The interest in influence

How many followers do you have on Twitter?  Number of times listed?  Retweeted often?  Determining a users impact has become so much more than mere popularity, with influence being judged more on a users engagement level than just number of followers.

The Guardian recently reported on Hewlett-Packard’s smart research paper measuring influence using a “Influence-Passivity Algorithm”, leaving the social media blog Mashable as Twitter’s most influential account.

HP are not alone though in measuring influence, Klout, the San Francisco based start-up, is gaining recognition when it comes to online influence.  And tech company PeerIndex is using algorithms not dissimilar to Google PageRank in identifying the web’s most authoritative voices.

Switching back to HP’s findings, the study concluded:

This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.

As influence becomes ever, erm, influential in terms of brand monitoring (not to mention online ego satisfaction) then the way we measure and rank it over Twitter, Facebook, etc becomes a key metric in developing the social graph.

The ten most influential users on Twitter according to HP : @mashable, @jokoanwar, @google, @aplusk, @syfy, @smashingmag, @michellemalkin, @theonion, @rww, @breakingnews.

1 Comment August 25, 2010