analytics vs. the real world

Most of the buzz I hear about measuring online influence is about Klout. Folks are always tweeting about their Klout scores or blogging about how to increase your Klout score. So, is that the only measure of how you or your brand are doing online?  A little poking around on the Intertoobz revealed that there are tons of tools for measuring just about every aspect of your online presence.

I came across this post from Newburyport's Ari Herzog:  How Tools Measure your Internet Life. He leads off with Heardable, which I'd never heard of until today. It analyzes your domain along many dimensions and does comparisons with industry leaders, generates a cool graphic of your network of influencers, gives you a brand health score, and ranks your domain. Pretty cool.

Alas, my ye-olde-fashioned web site that I've had since 1996 (or was in '95) on the world's oldest Internet Service Provider (remember ISPs) caused Heardable to become non-responsive. So for my experiment, I did the next best thing. I had it analyze redsox.com. I find it fascinating that the redsox.com brand is losing momentum even though the team is in first place in the AL East, 3 games ahead of the industry leading Yankees. Yes, the Yankees have the industry leading brand, but the Red Sox lead the division. As I write this, the Phillies have the best record in Major League Baseball at .631. The Phillies came in with a lower Heardable score than the Red Sox: Phillies 634, Red Sox 704. Oddly, Heardable compared the Phillies with CBS News rather than the Yankees. I never knew CBS News was an industry leader in MLB.

So, assuming you consider MLB to exist in the real world, what do the analytics tell us about the real world? How does brand strength correlate with winning percentage? What puts people in the seats? What sells branded merch? Why isn't Bill James analyzing this? Hmm, there's an opportunity here for melding sabermetrics with web analytics.