How many Twitter followers do you have?
One of the reasons Twitter is important is that it is introducing the concept of assessing people’s degree of influence. A person’s number of Twitter followers is increasingly being taken as a proxy for their influence. If the only thing you know about someone is that they have 5,000 Twitter followers (or 50), you can make some preliminary assumptions about their influence.
Of course Twitter follower numbers is a hopelessly flawed measure for many, many reasons, and pretty much everyone knows that. However it’s often all you have.
Relatively few people have blogs, and in the broader population not many people know about blog ranking engines such as Technorati and Wikio. Everyone understands that numbers of Facebook and LinkedIn friends don’t indicate much other than how inclined people are to connect online.
Today Twitter follower numbers is becoming even less accurate as an influence measure due to extensive gaming.
Systems such as Twitter Grader and Twinfluence take into account other factors such as who your followers are and how they behave, follower/ following ratios, retweets, conversational activity, and so on to give a more accurate view of influence.
However not everyone is on Twitter and has much time to spend on it. That doesn’t mean they are not influential – just that they are not bringing to bear their influence through the channel of Twitter.
It is inevitable that broader measures of influence will be developed. Of course these can only be valid within a specific context, so the best measures of influence will provide a single slice view.
The fact remains that Twitter follower numbers has provided us with our very first proxy for influence, however crude, however flawed. We now as a society have seen our first measure of influence. This will accelerate the creation and uptake of more sophisticated measures in the very near future.
We will explore the idea of measures of influence – and the business models that surround them – at Future of Influence Summit 2009.
Twitter’s impact on the news and media cycle
By Ross DawsonWhile online technologies have transformed the media along many dimensions, one of the most important ways of understanding this is in how the news cycle has changed.
In the old days news was broken on real-time channels such as radio and TV, reinforced and pushed out to a broader audience through newspapers, discussed again in chat shows, and sometimes had life added to the news with updates or responses.
Today, while elements of that cycle remain, much of it has changed. Twitter has had one of biggest impacts on the news cycle, firstly by often being the first media to break news, in offering a discussion forum around mainstream media coverage, and amplifying stories that have appeared in traditional formats.
I stumbled across a couple of interesting graphics and analysis by Samuel Degremont at Burson-Marsteller Paris who shows some of these changes visually.
Click on the images to see them in full size and read Samuel’s detailed discussion (in French).[UPDATE:] Here is the blog post translated into English.
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Twitter’s Project Retweet will amplify how influence drives content
By Ross DawsonTwitter has just announced the first of a series of changes to how retweeting is incorporated into the Twitter platform, called Project Retweet. This is significant in how influencers make content popular, one of the key themes of the upcoming Future of Influence Summit.
Retweeting (forwarding someone else’s tweet to all of your followers) has become central to how Twitter is used. This user-invented behavior means that Twitter has become an extremely strong amplifier of the dissemination of interesting content.
It also provides a very good indication of people’s influence and credibility. While Twitter follower numbers are very crude a proxy of influence, it is far more effective to see how much people are prepared to forward someone’s messages. High follower numbers does not necessarily result in lots of (or any) Retweets. However if someone is consistently and diversely retweeted, they must be saying interesting things, or more often, pointing to interesting content.
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Tara Hunt doing opening keynote at Future of Influence Summit SF
By Ross DawsonAwesome! Tara Hunt, renowned author of The Whuffie Factor, will be doing the opening keynote at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco.
Below is the video where I first saw Tara in action, speaking at the Web 2.0 Conference in April 2009 about The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities.
The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.
For those not in the know, “whuffie” is the measure of reputation used in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Since we don’t have any other good words for describing collectively assessed reputation, whuffie has gained traction as a description of this phenomenon.
Taken from the book description:
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Twitter follower numbers as a proxy of influence
By Ross DawsonHow many Twitter followers do you have?
One of the reasons Twitter is important is that it is introducing the concept of assessing people’s degree of influence. A person’s number of Twitter followers is increasingly being taken as a proxy for their influence. If the only thing you know about someone is that they have 5,000 Twitter followers (or 50), you can make some preliminary assumptions about their influence.
Of course Twitter follower numbers is a hopelessly flawed measure for many, many reasons, and pretty much everyone knows that. However it’s often all you have.
Relatively few people have blogs, and in the broader population not many people know about blog ranking engines such as Technorati and Wikio. Everyone understands that numbers of Facebook and LinkedIn friends don’t indicate much other than how inclined people are to connect online.
Today Twitter follower numbers is becoming even less accurate as an influence measure due to extensive gaming.
Systems such as Twitter Grader and Twinfluence take into account other factors such as who your followers are and how they behave, follower/ following ratios, retweets, conversational activity, and so on to give a more accurate view of influence.
However not everyone is on Twitter and has much time to spend on it. That doesn’t mean they are not influential – just that they are not bringing to bear their influence through the channel of Twitter.
It is inevitable that broader measures of influence will be developed. Of course these can only be valid within a specific context, so the best measures of influence will provide a single slice view.
The fact remains that Twitter follower numbers has provided us with our very first proxy for influence, however crude, however flawed. We now as a society have seen our first measure of influence. This will accelerate the creation and uptake of more sophisticated measures in the very near future.
We will explore the idea of measures of influence – and the business models that surround them – at Future of Influence Summit 2009.
The rapid rise of the sweet, sweet spot where influence meets advertising
By Ross DawsonAt Future of Influence Summit at the end of this month many of the most prominent people in the influence space will get their heads around where the space is going.
Given what I’ve been seeing and hearing over just the last few months, it is clear that an important part of this is the sweet spot where influence meets advertising.
A good overview of the space and two of the leading players in the space – 33Across and Media6Degrees – is provided in a recent article in New York Times titled The Online Ad That Knows Where Your Friends Shop. The article concludes with:
A recent article in AdWeek, Connect the Thoughts, also examines the space in some detail, describing some of the key ideas:
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A Manifesto for the Reputation Society: it’s coming soon!
By Ross DawsonOne of the key themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009 on August 31 / September 1 will be the emergence of the ‘reputation economy’, and how value is being created in that space.
Howard Rheingold, who has been deeply involved in this space since the 1980s, and has demonstrated his prescience by writing – among others books – Virtual Reality in 1991 and Smart Mobs in 2002, will be doing a keynote at the conference.
In our recent conversation about influence and reputation Howard mentioned the 2004 article Manifesto for a Reputation Society, which appeared in First Monday. I saw this a number of years ago but had forgotten it. It is in fact a great overview of where reputation may go. The abstract reads:
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Influence research: what drives people to Digg stories
By Ross DawsonIn the lead-up to Future of Influence Summit 2009, we will be pointing to some of the more interesting research into the influence space – there will be a wealth of insights coming up so keep posted even if you can’t make it to the event.
Let’s start with one which is a little outside the mainstream, drawn from the report Social Media for Marketing: An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior, created by new media research company One to One Interactive.
Digg was one of the first “influence aggregators”, bringing together the opinions of many to guide what content people read. In addition, the Digg ecosystem is a great example of an influence network. Research in early 2007 showed that 30 people were responsible for 30% of the stories that made the front page of Digg. Their personal influence networks generated waves of behavior that resulted in stories becoming very popular.
Today Digg’s prominence as an influence aggregator has waned relative to the growth other channels, most notably Twitter, however it is still a powerful force that concentrates vast amounts of web traffic to those stories the community push to the fore.
One to One Interactive uses a proprietary methodology that uses physiological data (breath rate, galvanic skin response, heart rate) in addition to eye tracking information and self-reporting to assess engagement. They did the study on a number of respondents who visit Digg an average of twice a day to see how the engage with the site.
Source: Social Media for Marketing: An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior
The above diagram from the report shows part of the research that resulted in the second insight below, that headlines are the most important factor in driving attention and traffic to stories.
These are the four key insights generated by the study:
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UK Newspapers: local classifieds lead the losses, Guardian and Telegraph lead online
By Ross DawsonSome more interesting insights from the UK OFCOM report (in addition to the shift in social networking activity from youths to adults I wrote about earlier today).
There has been a 25% slide in newspaper revenue over the four years to 2008 (with the biggest drop in 2008, and likely a larger one coming in 2009). Most interestingly, half of this loss has come from local classifieds.
UK has a distinctive structure to its newspaper market, with a number of national dailies mainly out of London, and a large variety of local newspapers. Classifieds by its nature tends to be a local market, so the national newspapers have in fact not taken the bulk of this revenue – this has been the province of the many local papers, which have been slammed by the fall in classifieds revenue.
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Adults take over social networking, children bail out?
By Ross DawsonUK telecom regulator Ofcom has released a major study on use of telecommunications in the UK, out of which some interesting statistics on use of social networking have come.
It’s not surprising to see the substantial rise in social networking in the 25-54 year old age bracket. Adults have “got it” and piled on board to network online with friends and for work. What is more surprising is that 15-24 year olds are using social networks slightly less than they were, with the Guardian speculating (there is no evidence for this from the report) that it is the uptake of social networks by older people that is causing this “adolescent exodus”. The nub of it is this:
“There is nothing to suggest overall usage of the internet among 15-to 24-year-olds is going down,” said Peter Phillips, the regulator’s head of strategy. “Data suggests they are spending less time on social networking sites.”
Part of it is definitional – what constitutes a social network? When young people use the Internet, they are primarily using it to connect with their peers. Whether that is on Facebook, through content sharing, or on music sites, they are effectively social networking.
The significant drops in use of social networks by the 65+ year olds makes me question the survey methodology – I find it hard to believe that 80% of the over 75 year olds who were using social networks a year ago have dropped out with none taking their place.
Here is the data as a spreadsheet, kindly provided by The Guardian’s Datablog.
Opportunities in Europe in late October?
By Ross DawsonFor the last years I have only got to Europe irregularly – my intent has been to focus on USA and Australia, however I have been getting fairly frequent speaking and consulting work in Asia and the Middle East as well.
I will be in Istanbul on 21 October to do the opening keynote at Marketing&Management Institute’s Digital Marketing Summit, and am exploring some possibilities to do public workshops or in-house strategy sessions in Brussels and Helsinki before or after then.
Let me know if there are other possible opportunities we should discuss for when I’m in that quadrant of the globe :-).