We’re living in an age of increasing collaboration, where companies are said to live and die by their ability to innovate and get the most from their employees.

While traditional performance reviews may focus on traditional metrics such as whether your sales targets were met, in the burgeoning social age, a new metric is likely to muscle in on your performance review – that of your influence within your organisation.

Measuring influence has been incredibly popular on the web over the last few years, with sites like Klout and Kred allowing people to measure how influential they are in the social media world.

Now, with social media tools increasingly being used within organisations, it seems inevitable that the issue of influence will come along with it.

Chatter, by Salesforce.com, comes with a feature called Influencer, which can measure how influential you within your company. It uses metrics similar to those used on Facebook or Twitter – meaning that if colleagues react well to things you share on Chatter, you score highly for influence.

Though people may sneer at such faddish intrusions, an increasing number of managers are using tools such as this. Imagine, for instance, that you have a project that you need to roll out across your company. By using influence ratings, you can locate employees throughout the company that have the clout to evangelize your project to their peers.

Influence ratings also provide a truer reflection of where the power lies in your company, because people will vote for those whose expertise is most valuable rather than those who have the most powerful title.

Chatter, which was launched two years ago, is not the only company working on a metric for influence within organizations. Other top enterprise social networking tools, such as Yammer and National Field, are also taking a stab at the problem.

With Salesforce recently buying feedback application Rypple, it’s clear that they’re investing heavily into a revamp of how appraisals are managed, with a much more frequent and democratic approach to metric generation.

How would you measure influence in your own company?