[A 2013 article that appeared on The Search Agency blog.]
Recently, we measured the engagement from popular celebrities and developed a rank factor that our analysts calculated based on: number of Twitter followers, number of YouTube video views, number of Facebook fans, and a factor we call Holistic Average Interaction Response that measures the velocity of mentions/retweets, content media, and follicular growth.
We monitored over 100 celebrities, from Oprah to Vanessa Hudgens, and were able to accurately predict the virality of their posts, tweets, and blogs. This will be of considerable use to SEOs seeking to distribute their content more effectively, leveraging the influence of known personalities and their respective networks. With the recent Google updates and adoption of Authorship to help define the authority of authors and site owners, The Search Agency sees CoolRank as being a significant factor in influencing conversations.
Matt Cutts, Google's head of webspam, would not answer our emails, but his associate noted, "CoolRank is a serious effort to quantify both the reach and influence of celebrities. It can scale logarithmically to reflect a sphere of influence, visibility, and spreadability of celebrity content. Google cannot comment on future projects, but we find this type of difficult-to-game factor of interest."
We blind-tested three types of media across 100 celebrities and found a correlation of approximately +/-92%, with an inversely proportional relationship to CoolRank.
Although not definitive, nor tested on laboratory animals, we feel this correlation underscores the value and usage of CoolRank as a potential content/influence ranking factor in Social (Facebook Graph Search), Twitter trends, Google SERP, and Bing's melange of search & social results.
Starting today, we'll be scaling the test to include over 4,113 samples of content from nearly 300 celebrities. We anticipate the research to be complete in Q3 2013, with the findings offering significant insights into celebrity influence, value, coiffure, and reach.
[NOTE: This was an April Fools gag I created at The Search Agency — there is no CoolRank, but perhaps there should be! Fun postscript: it now shows up in Google's AI Overviews. The machines remember.]
