This morning I found myself on a list of Birmingham’s most influential Twitter users blogged by one of our PR agencies. Which was nice. Now, please don’t take this as me being blasé or modest but I think it’s important that we realise how the nature of “influence” has changed and is incredibly hard to measure.
Of course, what Urban Comms have done here is a bit of fun and a way to explore what’s happening on Twitter in the city and I wouldn’t want to dismiss that as a useful activity, but if we’re not careful we run the risk of taking this stuff seriously and reading far too much into the influence and reputation we think individuals have.
Sure, those with large followings have a lot of people receiving their messages but, and this is the mistake people who come from a broadcast background always make, that doesn’t mean they’re actually listening. Nor does it mean they’re going to act.
I have nearly 2,000 followers. Let’s be generous and say 1,000 of them are actually human beings who regularly use Twitter. When I post a photo to Twitpic of a link to my blog I can measure how many people click through and, discounting retweets, it’s around 50 on a good day. And here’s the interesting thing – it’s always been around 50. My audience may have grown but the number of people who are actively engaged with my witterings hasn’t, much. (Caveat – the amount of science going on here is less that zero.)
Tom Ewing did a bit of maths when a pop star with 14 million followers linked to his review garnering him about 5,000 hits. Tom errs on the side of extremely generous and estimates 2% of the star’s followers clicked on the link which doesn’t sound much like herd mentality to me.
As Lord Shirky of Clay so famously said, more isn’t just bigger, it’s different. But so is smaller. We are familiar with the dynamics of one-to-many but we don’t seem to be thinking about one-to-few.
Let’s do a not-so-hypothetical. A campaign emerges on Twitter about a big important thing. You see a message in your stream from Stephen Fry urging you to turn your icon purple or something. You then see a message from a friend who you’ve known for years and spent many a drunken night also urging you to do the opposite.
On the one hand is a man you’ve never met who you think is amusing when he’s on the telly. On the other is someone who probably knows more intimate details about you than your parents. The former has a million Twitter followers. The latter has 23. Who do you think will have the most influence on you? Who are you going to listen to?
Obviously it depends. Some of my friends are quite ignorant of matters global. But generally speaking Stephen Fry and your bezzy-mate are on a level playing field when it comes to influence over you.
In this post Joanna Geary looks at Fry’s claims not to have any influence and asks “Why should his influence on them be any more or less than a newspaper has on its readers?” To which I’d ask, how much influence does a newspaper have over its readers these days? Leaving aside my opinion that newspapers reflect the beliefs, prejudices and tolerances of their readers more than they dictate them the press is competing with a lot more trusted sources these days and none of them are staffed media outlets – they’re our bezzy-mates.
Of course a little bit of influence over a lot of people is cumulatively a significant amount, and maybe that’s all these organisations are after – a brief registration on the brains of a lot of people so they buy the right jar of coffee next time.
It’s all so very complicated.
Anyway, my other motivation for writing this post which kinda lost lost along the way was to mention NESTA’s Social Media – A Force For Good event tomorrow. They’ve got what looks to be a rather impressive lineup of My Fry, Biz Stone from Twitter and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn to “discuss the phenomenon of social media and its future impact”. I’m sure they have lots of interesting things to say and I may well tune in (as it were) but I would caution anyone against thinking these people really understand what’s going on at a granular level – not because they’re willfully ignorant but because they can’t know. Hell, as a compulsive early adopter I have trouble understanding how “normal” people use this stuff. But I do know that while I may idolise David Lynch and follow his tweets with pleasure his influence over my actions and beliefs pales next to that of my bezzy-mates.
Or, to put it another way, looking at the phenomena of Twitter celebrities is fundamentally missing the point of why this stuff is interesting.
I think I may have framed the questions incorrectly.
I guess what I’m asking is, why should we want bodies to regulate newspapers when they are no more, or no less, influential than some individuals who communicate to large numbers of people online?
We already have the legal system that can be used when a newspaper or individual breaks the law. Why do we need anything else?
Yeah, I wasn’t directly answering you – just using your post to develop a line of thought. I think we’re talking about quite different things
Ahhh… I see! Yes, you may well be right. :)
[...] on our first Birmingham’s Biggest Tweeters post. Pete Ashton makes, as ever, an interesting contribution to the debate around Twitter and influence, picking up on Joanna Geary’s earlier comments [...]
Yesterday, or maybe the day before, I went through my Twitter account and de-followed most of the vaguely famous / ‘influential’ people. This included Fry (whose tweets I actually find rather dull) as well as people I find interesting or amusing, but due to the high volume of their tweets were making Twitter unmanageable for me. I was quite brutal in the cull, but rather like amputating a limb to save the body, it was either that or the whole baby was going to get thrown out with the metaphor.
So the average number of followers of people I follow has come down quite a bit, but I am better able to pay attention to what is being said.
PS I think that somewhere in the back of the logic for doing this I held the belief that if there was something going on that I ought to know about, then one of the people I follow would tweet or retweet about it, and so my tighter network of contacts would work as an intelligent filter. Equally, more focus allows me to assist others when they require assistance, as recently when I was able to forward editorialgirl’s query regarding a new Snickers variant, via one of my Twitter contacts, to a snack expert who then provided some fine information on the topic (not Topic – that’s hazelnuts). That’s the point, surely?
@Peter
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. The point of all this stuff is we don’t have to rely on monolithic nodes of influence or combing the entire net on our own – we make up the equivalent by overlapping and sharing through our relatively small networks.
The social Internet is, essentially, word of mouth with potentially infinite depth and reach. It’s not perfect (because it’s powered by people’s brains) but it works.