We continue our Influence research series, paving the way for in-depth insights and breaking new ground on the topic at Future of Influence Summit 2009 in San Francisco and Sydney. See the Future of Influence Summit blog for the full series.
Earlier this year Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at HP’s Social Computing Lab did an analysis of Twitter networks, resulting in the article Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope.
They studied a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users to gain insights into how they communicated and connected. There were a variety of insights from the research, including the relationship between Twitter activity and number of followers.
Source: Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope
The final conclusion of the paper was:
Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.
This is of course hardly a surprising outcome. Having hundreds or even thousands of Twitter followers does not imply a strong relationship, just as anyone with over a thousand Facebook friends will not necessarily be influenced by all of them.
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A futurists’ dinner: the future of content and remote engagement
By Ross DawsonLast night media futurist Gerd Leonhard , Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, and I caught up for dinner. Gerd is in Sydney for the first time for a couple of events, including The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content on Tuesday (see the event review), and Richard happens to be in Sydney amidst a hectic global speaking schedule.
We had a fascinating discussion, largely on the future of content, and in particular how to leverage our own content. As futurists (I will write a blog post soon on ‘why I am happy to be called a futurist’ – that’s another story) what we sell is content in a variety of formats.
The most prominent monetizable channels we have are speaking, consulting (which can take a variety of forms), and books and reports (which now also can be packaged and sold in multitude of ways). Of course we all throw out plenty of free content on the web as part of the mix.
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Insights and notes from Creating Value With Content event
By Ross DawsonThe Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content event on Tuesday was a fantastic success. As so many of the attendees observed, this topic is at the heart of many businesses today. While content in the broadest sense is more and more central to the economy, there are many challenges, not least with pricing and distribution, whether the content is music, film, books, news, advertising, or simply the flow of communication that sustains human and business relationships.
Gerd Leonhard and I have been trying to do something together for a few years now, so it was great The Insight Exchange was able to take advantage of his first visit to Australia to run this event. In addition to Gerd’s far-reaching insights and global perspective the event brought together top-level views on the world of content from Agency, Brand, and Publisher perspectives.
Below are my rough notes taken during the event. In addition definitely read Gerd Leonhard’s blog post Creating value with Content: The Future of Marketing and Advertising (my Sydney presentation), and see his presentation slides here.
We’ll shortly add links to the other presentations made at the event.
NOTES FROM CREATING VALUE WITH CONTENT
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Influence research: what are the real influence networks within Twitter and social media?
By Ross DawsonWe continue our Influence research series, paving the way for in-depth insights and breaking new ground on the topic at Future of Influence Summit 2009 in San Francisco and Sydney. See the Future of Influence Summit blog for the full series.
Earlier this year Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at HP’s Social Computing Lab did an analysis of Twitter networks, resulting in the article Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope.
They studied a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users to gain insights into how they communicated and connected. There were a variety of insights from the research, including the relationship between Twitter activity and number of followers.
Source: Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the microscope
The final conclusion of the paper was:
This is of course hardly a surprising outcome. Having hundreds or even thousands of Twitter followers does not imply a strong relationship, just as anyone with over a thousand Facebook friends will not necessarily be influenced by all of them.
Read more →
CMSWire review of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 – A Practical Guide
By Ross DawsonCMSWire has just published a nice review of my Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report.
Here is an excerpt from the review:
The front page of our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website now includes excerpts and links to reviews of the report – always handy before deciding to buy it! :-)
Who are the most influential media journalists in the world? Help us compile the list!
By Ross DawsonLeading up to the Future of Influence Summit held on August 31/ September 1, we will release a ranked list of the Top 50 Most Influential Media Industry Journalists in the world.
The list will analyzed and created using the platform of influence ratings startup Repyoot. However we need to provide a list of candidates to be analyzed for the ratings to be generated.
We have created an open spreadsheet with a list of over 100 prominent journalists covering the media industry in the English language.
Please add to the spreadsheet anyone that you think should be included for consideration in the most influential media journalists list. We will continue to add names ourselves until we submit those names for analysis by Repyoot this weekend.
One of the reasons we are creating this list is to make concrete the idea that “influence is the future of media”. While it is true that technologies of participation are making all of us influencers, mainstream media still affords a different scale of influence and impact. Journalists can now communicate not only through established media, but also through new channels such as Twitter and personal blogs. Together these provide multiple facets to how they exert influence.
In the wake of the death of venture capital: Finding a balance between the incubator and VC models
By Ross DawsonThere has been a lot of talk lately that the VC model is broken – here is a small selection of what has been being said recently on the topic:
Forbes: Venture Capital’s Coming Collapse
EarlyStageVC: Traditional Venture Capital Sure Seems Broken – It’s About Time
VentureBeat: The VC model is broken
Fred Wilson: Is The “Traditional Venture Capital Model” Broken?
Mathew Ingram on GigaOm: Is the VC Model Broken? Far From it
New York Times/ Bits: Do Web Entrepreneurs Still Need Venture Capitalists?
HuffingtonPost: The Death of Venture Capital as We Know It
There are manifold reasons for the VC sector’s challenges, not least the vastly lower capital requirements of the typical web start-up of today.
One of the poster-children of the new wave of seed capital has been Y Combinator, which provides very small amounts of capital to kick-start new ventures.
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Influence research: Duncan Watts and the debate on whether “influentials” really matter
By Ross DawsonWe continue our Influence research series, paving the way for in-depth insights and breaking new ground on the topic at Future of Influence Summit 2009 in San Francisco and Sydney.
Duncan Watts is one of a handful of scientists instrumental in developing the study of networks as a key scientific discipline. He tells his story in his book Six Degrees, which begins by recounting how he found a subject for his Ph.D in mathematics in biological phenomena, which turned out to be based on networks, and to apply to subjects as diverse as society, technology, biology, infrastructure and beyond.
Duncan co-wrote a paper in 2006 titled Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation. This used mathematical modelling to examine the dynamics of how influence could disseminate.
The paper’s abstract summarizes their findings:
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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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