Hacking Happiness

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Book: Read Hacking Happiness for Free Online
Authors: John Havens
category. Critical advertising dollars can go to increasing the scale of a message via an influencer versus building up a unique online following for the brand. Sentiment analysis of people’s responses to messaging utilizing social analytics tools lets brands rapidly analyze how their marketing messages are faring with the audiences of the influencers with whom they’ve partnered. And all of it, the whole process, is tagged and ranked in search engines.
    Klout and the like are not simply popularity mechanisms. Ranking via influence has direct impact on commerce, as reflected by where you appear in search. You may be the deepest-thinking mommy blogger on the planet, but if you don’t show up on the first page of a Google search, then you’re invisible.
    Quantity of content is also a key indicator of influence. While it’s assumed the quality of someone’s tweets or posts is of a caliber to gain a large audience, the nature of following online is highly subjective. In this sense, we’re encouraged to always create fresh content over and above if we have anything relevant to say. Increased productivity fuels the insatiable drive for salable data in the current model of the Web.
    Christopher Carfi is VP of platform products for Swipp, a social intelligence platform company focused on measuring sentiment. He gave a talk with Robert Moran of the Brunswick Group for the World Future Society called “Rateocracy: When Everyone and Everything Has a Rating” 2 that touches on these ideas of influence. Moran’s definition of rateocracy focuses on the ease with which people can create digital versions of their thoughts or feelings for others to see in the future—a global sentiment stream that can give the pulse of the planet. However, as Carfi points out, these sentiment streams provide a different form of benefit than influence measures like Klout.
There are a number of tools that use opaque algorithms in order to try to determine the level of “influence” an individual has in a social network. Unfortunately, these types of systems are easily gamed, often relating “influence” to frequency of social network posting activity. In contrast, future rating systems aggregate the feedback of large numbers of individuals to create a comprehensive picture of what various constituencies think about the world around them. Instead of trying to predict influence, the future of ratingsystems is more about better decision making at various levels of granularity. For example, if one was in the market for a new car, you might not care about what the auto critics think about that car. Instead, you might want to know what your friends who owned that model thought of it, or what the sentiment on that model was from others who had a family with similar demographics to your own. 3
    This form of crowdsourced rating system is becoming more common in the form of Yelp or other networks people have come to rely on in our digital age. However, modern behavior has still led a large majority of people to utilize digital sites to express opinions in hopes of peer approval. And when our primary focus for networking becomes the need to increase influence, we invariably suffer by comparison. LiveScience magazine describes this dilemma in “Facebooking and Your Mental Health.” Author Stephanie Pappas cites recent research, pointing out the ironic fact that having too many friends on Facebook can lead to depression when people compare themselves with others’ achievements. While the site itself isn’t harmful, it’s leading many users to feel worse about their own lives after using it. 4
    Here’s a deep connection in the measures of online influence and wealth: When either is pursued only as a means to itself, people lose a balanced vision of what brings well-being. Klout and the GDP aren’t evil. They’re simply inefficient measures of holistic value for a person or a nation. The drive for increased influence or productivity alone becomes

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