i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google completely revolutionized the way search was performed when it brought out the concept of Page Rank in webpages. Pages which were "legitimate" so to speak were given more weight as compared to the others and this started the prolific trend of SEO companies that we see today. Trying to make your website more "friendly" for the spider to take notice of you and increase the number of back links to your websites using numerous link building measures only seemed to add to the choreographed process of Search Engine Optimization.

However, with new advancements in Social Media and with Google now giving importance to the content shared by users on various forms of "user engagement", the Social Media is abuzz with the possibility of having a 'Page Rank for Social Web'. As Bindu Reddy, CEO of Mylikes.com and former Product Manager at Google puts it: Tied to a web identity across many platforms, this score would be a measure of how “useful” the person’s stream is to other people. Whether it’s curating good content, creating interesting social content or just being important enough to make news, a person’s engagement score is a measure of how much they contribute to the quality of the social web.

 What this means is an Eric Schmidt sharing a message on Twitter maybe more effective than me posting this message on Twitter for several reasons. Just like Page Rank to a website is determined by not just the number of links that come in to a website but also by where the links are coming from, social engagement should be determined not just by the sheer number of followers, re-tweets, comments but by considering who the commenters and re-tweeters are.

It’s also valuable for this engagement score to be network-agnostic and tied to a web identity rather than a single network. Schmidt’s audience is his, irrespective of whether his posts are read on Twitter, Facebook or this blog. A robust model for measuring social engagement will help shape and organize the social web and will become integral to effective information organization and discovery on the Internet.