I agree with you completely. Most “experts” are way off-base on a lot of issues. Either they’ve never seen success over the popularity numbers, so that’s what they focus on (which is utter bullshit), or they’ve found real success with a client or two and then they become evangelists for the tools that worked for them and act like they should be used in a similar way by everyone else (also utter bullshit). And a lot of it is just echoing something someone read, heard, saw, etc. rather than being useful or in any way original. But as bad as it is in social media, it’s much moreso in the SEO world. I’m glad to hear that you saw through a lot of it, and very sorry they wasted so much time until that happened.

It sounds like you have a good plan in place now — finding what works for you, making choices based on the time you can actually devote to doing it “right,” and emphasizing quality and value to your customers, readers, etc. I wish more people would follow suit!

The main problem is that these metrics are used as little more than linkbait by supposed social media professionals — giving businesses a false sense of their value. They do it in part to build hype around social media in general and because popularity metrics can be easily manipulated. It’s something many of them do for clients, and hyping up the false value validates their professional existence. Yes, in that sense it’s similar to SEO folks especially earlier in the game. But building an industry on smoke and mirrors is foolish, and if anything social media folks should have learned that from SEOs example rather than repeating it.

As for influence, it’s immeasurable. It will never be possible to truly measure it, and social media folks need to stop pretending that they can. You cannot know every reader’s or visitor’s opinion on an issue and how you’ve changed or reinforced it. That’s influence. You won’t ever be able to see every action people take as a result of you. That’s influence. Instead they look at retweets and links and likes — all things that require very little effort, and therefore little to no actual influence. And not measuring influence is fine. But they need to stop blatantly lying to clients and the public about what they’re measuring — popularity masked as so-called influence, with no acknowledgement of the fact that almost every single popularity metric around can (and is) heavily manipulated. Sexy or not, lying is never acceptable.

Don’t worry. I won’t misconstrue a link as false “influence.” 😉