In an effort to state it’s social savviness, The Sunday Times has launched The Social List – a fun spin on it’s annual ‘Rich List’.
According to it’s creators, The Social List “determines your wealth, not by how much money you make but by how rich you are socially”.
Being a curious bunch, we were keen to test our ‘social wealth’.
Considering all the hype we were expecting something special. In reality we were a little disappointed.
The site draws social information from the ‘big four’ social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Foursquare, in order to work out your ‘worth’ and ranking in the list.
Rather than rank you based purely on the noise you make, it claims to also look at responses to your posts – assigning points to each interaction.
The more noise you make and the more noise people make in response to that (reply’s, comments) the more socially wealthy you’ll become, and in turn climb higher up the list. You get the idea.
The system measures ‘activity’ so there’s no advantage or disadvantage attached to how many social networks you use – it all depends on how much you use them. So, in theory, someone with just a busy Facebook account could be deemed more socially wealthy than someone with accounts on all four sites.
Nice thought, but in reality it doesn’t look that simple.
To test the theory out, resident Matt Batterham volunteered to see just how social he is…
Out of around the 7,000 people who have registered on the site to date, his rankings were as follows. (Note that these numbers refer to position, not score, so the lower the better).
- Just Facebook – 3997 (pretty poor, bad Matt)
- Just Twitter – 2928 (better, comfortably in the top half of the list)
- Facebook and Twitter – 2919 (best so far, which is strange considering how badly he ranked for Facebook alone. Hmm, it seems that he is rewarded for multiple accounts, even though he is deemed to be pretty unsociable on one of them)
We also played around with a few other combinations of social networks and the results were very unpredictable.
Granted, like any social-measurement tool, any information has to be taken with a vey large pinch of salt, but this just seems totally random.
It comes back to the big debate – how do you measure influence?
Your thoughts are welcomed…
