Seth Godin on Clout

Clout

The web knows something, but it's not telling us, at least not yet.

The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog.

It also knows how often those people retweet, amplify and spread your ideas.

It also knows how many followers your followers have...

So, what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout. Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread? Bloggers don't have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are (my readers, of course, are the most sophisticated and cloutful on the entire web).

If you knew which of your followers had clout, you could invest more time and energy in personal attention. If we knew where big ideas were starting, that would be neat, and even more useful would be understanding who the key people were in bringing those new ideas to the rest of the world.

Back in the old days, we had no idea, so we defaulted to big newspapers, or magazines or the TV networks. But now we know. We just need to surface the data in a way that is useful.


via Seth Godin

I was always amused by MySpace telling me that my extended network included 334,567,894,230.86 people. Who in the world would need to know that? It's an arbitrary number considering if you are a friend of "Tom," the default friend and founder of MySpace (and, indeed, everyone is). What does this tell you? It's MySpace bragging about how many users they have. It doesn't tell you about your influence, your clout.

Same with Twitter. I laughed at the race for a million followers between CNN Breaking News and....what? ASHTON KUTCHER? Here's the thing. Call me a snob, but I'm gonna wager a guess that CNN's followers carry, on the whole, more clout than Ashton's.

I agree with Seth. The big shiny rainbow is a method of finding out who's actually absorbing and sharing the information they're finding on your measly blog. The pot of gold at the end is endless *cough* (money) *cough* and clout.