People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising. – Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Online influence is manifest in many ways — but it’s not possible to effectively measure when you think of blogging and other forms of online publishing from a legacy “media buyer” perspective. Google Analytics doesn’t capture data on meaningful and substantive influence.
Moreover, real online influence is about delivering content that others value — clearly, if you’re only focused on measuring page impressions then you’ll never be able to comprehend who is truly influential for a given topic.
This myopic thinking is also common with people who have a traditional advertising background. Besides, those who choose to advertise on Facebook seem to characterize this obsolete mindset that’s from a bygone era of product marketing.
Very true, GA can only measure so much. Real influence is still a very human “metric.”