Understanding my social capital is quite fun to do

Those who follow me know that I am fairly active on Twitter and this blog. I decided to focus my blog very strictly around Microsoft Virtualization, Hyper-V, System Center, HP Server, Storage, Cluster and Cloud. On the other hand there is very little news about my personal life. Well maybe just the occasional exception to this rule. If I want to share something I use Facebook, but admittedly I use that sparingly. I also closed down my FourSquare account as I couldn’t think of a valid reason to use it, at least not for what I want to use social media for. There is one opportunity to get to know me a little better: the recent video interview with me by Carsten Rachfahl. We are also planning an interview with the entire Hyper-V.nu team by the way.

A few blogs back I introduced a site called the Archivist which saves and analyzes tweets. It then visualizes them in pretty graphic representations.

We are blogging to share knowledge and grow the Hyper-V community and that’s why I want to measure my influence by different counters. Of course the number of followers is one of the first counters I look at every day. It’s good to keep on seeing a steady growth and the magic number 1000 is approaching rapidly.

A relatively simple one is Twittercounter.com to just see some quick growth statistics. It predicts I will grow to 1015 followers in 15 days and 1800 in 172 days for instance.

One that I used right from the start is wefollow.com although their updates are very irregular. The idea is that you enter a number of keywords that describe your profile and wefollow.com calculates both your rank in number of Most followers for every keyword as well as Most Influential.

There’s also an easy way to check why your follower count goes down every now and then. If I have been very overenthusiastic, I lose 5 to 10 followers although they are mostly the ones who did not understand what Hyper-V was anyway. To check this I navigate to http://who.unfollowed.me/lite which can also show me all tweeps that I follow, but don’t follow back. So I can try and do something about it like “Hey! Please Follow me, I want to send you a DM”

Klout is a more interesting social media tracker that measures a metric of your total influence online. The higher your Klout score, the larger and more robust your sphere of influence. One thing I didn’t understand was why the word taliban was in my list of influential words. I found out that some retweeter used that word once or twice (I don’t wear a beard by the way) and a mail exchange with Klout and promised re-analysis could not clear this up for me.

Recently I discovered the social media statistics site that is my current favorite: PeerIndex which claims to understand your social capital. Just by chance both Klout and PeerIndex give me the same score although with different approaches and angles.

PeerIndex measures your status and reputation across the social Web. Their core technology examines your activity on multiple social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog and Quora today), identifies your status & reputation across those platforms and identifies the topics & categories you have the highest reputation and interest in.

So fairly soon after adding the social media platforms I am active in, I got a score which was lower than it is now. This is because they only briefly scan your tweets and activity. After several days the number of gathered stats help to raise or lower your score.

The really cool thing is the ability to curate groups of your own. I created a group called Hyper-V peers and put every Hyper-V tweep in that had some relevance.

Not everyone on my list is super active in social media of course and I certainly don’t want to imply they are not less important in the chosen field, but these days reputation is measured by what you communicate via blogs, twitter, facebook and the rest. PeerIndex has three grades: Authority, Activity and Audience which we might call the new Triple-A status (knowing that PeerIndex wants to understand your social capital).

By all means, if you want to be on this list, please let me know your twittername and I will gladly add you. Or join PeerIndex yourself, make your own groups and add me in it if you like.

Hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I am using all these tools to understand what my impact is in the world.