In an email exchange today with Robert X. Cringely (which is a little weird to say, since many people wrote under that name at InfoWorld, including me), I was reminded that social media isn’t quite so simple.  Bob asked me if social media analytics could tell him what he’s worth.  My answer?  Yes, but nobody can agree what the numbers mean.

Even when the outcome is objective – sales revenue – nobody agrees on the value of community because there is no objective way to determine the value of people who influence others to spend money.  A community has a sphere of influence that goes well beyond its own boundaries.  Even primary research – buyer surveys – have a tough time figuring out what the community contributed to the buyer’s decision.  But this is nothing new.  People have been writing about the problem since social networking got hot.

I’m going to suggest here that we are often are looking in the wrong place.  The game-changer in social networking is the fact that it has opened the door to new points of view, not just more eyes.  Many years ago, the founder of Dow Jones News Retrieval got me started in this direction.  When others were putting financial data on-line, DJNR beat them by putting opinions on-line.  This is supply and demand – when people have access to lots of facts, the value of facts drops and the value of point of view about those facts rises.  The Internet has created enormous amounts of data, and as a result, value is shifting to viewpoints about the data. The big challenge is figuring out how to organize, filter and prioritize all these points of view for people to get the most value out of them.  That’s why something like Twitter can matter; it neatly packages and distributes points of view, even if it just that so-and-so thinks X is worth his attention.

This truly is a new paradigm.  Traditional advertising aims to get people to behave similarly.  When a community does that, we call it brainwashing.  The real value of a community is in its diversity, the sparks that leads to insights or the serendipity of discovery.  Serendipity – I like to remember where that word comes from.  It is from a story about a prince of Serendip, the old name of Ceylon, who never got where he was going because he encountered so many interesting things along the way.  In other words, aim high and prepare for surprises.