Measuring success in Twitter: Influence vs. Participation

I was reading a post recently outlining a somewhat incomplete attempt to measure something called “Influence” as a measure of success in Twitter. Being a champion for complicated and easily misunderstood metrics based on cognitive and behavioral psychology I was immediately drawn to the article but walked away unsatisfied … that is, until I found Twinfluence.

Twinfluence is this nifty little Twitter tool that lets you explore a Twitterer’s “influence” based on their reach (size of their network and second-level network), velocity, social capital, and centralization (see the explanation page at Twinfluence for the details behind each.) For example, here are some of the people I follow in Twitter analyzed by Twinfluence rank:

Rank #19: Jeremiah Owyang (jowyang) from Forrester Research
Rank #660: Bryan Eisenberg (thegrok) from Future Now, Inc.
Rank #2,893: Marshall Sponder (webmetricsguru) from Monster.com
Rank #3,577: Avinash Kaushik (avinashkaushik) from Google Analytics
Rank #6,124: Anil Batra (anilbatra) from ZeroDash1
Rank #7,195: Aaron Gray (agray) from WebTrends
Rank #7,591: Jim Sterne (jimsterne) from Emetrics
Rank #11,209: Omniture (omniture) from, yep, Omniture
Rank #11,786: Dennis Mortensen (dennismortensen) from Yahoo! Web Analytics
Rank #11,940: Nick Arnett (nick_arnett) a social media blogger

Whee, what fun! I could Twinfluence my friends and folks I follow all night and day if only client work, my family, and copious powdery snow didn’t get in the way. In case you were interested I have a rank of #5,754 based on my nearly 700 followers who are followed by over 375,000 other people and a very resilient social network.

However, after a little while I started thinking that measuring someone’s “influence” in Twitter was the wrong way to think about success in social media in general. Especially since people who have been dubbed “influential” and successful in the blogosphere have a tendency to think about their popularity in somewhat ridiculous ways … say perhaps stating publicly that they’re going to charge to re-tweet content because they want to buy expensive stuff?

Anyway, when I went down this path I immediately thought “Hey, the two things I spend the most time on in Twitter is trying to find great people to follow and trying to share interesting ideas.” To find great people I use Tweetdeck and to a lesser extent MrTweet to find folks who are having a conversation I’m interested in. To share interesting ideas I limit the majority of my updates to the sharing of links on web analytics related topics.

These combined efforts have helped me find and share ideas with hundreds of folks in Twitter interested in web analytics. So I started thinking “So perhaps the true measure of success in Twitter is being as good a listener as you are a source of information!” Being a balanced participant in your efforts, not just a “social media rock star” who spends all their time talking at people, not to them …

Of course this line of thinking let me to Dave Donaldson’s Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio (or the Twitter Ratio for short.) The Twitter Ratio is dead simple: the number of followers you have divided by the number of people you follow — the perfect Twitter key performance indicator! Dave even provides benchmarks against which we can be measured:

A ratio of less than 1.0 indicates that you are seeking knowledge (and Twitter Friends), but not getting much Twitter Love in return.
A ratio of around 1.0 means you are respected among your peers. Either that or you follow your Mom and she follows you.
A ratio of 2.0 or above shows that you are a popular person and people want to hear what you have to say. You might be a thought leader in your community.
A ratio 10 or higher indicates that you’re either a Rock Star in your field or you are an elitist and you cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter. You like to hear yourself talk. Luckily others like to hear you talk, too. You may be an ass.

(The emphasis on that last sentence is mine … I laughed out loud when I read that!)

I think Dave’s Twitter Ratio of 10 or higher is the same thing as Perry Belcher’s “Twitter Snob” (funny YouTube video if you have 5 minutes.) Perry comments that if your Twitter ratio is super high you may not be participating in “social media” but rather “solo media” — perfect! Perry’s point is why are you even in social media if you don’t have time to listen to the conversation?

If I apply the Twitter Ratio to all of the fine folks I analyzed still ranked using their Twinfluence score here is what we get:

Jeremiah Owyang earns a score of 2.95 indicating that Jeremiah “may be a popular person” and “people want to hear what [Jeremiah] has to say” plus he “may be a thought leader in [his] community.” Sounds pretty much perfect to me, but I like Jeremiah.
Bryan Eisenberg earns a score of 1.04 indicating that Bryan is “respected among [his] peers” (or that he follows his Mom and she follows him, but with 1,951 followers we can assume the former is the best explanation)
Marshall Sponder earns a score of 2.30 which is pretty similar to Jeremiah’s score against his 851 followers.
Avinash Kaushik earns a score of 105.5 indicating that Avinash is “either a Rock Star in [his] field or an elitist [who] cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter” who “likes to hear [himself] talk” but “luckily others like to hear [him] talk too.”
Anil Batra earns a score of 1.27 putting Anil in the same category with Bryan above although with only 266 followers his reach is somewhat lower than Bryan.
Aaron Gray earns a score of 1.49 pushing Aaron more towards Jeremiah Owyang than Bryan Eisenberg, at least on Dave’s scale.
Jim Sterne earns a score of 17.48 which is in the same “Rock Star” range as Avinash (although an order of magnitude less rock-starry than Google’s own analytics evangelist)
Omniture earns a score of 1.26 indicating respect among the company’s 247 followers
Dennis Mortensen earns a score of 13.85 showing that Dennis, like Jim and Avniash, is a true web analytics rock star!
Nick Arnett earns a score of 0.58 which indicates that Nick is trying but alas, “not getting much Twitter love in return.”

My own score is 3.13 against 697 followers which I’m pretty happy about (especially the part about not “being an ass!”) Incidentally Perry Belcher’s Twitter Ratio is 0.98 … about as balanced as it gets! If you have 30 seconds you can go to Dave’s site and calculate your own Twitter Ratio.

What do you think?

Is “influence” the best measure of success in social media? Or should we pay closer attention to something like the Twitter Ratio as a measure of our likelihood to actively participate in the larger conversation? It’s not hard to imagine the Twitter Ratio combined with a measure of tenure or update velocity or even something like influence to come up with a system to help us better discover which members of Twitter are providing real and substantial value to the community.

I welcome your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and perhaps more selfishly, recommendations for great and interesting people to follow and tools to help with the discovery process.

Posted Monday, December 29th, 2008 | 32 responses | Share, Save or Email

http://www.litmanlive.co.uk Michael Litman

Eric

Interesting article. So my ratio is 1.13 which isn’t anything ground breaking but good to know.

When it comes to authority, it’s a fascinating area for research and is a hugely subjective matter. One person’s authority is another’s minority.

I’d be interested to get your thoughts on the following blog post – and your readers too! All the best. M

http://tinyurl.com/7akqlc
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http://www.kemeny.cl/ Kemeny_x

im just missing some graphic tool that plots out all off this :-) thnx for the twitter ratio link. I use http://tweetburner.com/ to see how people react to the links i share. that seems to give me an idea on how much people are really listening to my twets.
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Ed H

First, how do you *DEFINE* success in twitter?

twitter has the problem that lots of people may ‘subscribe’ to people’s streams, but don’t actually read any of it. (Especially with the people who subscribe by having the stream texted to their mobile phone.)

I mean, honestly, do second-level connections mean *ANYTHING* on twitter? Hell, I have 59 connections on LinkedIn, with 4775 people “In my network.” So? Barack Obama is “in my network,” yet that doesn’t mean squat. I see you have over 500 connections, yet honestly, how many of those people do you truly have a ‘connection’ with?

Any metric based on ‘connections’ to people are inherently flawed, because people like to make false connections. Either because they honestly want to be connected (as I believe your LinkedIn connections are,) or because they are being vain and self-important, or some other reason.

Likewise, the ratio doesn’t say much, either.

I have a ‘blog’ (I hate that term…) that I occasionally write on. I have probably one follower (well, maybe two. I know my grandma reads it, my mom might once in a while, too.) Yet I only follow one other blog even vaguely ‘regularly’. So my “blog ratio” is 2.0. If I get a third follower (my brother-in-law, for example,) I’ll jump to 3.0!

Doesn’t mean squat. A ratio of 10 just shows that someone is willing to write alot (and may have quite a few followers,) while not necessarily having the time or desire to follow others. Not necessarily out of ‘spite’, but for whatever reason. What about a CEO of a small company. He may not be a ‘rock star’ in his field, but may have a few dozen people following him. Yet he may not actually care enough about twitter to follow anyone on it.

Just because someone likes to write, doesn’t mean by default that they like to read. And they don’t even have to be a ‘rock star’ in their field.

I suppose the entire premise of twitter encourages two-way participation, though. (Note: I don’t do twitter at all…)
http://www.ManishaMusic.com Manisha Shahane

Hi Eric –
Enjoyed reading your post. What are your thoughts about Twitter Grader? Doesn’t that tool supposedly incorporate a number of variables? It certainly attempts to entertain you with messages while you wait for the grade as the generator is jumping hoops in the kitchen sink through all sorts of calculations.
Best,
Manisha
@ManishaMusic
http://www.gunzcommunications.googlepages.com Joel Gunz

Hmmm… Metrics are tough, and since Twitter is still growing and forming its identity (its very raison d’etre is still in flux), I’d say that, while attempts to measure influence, etc. are interesting intellectual exercises, we still have a way to go before there can be a concrete set of metrics.

That said, I suggest that a better measure of influence would examine how many people Retweet you, and how often. The same goes for the number of replies and direct messages. Such figures can you tell you whether you’ve merely amassed a large but inert “following”, or if people are really listening to you when you tweet.
A deeper analysis could even measure what kinds of tweets (based on keywords, perhaps) are more likely to catch the attention of the twittersphere.

Another thought: I’d like to be able to measure how many people have me in a preferred category in their Tweetdeck.

If you agree (or disagree) with this post, please Tweet about it! ;)

Joel
http://www.tatvic.com/blog Ravi Pathak

Eric,

It might be interesting to add few more metrics

1. No of updates / duration
2. No. of favorites / updates

Twitter is an interesting networking machine, like Ed said, you even if you follow someone, but he doesnt post many updates it doesnt make sense.

For. e.g my entire first page in the morning is blasted by all the updates by Guy Kawasaki,now , while I hate it as I want to listen to other people’s tweets as well. That certainly doesnt make Guy the most influential.

Ravi
http://blog.webtrends.com Aaron Gray

Interesting piece, Eric. I’m happy to see that, at least on one scale, I’m more influential than Jim Sterne. ;-) I’m not sure that passes the common sense gut check, however, as much as I’d like to believe it.

I love this discussion, though, because it is the foundation of a new measurement paradigm that we haven’t figured out yet. It’s like the early days of web analytics when we were figuring out we could measure stuff, and we were fascinated by it, but we had no idea how to apply it to anything useful.

I think influence is going to be the holy grail of this new paradigm. By that I mean defining what influence is. The really interesting question that stems from that, though, is to what end are we measuring influence. My influence rank on Twitter is but a single data point that is useless on it’s own (IMHO). I think what becomes useful is when, as a marketer, you can measure your ability to influence the influencers. When you can actually quantify your impact on the network. To do that, we have to be able to identify the influentials as a start. But, once we’ve done that, how do we track our influence of them. That’s the interesting question to me. We’re not there yet, though, because we haven’t agreed what constitutes influential.

Until we’ve got a better model, Jim Sterne will have to get in line behind me. :-)
http://blackbeak.com Steve Jackson

I like the idea, but I’ve never used Twitter apart from to register and try it out.

Steve Jackson
AKA: blackbeak
Analytics and conversion specialist
Followers: 7
Friends: 4
TFF Ratio: 1.75
Born Leader

A ‘born leader’ who has logged into Twitter twice. I didn’t even realize I had 7 followers till I logged in today. Not convinced this method of measuring success is so valid.
Alex B

Interesting post Eric and an issue that I’ve been battling with a lot lately/can be extended to Social Media in general. I’m going to take the wuss way out and say “it depends”, both because I’m a wuss and because I actually believe it.

Who is Twittering and why are they doing it? If it’s a company looking to relay their information, then retweets, bots, and other tools can all be used to measure said influence and lets be honest, in many ways Twitter has become a relay network (it’s actually fascinating to track a story as it’s released, you see just how many bots there are).

If you’re an individual trying to gain notoriety in your field, then the amount of people who follow you compared to how many you follow could very well be a useful figure, but that ratio is rather irrelevant for, say, a support twitter channel.

As with many things in this field, a clear sense of purpose/a mind for how it all fits together is pretty important at the outset if you want to measure and proclaim success. I also think that to gauge said success we need to look to other tools, ones that we are more familiar with.

I.E, I use Radian6 to track Social Media including Twitter. By slicing and dicing related Tweets in something like Excel, I can come across major stories, topics and issues. I can then look for related spikes in traffic, or to pages that would, in theory see a spike. Of course, I can go the other way too, find the spike and go digging for the answer.

For more e-commerce geared sites, making such an analysis into an ROI would be about as simple as it gets and could help define success if that were ones goal.

I’ll offer but one example for Social Media. We had a number of videos on display on a page that we viewed as success criteria if they were viewed. One video got about 90% of total views, despite a considerable, rather equal spend.

The difference was social media as a whole. Slashdot and others picked up a story related to the video and ran with it, creating a tidal wave of traffic related to that video that, of course, vastly outperformed said aforementioned spend. We then were able to analyze the results in our more familiar tools. I think Twitter can be measured in a similar light and used to evaluate ROI directly for many things and thus “success”. As a result, I think that in the end, we will look to other tools to evaluate true success in Twitter, at least for companies.
http://webgeeksforsocialchange.blogspot.com/ Jen Chiu

Hi Eric,

I would actually start by asking the question: what is the purpose of Twitter? or, what is the purpose of an individual’s participation in Twitter? Maybe I’m still a bit of a Twitter newb, but I don’t think this is obvious– and I think the impact metric should flow from the answer.

If I took as a hypothesis that the purpose of Twitter is to spread ideas, I agree with Joel’s thinking above. An appropriate metric would be one that includes how many people are actually listening AND how many people are spreading your ideas. This metric could include retweets, replies, and clicks to the links that you include in your tweets. Twitter could also build in an ability to rate tweets.

I like where Twinfluence is going. I think it’s a great ballpark tool but doesn’t really get at true impact. For example, I’m one of the 40K+ people that Guy Kawasaki follows. Do I actually influence him and the 40K+ people that follow him even though I’ve only had 14 updates? At the moment, doubtful. Perhaps it should be called “Twipotential”

Jen
@jen_chiu
http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

Hey Steve,

In the spirit of your positive engagement and leader status within the twitter community, let me reply in 140 characters :-)

@blackbeak I believe we agree any metric calculated on 7 (Followers) and 4 (Friends) data points is bound to be flawed!?

Merry Christmas
d. :-)

N.B.
AND this reply almost confirms Eric’s scientific thesis from above… I am hereby an ass! he he – later Steve

Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!
Blog: http://visualrevenue.com/blog
Book: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/yahoo-analytics-book
Boaz Ronkin

Eric, from a professional perspective, I’d say that Twitter’s measure of success is in driving conversions, however one defines conversion for their business or organization.

E.g., do people who click on my Twitter link end up downloading a white paper from my website, and how does the conversion % compare with my other marketing initiatives’ conversions?

The trick is, of course, to correctly attribute credit to Twitter activity. This can easily be done using web analytics, if your analytics solution properly supports attribution.

It would be nice, however, to be able to segment my Twitter traffic based on Twitter-related variables, so that I can increase the relevancy of my Twitter messages to my followers or Twitter searchers.

Boaz Ronkin
http://blackbeak.com/ Steve Jackson

@Dennis; As a ‘born leader’ I feel obliged to respond. Since I posted here my ranking has improved even more. 2 other followers obviously impressed by my leadership status have decided to follow me on twitter so now I would assume my rank has reached the dizzying heights of 2+.

While I get your point about the lack of statistical significance in only having a massive 9 followers (and only following 4 people) it would seem to me that the flaw is in the KPI methodology.

This ratio is not really a KPI at the moment and as suggested by Eric needs more teeth (postal velocity, reads etc). It misses out on two things, 1) it’s not key and 2) it doesn’t measure performance. It’s just a ratio.

If I want to be an ass it’s easy. (In more way than one but lets assume we’re talking about the Twitter KPIs :) I just need to stop following 3 people and add one more to my followers list! Or I just need to amuse enough people in this post to increase my Twitter following (of currently 9) to 40 or more while not following anyone else. All still without making a post on twitter in the last 4 months!

Anyone reading? HELP ME BE AN ASS! My Twitter name is blackbeak! Follow me and be thoroughly amused by…. well, nothing unless I reach the magical 40 followers and become an ass. I promise, the day I become an ass I will post another twitter comment!

:) Hope the Christmas was merry and the New year is better than your last one!
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Everyone: Oh my goodness, post what looks like a harmless post, walk away for a day and look what happens! I apologize tremendously for being late to reply to comments and thanks to everyone who has commented so far.

Michael: Great blog post! It seems like we agree that terms like “influence” and “authority” have become pretty subjective in the online world. Your quotes from Scoble and Paul Borge are also interesting … Scoble points out that authority and popularity ** are ** in fact different measures and then Paul falls right into Robert’s trap! I personally don’t think Robert Scoble is an authority on anything, except perhaps Robert Scoble.

Ed H: I was following you, then I lost you. You seem to be saying that there are no measures of success in Twitter, certainly not connections or number of followers. But then you end your comment saying “I suppose the entire premise of twitter encourages two-way participation, though” which was my original point: if Twitter is all about participation, why not use the Twitter Ratio as a measure of your participation?

Maybe I missed something.

Anyway, I’m glad to hear that both your mom and grandma read your blog. That’s a start! LOL!

Manisha: I looked at Twitter Grader (a bunch of people mentioned that service to me via email, thanks everyone!) and it looks like Twinfluence only with a slightly less good explanation of how the scores are calculated. My “Twitter Grade” is 99.3 which I guess is good (better than I did in my undergraduate work, that’s for sure!) and I suspect that if I ran Grades for all the folks I looked at in the original post we’d get the exact same rankings (Jeremiah O. first with a perfect 100.0, Nick Arnett last with a 71, etc.)

I guess since Twinfluence and Twitter Grader are both based primarily on number of followers I’m still not convinced they have any substantial value. Why not just rank people by number of followers and say “these are the best Twitterers” (“Twits?”, “Twitheads?”) and be done with it?

Ravi: Yeah, I definitely think that the Twitter Ratio could be improved using some other measure. The thing I’m looking into most closely right now is how people “retweet” other people’s updates. When I think about “influence” I am more inclined to score that against the likelihood that others will retweet an update; the more “influential” you are, the more likely people will help you spread the word.

Does that make sense?

Turns out you can use Twitter Search to look for “RT” and a Twitter handle and see who is retweeting you. Here is recent retweet activity for little old me:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=RT+%40erictpeterson

Clearly this is not perfect, but it makes me wonder if some enterprising youngster out there with time on their hands could build a web application that would combine your Twitter Ratio with some measure of retweet activity (percent updates retweeted? percent followers retweeting?) to calculate a better participation score? Hint. HINT. HINT! ;-)

Thanks to all of you for your thoughts and more comment responses shortly.
http://areteanalytics.blogspot.com/ Xavier Jimenez

Eric, @ManishaMusic,

Twitter.grader is good at raking but that’s about it. Influence goes far beyond rank. also the cloud on twitter grader is not comprehensive so i wonder how deep/far back the data goes when attributing you ranking. the best thing about twitter is that it continues to gain acceptance and is pulling more and more people into its fold.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Aaron: Yeah, another point of data that says that measures of influence on Twitter are somewhat biased. Don’t get me wrong, I love your work, but Jim is pretty influential in our industry …

I guess I’m just not sold that influences is the holy grail but I suppose my hesitation goes back to the point we’re both making: nobody has proposed a sound definition of the term and so, lacking that, the data all looks suspect.

Alex and Jen both raise a good point about the spread of ideas. I mentioned this in my previous comment above and since then I found retweetrank. While not perfect (specifically whatever retweetrank does for pattern matching appears flawed) it does highlight that perhaps a better measure of influence in Twitter can be found in the propensity for followers to pass updates along.

Thinking along these lines, perhaps a better measure of how “influential” an individual is in Twitter would be the likelihood that a follower will retweet an update combined somehow with the likelihood that their tweets will be retweeted at least once. So:

# of Followers Retweeting / Total Followers

and

# Updates Retweeted / Total Updates

I’m not sure how those numbers would be combined but if someone builds an App to calculate both ratios (hint!) I’m sure a bunch of folks would look at how they could be combined.

What do you all think?

Dennis and Steve: I never said any of you guys were asses based on your Twitter Ratio, you made that leap yourself. Plus, you Dennis may be a rock star, but he’s still barely Ronnie James Dio to Avinash’s Robert Plant. LOL!
http://www.mariathemuse.com Maria

To me RESULTS and how you FEEL are the best measure of success in Twitter or any social media platform.

If I’m having fun, meeting new people and expanding my circle then I consider it a success.

Granted I’m no internet marketing guru. I like connecting with people and if they like what I have to say they can hop on over to my blog and interact more there.

I look at it as a point of connection to greater things :)

Peace,

Maria the Muse
http://www.nickarnett.net Nick Arnett

I am pleased to report that I’m coming on strong. My Twinfluence ranking has risen two spots already:

nick_arnett’s Rank: #10,743 (44%)
omniture’s Rank: #14,200 (26%)
DennisMortensen’s Rank: #14,900 (23%)

Ah, but what this really means is that the explicit social network, based on followers of followers, is not useful by itself. It was very, very easy to increase my rank.

My blog (nickarnett.net) explains why it is far more significant to measure the implicit social network than the explicit one. And why we can blame Guy Kawasaki.
http://june.typepad.com/ June Dershewitz

Fascinating post, Eric! You’ve led me to break my blog commenting moratorium. Feedback:

1) I think the Twitter Ratio is an etiquette issue rather than a statement about participation. When I first started using Twitter I pondered it, myself: https://twitter.com/jdersh/status/749578092 . It’s been nearly a year and I still don’t know the right answer. There’s a limit to the number of followers I can actually pay attention to. I’ve developed my own criteria for following (or not) each person who follows me, but really it’s a personal choice. Also, there are other ways to follow someone’s feed outside of Twitter – like Facebook or FriendFeed. Unless the ratio takes that into account, I believe it’s flawed.

2) As this exploration of Twitter value continues (as I know it will) I believe we’ll need to split *personal* influence/participation from the corporate equivalent. Yeah you mention @omniture (and we could talk about @zappos, etc) but I still believe that Twitter is most useful for building a personal brand rather than a corporate one. As far as corporate business value goes, meh, I still need some convincing.
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http://www.analytical.me Tim Duke

My concern with these twitter grading API’s is how they’re measuring the quality of your tweet contributions based on # of followers and reach.

Based on the fact that I have 50% more followers than people I follow, you might think I was contributing something of value to the community.

On closer examination of WHO is following me though, you might find that the vast majority of these followers fall into a few select categories:

1) Friend Collectors: These people usually follow ~10x more people than they have followers.

2) Spam accounts: These “people” usually have banned or suspicious accounts, but are still factored into your Follower Friend Count.

3) Niche or Geo targeted: Because I live in Austin, I’ll get followed by someone trying to build a community following in Austin (ex: austinnewsreport), not because I’m contributing to anything specific.

So in reality, I dont have a group of followers 50% larger than the people I follow. In fact I might actually only be reaching a small fraction of ‘my’ audience.

To begin getting a really effective read on how ‘good’ a twitter user is, I would think it prudent to begin assigning a value to each of these types of twitter followers (friend collectors, spammers, niche-geo) before allowing them to weigh in on your twitter influence/reach.

thoughts?
http://www.saurabhsahni.com Saurabh Sahni

Retweetrank ranks users based on number of times they have been retweeted by others, which is a good measure for influence.

Eric: What kind of pattern matching problem you see in retweetrank? I will try to fix that.
Trontastic

I think this is headed down the right path, but not quite there yet. I agree that the secondary audience within twitter isn’t really much of an audience at all. But that is one of the great things about twitter. It is all right there on the first level.

If you’re going to look at the ttf ratio, it needs to be compiled with a quantitative measurement of activity via replies, retweets, and those who voluntarily respond to what you put out. Put those together and you will begin to truly understand a persons influence on Twitter.
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com eric

Trontastic: Hmm, you mean something like this:

Web Analytics Demystified Twitter Influence Calculator

I am still collecting data but would LOVE your feedback on the implementation. Happy to answer questions, etc.

Thanks for writing!
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http://openmode.ca Malcolm Bastien

Measuring ratio is best suited for that idea of wanting to listen to the conversation versus wanting only to broadcast or hear themselves talk. The ratio though doesn’t really matter when it comes to influence.

Follower counts as well I think are only a good measure of influence at the top end of the scale like when examining a board like Twitterholic. When you examine follower counts at the 3,000 -/+ level it’s too easy to spammers or value-zero people to pollute the results.
http://www.harmoniker.net Bill

I’m disillusioned by twitter as it turned out to be primarily a “broadcasting” system rather than something of social value. We have a site at harmoniker.com (and .net) which is trying to focus on the important part of the equation which, as counterintuitive as it may seem, is not “people” but “conversations”. Does it matter WHO is participating, if the conversation is of high quality, value and is entertaining to you? Harmoniker manages your network using simple rules, so you don’t have to follow/invite anyone. The rest is up to you :)
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