mark Borkowski, while the rest are in quite a different order in each list.
I don’t think you can draw that much from this other than a couple of things:
1) Don’t put too much store in lists when you’re mapping online stakeholders.
2) Rankings change all the time – my PeerIndex has shot up rapidly recently, Klout has climbed much more slowly.
