Who are the most influential media journalists in the world? Help us compile the list!

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Leading 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.

Influence research: Duncan Watts and the debate on whether “influentials” really matter

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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.

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.

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The paper’s abstract summarizes their findings:

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Twitter’s impact on the news and media cycle

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While 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

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Twitter 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

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Awesome! 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

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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.

The rapid rise of the sweet, sweet spot where influence meets advertising

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At 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:

Margaret Clerkin, the head of the invention group at Mindshare, a division of WPP’s GroupM, who works with clients including Unilever and Sprint, said she wondered whether the approach would work for every category.

“The theory feels strong that in this very social environment that people are influenced more by their friends than they are by advertisers and brands,” she said. She plans to test Media6Degrees and 33Across later this year.

“I think the validity of that is going to end up being tested by brand and by category,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re going to see the same ratio in buying a bar of soap that you are in buying a car. The influence rate is going to be so much greater as the price tag of the product goes up.”

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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Influence research: what drives people to Digg stories

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In 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.

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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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Sponsored Tweets opens up the world of monetizing influence

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Sponsored Tweets has just launched, providing a sophisticated pay per tweet system. Mashable has a detailed review of Sponsored Tweets, including how disclosure is handled.

The Sponsored Tweets platform works by giving advertisers the ability to create campaigns and select, invite, and approve Twitterers of their choosing to participate in their sponsored campaigns. On the flip side, Twitterers can set their pay rate and find opportunities to tweet on behalf of advertisers and get paid per tweet and/or click.

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Of course, IZEA’s attempting to cover the disclosure and ethics and portion with their Disclosure Engine software that automatically detects whether or not the appropriate hashtag or text is included. According to IZEA’s CEO, Ted Murphy, “disclosure is systematically enforced” and adheres to FTC and WOMMA guidelines.

This is the first substantive platform in what will undoubtedly become a crowded space. How prominent twitterers and their followers will respond to this is an unknown.

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Working out who influences the influencers

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Travis Murdock has a nice blog post: Who influences the influencers? (which, tellingly, I found from @louisgray on Twitter).

Travis offers five tips:

1. Check who they are following on FriendFeed

2. Follow Influencer RSS reader feeds

3. Research Facebook events

4. Research ReTweets and @replies on Twitter

5. Follow the social brick road

There are a variety of other manual and automated ways to identify who key influencers are listening to and drawing on to shape their opinions.

What is critical about the idea of ‘who influences the influencers’ is that this intrinsically describes influence networks. Far too much influencer marketing is about finding the influence hubs and then trying to reach them.

The reality is far more subtle than that, in many ways. Influence flows through networks, and effectively working with influence can only be done by understanding influence networks, not the ‘hub and spoke’ model that many PR and marketing firms seem to base their thinking about influence on.

Far more on where influence is going at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco and Sydney, coming up soon!