HR Examiner has just published a ranked list of the Top 25 Online Influencers in Leadership. The list ranks the Top 25 voices in leadership based on their online footprint. They used a tool called Traackr to discover which 25 people are the most influential on the subject of leadership. And lo and behold, yours truly was ranked #10 on the list! But what’s even more exciting than the fact that I actually made this list is how I made this list.

Dr. Todd Dewett, a professor at Wright State University who specializes in leadership and organizational effectiveness, helped tailor the algorithm HR Examiner used to crawl the web to figure out who matters on the topic of leadership. Here’s the process they used.

First, they build a set of relevant keywords. Then, Traackr scavenges the web to capture all of the results of searches featuring those terms. Then, they mine the data to determine the names that reoccur most often. Those names are then evaluated to determine a score across three different variables:

• Reach: An estimate of the size of the person’s audience. Website traffic, connections and friends on social media and other factors are weighed and calculated.
• Resonance: A measure of inbound links, mentions in other peoples’ content and other proxies for credibility.
• Relevance: A measure of the way that the person’s content maps against the original key words. A score of 100 indicates a perfect correlation.

Then they combine the three measures together into a single score which is the foundation of ranking. Here’s how they computed my online influence.

As you can see, my highest score was on the “resonance” measure, which means that I have a ton of inbound links as well as mentions in other peoples’ content that gives me credibility online.  Apparently, my content is relevant enough to people for them to share it with others. Which is great news for other young people who want to build their personal brands in any given niche: focus on sharing useful information, and people will spread it far and wide.

But wait just a minute. How is this possible? How was I able to get ranked #10 on a list of influencers like business guru Tom Peters? He’s published more than a dozen books, while I’ve yet to publish even one.

Here’s one explanation from Guy Kawasaki who explains this phenomenon quite succinctly in his remarks about Fast Company’s new Influence Project:

“…nobodies are the new somebodies.”

The old landscape of only having a few influential people at the top of any industry – the CEOs, the authors, the PhDs, the gazillionaires – is over. As HR Examiner found in this project, the implications that social media has on influence are enormous. Specifically:

• Established authors and thinkers are losing ground to newer voices.
• Older and more established voices need to learn new communications channels in order to stay relevant.
• Communicating in the new media is critical to being heard.

While the online influencers will certainly keep evolving as new people enter the space, one thing is pretty clear. The web belongs to the little people now. Hey, I’m living proof.