Probably because I don’t feel you can measure influence purely by what you do online, and most definitely because there are so many variations that make up a single decision that – to me – it’s impossible to say what influenced that decision the most. Make Yourself An Influencer By Playing The Klout +K Game originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license. Insights Recommended Viewing influence kloutNow that deserves a +K! MORE >>

Following on from the success of our social media monitoring tools review earlier this year, we’ve been testing  nine of the leading social media monitoring tools in order to assess how effective they are at identifying influencers. We felt it would be interesting to see how well each of the tools could help identify influencers for this much-discussed topic. Download our social media influencers report 2010 to find out. Will the tools pick out key “mummy bloggers” and frequently visited forum posts in parenting sites such as Mumsnet and BabyCentre ? MORE >>

Bloddy hell, we just can’t get away from “influence,&# can we? There have been blog posts ad nauseam by online influencers (and I don’t mean to use that term in a belittling way, so please don’t anyone take it that way) on online tools such as Klout. And, then, yesterday’s Inc.com article on how to measure your brand’s online influence. And I have received my fair share of “influencer perks&# from them, some of which I wrote about , though probably not in the way they would have liked, and others I didn’t. YAY TEAM!!!!! MORE >>

Given that, it’s no surprise a new industry has emerged, the “influence measurement&# industry; another way to make us feel more, or less, important. Leading the influence measurement pack is Klout , who will mash up your interactions on Twitter , Facebook , Foursquare , Tumblr , and more, and send it through their algorithm to score you. Yes people, you are now being scored based on the online influence you wield. Influence scores work in the same way. “His&# influence score seems to keep rising. We all want to be heard, and to be respected. MORE >>

Identifying and engaging so-called influencers is one of the major activities in business that use social media. Unfortunately, it is often for the wrong reasons: defensive brand reputation management or engaging influencers in completely irrelevant ways, blinded as we are by the term “influence”. Blog Connected marketing Social media marketing accidental spokesperson cross-channel Forward to a Friend FTF IAB Belgium influencer identification influencer marketing Landal Greenparks Rohit Bhargava Share With Your Network social media SWYN MORE >>