Measuring Influence & Impact
The world is drowning in content. On Wordpress alone, 70 million posts are published per month. In an ocean of noise, how can you tell which ideas really resonate?
For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will partner with Message Lab — a content and strategy agency that specializes in combining “journalism for brands” with content intelligence — to explore this question. Their clients are increasingly interested in whether their publishing efforts achieved any kind of influence or impact.
How are those terms defined? Is it even possible to measure influence or impact? That’s what the team on this project will explore. In all likelihood, our methodology will consist of a mix of things — signals and metrics that together form a rough picture of influence and impact — but deciding which ones, and in what proportions, will be the real trick. While the goal is to propose a model for measurement, we believe the research and thinking done along the way will be equally valuable, if not more so.
Faculty and Staff Leads
Project Details
2022 Fall
Important Questions
- How might we measure the influence and impact of content?
- Can we conceive of a data-based methodology to assess whether the ideas an article posed provoked real-world action — and if so, what type and how much?
- What are the metrics that make up a clear picture of an article’s impact?
- What metrics are most important? Least important?
- What data could help clarify this picture, but either seems impossible to find/collect or doesn’t exist?
- How do stories and ideas that originate in a niche gain broader influence and impact?
- Are there characteristics of stories and/or ideas that spread vs ones that don’t?
- How do stories and ideas that originate in a niche gain broader traction?
- Does the medium of the content matter?
Sample Milestones
- Week 1-2: Meet with leaders at Message Lab to learn about their current thinking; Develop a list of research sources and a plan to develop a common context for the quarter’s exploration and ideation; Begin the attempt to define “influence” and “impact” for the purposes of this project.
- Week 3-4: Begin considering the metrics that could be used to make up “influence” or “impact.”; interview experts in the “Altmetrics” field to learn how approaches from academia could be cross-applied to media; talk to reporters/editors who created influential work as well as the amplifiers; flesh out questions and begin to develop hypotheses.
- Weeks 5-7: Apply metrics to a subset of existing articles in order to pressure test hypotheses — iterating and refining along the way.
- Weeks 8-10: Develop a scoring model (if applicable); synthesize research into a report.
Outcome
At the conclusion of the course, students will create a report detailing the team’s findings on how to approach the measurement of content’s influence and impact — and whether or not it can actually be done. If applicable, the report will include a candidate model for computing a "cultural impact score" for a piece of content.
Links
- Measuring Your Impact: Impact Factor, Citation Analysis, and other Metrics: Measuring Your Impact (University of Illinois-Chicago)
- Measuring Research Impact: Altmetrics (UC Berkeley)
- How to Measure Social Media Reach? (Brand24)
- The Psychology Of Social media Sharing: Why Do People Share Online (New York Times)
- “Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?” (The Ezra Klein Show)
- “Against Rotten Tomatoes” (Aesthetics for Birds)
- “How Twitter Gamifies Communication” (Applied Epistemology)
Students
