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Intelligence
Popularity is a Dubious Metric

Intelligence

Popularity is a Dubious Metric

Mar 30, 2009By Michael Stoner

2: suitable to the majority: as a: adapted to or indicative of the understanding and taste of the majority … b: suited to the means of the majority
3: frequently encountered or widely accepted.

These days, the equation too often seems to be that whoever has the most followers must be more influential, or smarter, or more thoughtful, or more important, than someone who has fewer.

Then this came across my desktop: Best-designed university sites. This is just a beauty contest, at best! What does a visitor learn about these institutions in this comparison! “Best-designed” my … foot (though one of our designs did make the top 10!). 

I’ve never bought into that notion that popular=great (or even good). Maybe it’s just my nature as a born and bred iconoclast. There are so many examples I could cite that I hardly know where to start.

How about American Idol, which seems to get a lot of attention (and subsequently pixels) from some of the folks I follow on Twitter. Lots of people get off on American Idol—nearly 26 million this week, according to preliminary estimates by Nielsen Media Research.

Similarly, Kevin Rose has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter.

But: what’s interesting, effective, influential, enduring, strategic?

It’s time to think carefully about what those numbers, because it’s too easy to buy into the notion that just because they’re big, they have great significance. Let’s examine some of those examples.

American Idol’s popularity may make it a desirable vehicle for its avertisers. And it’s entertaining, at least to many people. But is it great TV? Arguably, The Wire is much higher quality work in every aspect and I’ll wager it has a longer tail than American Idol. But compare the numbers: the final episode of Season 5, the last season of The Wire, drew just 1.8 million viewers.

And do you know who Kevin Rose is—without clicking on that link or without doing a Google search?

The way to measure success is to first have a clear understanding of your purpose. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What are you trying to achieve?

Once you’re clear about these issues, you can get a clear sense of what success looks like to you.

For example, someone who’s using Facebook to update real friends-as in people you know personally, who really are interested in what’s happening in your life-won’t care if they have thousands of friends. What’s important to them is the richness and depth of the exchanges with their real friends, not simply the aggregate number of the group.

Here’s another example. My partner Voltaire tells about a website he used to maintain, a website visited by only one person. Many people would consider this a failure. But it wasn’t. The visitor to this site was the major donor for the organization Voltaire worked for. The donor loved the site, and as a result gave even more to support the organization. Pretty effective, yes?

And another. We launched a social network for a client that was limited to only 2000 people. These were students who had been admitted to this institution and the social network was designed to engage them and to drive them to accept their invitations to matriculate. In a challenging admissions environment, more than 80 percent of the prospects logged into the site; more than 70 percent created a profile; and the insitution had a terrific admissions year.

And yet another. One of the most thought-provoking blogs I read has “only” 850 subscribers. I’m thinking of Andy Shaindlin’s Alumni Futures, which just celebrated its second anniversary. And @alumnifutures has “only” 313 followers on Twitter. But the smart people in advancement pay attention to Andy. Influential, but not “popular.”

And wouldn’t a business like ours be much better off to have 400 CEO, CIO, and vice president followers on Twitter-e.g. decisionmakers-rather than 2500 miscellaneous followers?

And finally, consider this very blog. I have a number of measures of success for mStonerblog. We don’t have huge numbers of readers, but it’s never been our goal to make this a “popular” destination. We know that plenty of smart people are reading our posts and talking about them. How do I know this? Because people tell me: they send me emails or speak to me personally about things they read here. And I see a spike in traffic to the blog when one of us visits a potential client. Anyone who wants to check out how we think about things can see a long history of posts—for example, potential clients have much more information to help them evaluate mStoner than they do about any of our competitors.

So please don’t talk to me about “popular.” Aggregate numbers just aren’t that important, at least to our clients, who aren’t Pampers or Brittany Spears or American Idol. The much more important metric is a measure of smart or effective or influential. And to begin to understand these qualities, it’s necessary to look beyond mere numbers and think about purpose, audience, and reach, among other factors. Only then can you determine if something is delivering the results you want and need.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?