See Your (Social) Influence and Grow It

Back in the old days of the web, designers and developers such as myself used metadata to place keywords on websites in order for them to be searchable through Google, Ask.com, and others. The effectiveness of those keywords was measured in the number of organic searches that resulted in a unique site visit. The measure of a person / persona in a social networking atmosphere is not as easy to determine as there is no standard unit for ‘influence’ on the web. Facebook, Twitter, and flickr all provide different ways to communicate with other members, but how do you know if your messages are influential within your local group or in your global network?
I’d like to introduce a concept for measuring social ‘influence’ and increasing it over several networks. I call it the Total external social radius, or (T) chart. A person / persona is one voice on the Internet among a planet filled with tweets, chats, and IMs. When you tweet / post / comment / chat, who hears you? Can you be heard over the much influential people on the web and the remaining white noise? If you have something you want others to know, ideally, you want as many people to be aware of what is being communicated as technologically possible.
Think of the number of each social network as a circular layer around your persona. Imagine the radius of each layer as the total number of external personas that you have been able to capture. For example, Facebook could simply be the ‘number of friends’, Twitter would be your ‘followers’, and flickr could be images tagged as ‘favorite’. The sum of the aforementioned groups could be called the Total external social radius (T) and then you can visualize how much of an ‘influence’ one has. Naturally, not all of the layers would have the same radius, but you get the idea.
Another analogy could be with sound. Think of your radius in terms of sound. In Music, p stands for piano (soft), and ppp represents extremely soft. When a persona has a low radius, that means you are soft relative to the rest of the web. An increase in radius would mean that a persona is forte (loud) and in this case, fff represents extreme loudness. Maybe my tag could be mf (mezzo forte) which means moderately loud. Who knows...
So how do you grow your radius? Google Analytics provides tips on how to use their keyword and ‘Insight for Search’ tools to expand your keyword reach. You can do the same in each respective social network:
Facebook: Join networks and add ‘tags’ to your profile. The more you join, the better...
Twitter: Use #hashtags and get prominent tweeters to re-tweet (RT) your comments, links, and notes. Don't know what they are? Learn about #hashtags here...
flickr: Tag your images using the most prominently searched keywords
Perhaps an API will appear one day which would let you display your web influence. Imagine your power...Would you use it? Do you think others would adopt it?
Real: influence, keywords, metadata, sound
Imagined: talking softly in a loud room and being heard