Actually didn’t see this post directly about Influence measurement on Twitter by Nick Arnett - it was picked by a Google Alert I set up on my own name - yet I definately am keyed in to what he’s saying: Some of my followers are people I believe are influential in the world of web analytics. Let’s see how they do (a third-order measurement of my potential influence, if I did it for all of them)
Actually didn’t see this post directly about Influence measurement on Twitter by Nick Arnett - it was picked by a Google Alert I set up on my own name - yet I definately am keyed in to what he’s saying:
Some of my followers are people I believe are influential in the world of web analytics. Let’s see how they do (a third-order measurement of my potential influence, if I did it for all of them). In no particular order:
- Anil Batra: 232 followers, who are followed by 235,000 others.
- Eric T. Peterson: 689 followers, who are followed by 373,000 others.
- June Dershowitz: 266 followers, who are followed by 122,000 others.
- Marshall Sponder: 839 followers, who are followed by 727,000 others.
Avinash Kaushik, Google’s web analytics evangelist, isn’t following me (hey, bub!), but anybody whose title is “evangelist” is supposed to be influential. At the risk of exceeding the Twitter API limits, I ran my gizmo to get his stats. Avinash has about 2,000 followers, who are followed by almost 600,000 others.
If you rank these people by popularity (followers), Avinash is No. 1, hands-down. But if you rank by potential influence, Marshall Sponder’s followers are followed by the most people, which is especially surprising given that Avinash appears to be more than twice as popular.
So, according to Nick Arnett - those who follow the people who follow me are more influential (in terms of numbers - or reach) than those that follow the other names mentioned.
Nick goes on to say:
“…. I should note a messy bit of this measurement - sites like Woot, Twemes, hashtags.org and others that automatically follow you when you follow them. Ugh. I haven’t figured out a good way to exclude them, so I’m just doing it manually… and I haven’t thoroughly made sure I caught all of them. So there’s hope, Avinash - maybe Marshall is just signed up for more of those. In any case, don’t take these numbers too seriously. I’m going to work on some additional data points - number of replies and such, to strengthen the results.”
I’m curious to see what Nick Arnett comes up with - but, aside from Tweemes, I didn’t do anything else - I just talk to people across circles of influence - and I socialize a lot - and my socializing isn’t based on pushing anything - I really enjoy hanging out and listening to people - and in those circles -when they think of “Web Analytics” they don’t of Avinash, or Eric, they think of me.
There may also be an element of Gen X and Gen Y in this, that can’t be discounted - Social Media is democratic in nature - but Broadcast media isn’t - and honestly, I’ve noticed both Eric and Avinish, while they adopt Social Media - don’t really fully engage in it - I do.
Maybe that’s what Nick Arnett picked up on - but then again, once he tweaks his program, maybe the results will be totally different - we’ll see.
More:
Social Media Influentials - Social media analytics for decision-making from @NickArnett
Popularity: 40% [?]
