Social Capitalism - measuring Heirarchies and Influence on the Social Net

Two fascinating articles in the in-tray today (hat tip John Hagel and Andrew Keen)

Firstly, a report by The Web Ecology project called The Influentials, its a study on how people influence others on Twitter. They followed the twts and responses of 12 popular users to determine measurements of relative influence on Twitter. They examined an "ecosystem of 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees, and in response to the 2,143 tweets generated by these 12 users over a 10-day period, we collected 90,130 responses published by other users". A background to the methodology:

Just counting followers (what all the PR and Top Twitterer pundits do) is useless

A popular metric of perceived influence on Twitter measures the quantity of a user’s followers. In general, the more followers a user possess, the more impact he appears to make in the Twitter environment, because he seems more popular (namely, that users follow him). This statement makes sense assuming that Twitter acts as a successful broadcast medium, where a user publishes a tweet and it is read by every follower. However, this view of Twitter as a broadcast medium ignores the potential for users to interact with the content on the platform.

Looking at follow/followed ratio is better, but has flaws

This ratio, while better than the former method of counting followers, is still imprecise. Again, a ratio based on audience ignores the ability for a user to interact with content on the platform. However, the ratio of followers to followees does inform a better understanding of how influence can operate in Twitter’s environment.

But, it is the basis of a useful attempt to analyse them (and start to create some form of behavioural separation) - the Broadcaster vs Spammer axis

....if the ratio approaches infinity (high follower total versus low followee total), the user account might be described as focusing on the material aspect of Twitter. By material, we mean a compulsion toward moving content to other users in the environment [aka Broadcasting]. In another instance, if the ratio approaches 1 (an equal or near-equal amount of followers and followees), the user might be categorized as a conversationalist. The user most likely follows back a majority of his followers, to retain familiarity with more personal conversations. Contrarily, the materialistic user aims to collect followers as contacts to whom the user may push content (who may then share the same content with other users).

Finally, if the ratio approaches zero (low follower total versus high followee total), we might categorize the user as a spammer.

Reply and Retweet and other (trans)actions are used to measure influence

The reply and retweet are categorized as actions because they are applied by a user to a piece of content. The reply acts as a response to another user’s tweet using new content, while the retweet operates as a citation or paraphrase of another user’s previous content. While both actions have different purposes, both are meant to move content to other users (albeit in differing ways). If a reply or retweet exists with respect to a given tweet, the actions are evidence for influence that has occurred. A reply occurs because a user is influenced to reply to the content; a retweet occurs because a user is influenced to reproduce the content. Literally, the actions are markers of influence.

Similar to the reply and the retweet, the mention and the attribution are categorized as actions because they too are applied by a user to a piece of content. We have separated the mention and the attribution from the more fundamental reply and retweet because the former two actions are not officially recognized by the Twitter platform.

Anyway, using this as the basis of their metric, they then anaysed this mountain of data mentioned above. I'm skipping that stuff for brevity, read the article for the details. Some interesting conclusions:

On average, the data suggest that social media analysts [Scoble, Brogan, Vaynerchuk] receive minimal reward for the effort they exert in maintaining a conversation with their followers. For those users that succeed, most news outlets [CNN, Mashable, BarackObama, CNN Breaking News) were more successful at having their content pushed to other users.

Celebrities [Ashton Kutcher, Shaq O'Neal et al] , on the other hand, appear to inspire conversational responses with their followers, yet with more success than the analysts.

Celebrities with higher follower totals (eg., THE_REAL_SHAQ and ijustine) foster more conversation than provide retweetable content.

News outlets, regardless of follower count, influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users.

The graph above shows a graphical timeline of activity - you can see the flashes of colour that represented the penetration and cadence of a twt over time.

The second item was from Rapleaf, studying trends in Twitter followers over 3 month period. They analyzed follower and following counts for a packaged goods company’s top 0.1%, top 1% and top 10% most-followed Twitter users, and compared how these figures changed over nine weeks. The killer chart is below:



What it shows is that the higher you go, the faster you grow and the more of a broadcaster (high ratio of followers to followeds) you are.

Conclusions (apart from the already rich in Social Capital get richer, faster)

- Nearly all the Top 10% have follower/following ratios of near 1.0, ie they are pure broadcasters - this is not a conversation game

- The log scale is quite consistent - you need 5 to 9 times more Social Capital (Followers), to get from Top 10% to Top 1% and similar to get from Top 1% to Top 0.1%

From the first piece, its clear if you can bring your existing fame to Twitter you will clean up far faster than the home-grown talent. The death of mass media's influence is probably somewhat exaggerated....Makin' Whuffie is all very well, but it's better you bring some you made beforehand.