Benchmarking Influence

Measuring how the influence of a stakeholder develops over time is a topic of great interest to many of our clients.

Some clients are interested in understanding the effects of a marketing/PR effort. Others may be interested in identifying new rising stars among the influencers.

However, benchmarking influence over time can sometimes be a bit tricky. Because influence is relative we have to benchmark the influence of a stakeholder relative to one or more other stakeholders.

Using InfluenceMonitor I took a look at how the BBC’s influence on the topic of climate change has developed.

As a baseline I used the influence of IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Figure 1 (below) shows the relative influence of the BBC as a percentage of that of the IPPC since March 1st this year.

The BBC used to be more influential than IPCC on this issue, but around the end of April its influence dropped below that of IPCC. We can see this as the relative influence drops below 100%. Notice, however, the spike in BBC’s influence at the very end of the graph. The increase in BBC’s influence is a good illustration of how a heavily discussed article can dramatically increase influence.

On the 10th of July BBC published an article about a new study that (apparently) concludes that there is no link between the cosmic rays from the sun and global warming. (See partial screen shot below).

As can be seen from the graph below, this article caused a spike in the number of references and inbound links to the BBC, in the context of climate change, over the following days.