how not to measure twitter influence
DESCRIPTION
These are the slides of a keynote I gave at Emerce Eday on 25 October 2012 in Rotterdam. The short description of my talk was as follows: With the ongoing rise of third party applications like Klout, tools for measuring Twitter influence are important to understand. This presentation takes a look at the different ways in which influence measures have been developed for Twitter. In particular it will use the case study of the UK riots of 2011 for which a database of 2.6 million tweets was collected in collaboration with Twitter and The Guardian newspaper. By examining the top 1000 most tweeted accounts, it will give further insight in how influence worked during this crisis event, specifically highlighting the emergence of the ‘ordinary influential’ during 2011 as well as how large organisations have incorporated social media practices.TRANSCRIPT
How (not) to measure Twitter influence
Farida VisInformation School, University of
Sheffield
@flygirltwo
REAL TIME
BIG DATA
MOBILE
[NAME OF NEXT BIG SNS HERE]
GEOLOCATION
STREAMING
INFLUENCE
KLOUT
PEERINDEX
Following Rules and Best Practice – Twitter Help Center
We don’t limit the number of followers you can have. However, we do monitor how aggressively users follow other users. We try to make sure that none of our limits restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most Twitter users.
Aggressive following is define as indiscriminate following a few users if their accounts seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive.
… every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on you ratio of followers to following.
‘A score in the 40s suggests a strong, but niche, following’
‘… influence is about engagement and motivation, not just racking up legions of followers’ (New York Times)
Sleep deprivation…
Community
Not on KLOUT, still scored
THE ALGORITHM
Aaron Zinman
MIT SociableMedia Group
Illegal and legalEducationSportOnline
UK TWITTERATI
2011 UK Twitterati (The Independent)
1. Sarah Brown – Campaigner (PI: 93)
2. Richard Bacon – Broadcaster (PI: 92)
3. Eddie Izzard – Comedian (PI: 89)
2012 UK Twitterati (The Independent)
1. Richard Branson – Tycoon (PI: 93)
2. Sarah Brown – Campaigner (PI: 92)
=2. Alan Carr, Broadcaster (PI: 92)
Tweets as: @richardbranson
PeerIndex:93
Authority: 95
Activity: 46
Audience: 97
Follows: 6,414
Followers: 1,834,516
NO Jon Hickman on PeerIndex
No score/profile created for him
Free stuff
More than 2,500
companies using
Klout’s data
(NYT, 26.6.2011)
“For the first time, we’re all on an even playing field”
Joe Fernandez
Chief executive and co founder of Klout
BIG DATA
NOT ENOUGH
GIANT DATA
More than 12 billion signals a day into a Hive data warehouse of more than 1
trillion rows
Hundreds of millions of user profiles
Klout blog 11.10.2012
2.6 million riot tweets
Lisa Evans, 8.12.2011
± 45% Mainstream media
Viral
Image
≠
Influence
Mentions ≠ insight
Online influence ≠
Offline influence
BIEBER VS OBAMA
2012 UK Independent voices (The Independent)
UK NEWS: Owen Jones –
writer / researcher (PI: 65)
WORLD NEWS: Hossam el-Hamalawy –
Egyptian journalist/dissident (PI: 64)
PEOPLE: Wael Ghonim –
Egyptian Google staffer (PI: 41)
2011 rise of the ordinary influential?
CONTEXT
CONTEXT
CONTEXT
Small data = meaning
Gaming the system
Implications of reducing
people to a number