We all know sites such as klout and peerindex who are measuring your reputation in a certain way. This way you get a little insight in what the effects are of your participation in social media and how your efforts and results compare to those of others. What you might not know yet is that both Facebook and twitter are already keeping internal scores on you as a user to determine how important and influential you are. Combining the proprietary scores of Facebook and twitter with the less proprietary ones like klout and peerindex should result in a nice overview in your online performance, it is your social credit score.
These scores will end up in the near future in your yearly review since they provide better insights in your behavior and performance than just a few project reviews in closed environments. It will be about your social credit score, based on the input you provide in your open public social environment, but also based on the closed internal social environment. Based on your actions you will get a certain social credit score and based on that you might, or might not get a raise. This might sound as something rather strange, however social media will be a (big) part of many people’s life and of many people’s work.
If you take for example the business I am working in: the consulting business, there social media will be one of the very important input channels whether or not you will get a certain project or assignment. We have all seen resumes specifically tailored to an assignment and project proposals that are an exact match with the requirements, times lines and budgets, however social media will be adding extra transparency to that.
What is being said about the things you did, what is being said about you and how does your performance compare to others? It is about going beyond the arbitrary numbers such as fans and followers and a focus on performance and thus also on your social credit score.
And in the mean time there is something that I going beyond scoring you against others, it is Empire Avenue. This site not only provides a certain scores on your overall social media performance, it is also provides the option to buy (virtual) stocks in people. So now you can see how many people are willing to invest in you, how many people are recommending you and how many trust you enough to keep an hold on their investment even though your stock price is declining.
For me Empire Avenue is just another layer in providing transparency in the real value of people. And yes it can be gamed, however in the long run it provides you with insights in your performance , in the performance of others, but also in the matter of trust there is a person and how a person behaves and performs over time.
Virtual stocks, social credit scores and badges might just look like ingredients for an alternate reality game, however it is reality and within five years it might be a necessity to get a new job or to get a mortgage. No way that people will ignore this important data for longer than that. They will care less about the badges you got, though they will care a lot about the social context regarding your social credit score.