Getting a handle on influence and online content creation

As you may be aware, espe­cially if you’ve been blas­ted by my twit­ter stream recently, I’m help­ing some friends out with the Empire Aven­ue beta. I’ve writ­ten before about Social Media and the Power of Influ­ence, but today I’m going to talk about a few things I’ve learned over the last few weeks.

A few things about Empire Aven­ue:

• Empire Aven­ue is about your online Value and your online Influence
• Empire Aven­ue’s The People’s Mar­ket is a fantasy stock mar­ket where the com­mod­ity being traded is your Influence.
• You can buy, sell, trade vir­tu­al shares in any­one on the site and rate the value of their per­son­al online brand.

Why I’m into it
For me, it’s about under­stand­ing my value to you, my loy­al min­ions friends and read­ers. There are many mod­els out there for rank­ing reach, breadth, pop­ular­ity and power of your blog, or Twit­ter stream. But there’s really noth­ing that takes the next step and helps you under­stand your online value to your read­ers, no mat­ter the medi­um be it Flickr, Face­book, Twit­ter, etc.

Value in Empire Aven­ue is determ­ined a num­ber of ways, and that’ll likely be cause for spec­u­la­tion as we move through the beta peri­ods and into full launch later this sum­mer. I believe the details of Empire Aven­ue algorithms will remain secret, much the same way that Google keeps their search algorithms under tight wraps.

How it helps me
Empire Aven­ue, as I’m begin­ning to under­stand through use, is show­ing me through activ­ity on my ‘stock’ what mem­bers of the Beta think of my con­tent, and of me as a con­tent generator.

Sure, many be spec­u­lat­ing or guess­ing. They’re not really read­ing my posts and under­stand­ing my value, tail­rid­ing on the activ­ity of oth­ers. That’s fine too, espe­cially since we’re in such a small-sample beta right now.

But, when we start open­ing the beta up, allow­ing friends to bring their friends into the mix, these tail­riders may be in for a sur­prise as ‘pop­ular­ity’ may not be as admir­able trait in the marketplace.

I don’t know, but I’m look­ing for­ward to see how things shake out.