Our friend Jeremiah Owyang, digital media influencer and analyst at Forrester posted a blog entry on Retweet and the power of word of mouth. To summarize:

[Information within Microblogging communities like Twitter encourage rapid word of mouth –of both positive and negative content]

In the post he talked about how information spreads quickly with Retweets. Essentially on Twitter if you “RT” or “ReTweet” someone you repeat what they say presumably because you agree or disagree with them OR if you want it to be amplified to your audience of followers on twitter.

Using BuzzGain we tracked usage of the Retweet before and after Nov 23rd. About 16,500 twitter users follow Jeremiah and so his influence in twitter is relatively large.

After Nov 23rd usage of Retweet among the top 50,000 Twitter users has increased by ~7%.

Great you think, Jeremiah well done.

Not exactly. I will chalk this as a not so positive trend. Why?

If you drill down deeper, tweets with negative sentiment (we measure sentiment as positive, negative or undetermined) has 45% more retweets than positive or neutral ones.

This is consistent with the view that bad news travels faster than good. This may also be primarily because of the Mumbai blasts and it could be an anamoly I agree, but you cannot equate a Retweet to someone linking to your blog on a post. How is retweeting different then?

1. Immediacy: Given the real time nature of twitter versus the 3-5 min it takes to blog link to someone, the amount of time to think, process and react to what’s being said is a lot less. If you tweet information that’s not factual or plain incorrect the person retweeting has a lot less time to fact check.

2. Value add: In most blog posts that link back to a post (including ones that just provide a list of links with delicious tags for example) there is a sense of “aggregation” or value add to the post. In most posts with link back there’s a lot more value add in the form of a different opinion or counter example. With Retweets, there’s ZERO value add. Its a plain and simple echo. You can argue there’s value in an echo, but I think its useless for most parts.

3. Reinforces a heard mentality. Retweets are an inaccurate measure of ripple effect. On average less than 0.35% of the top 50,000 twitter users posts are retweets. So it should have a relatively small effect right? No. Unfortunately, even though the next 350,000 followers of the top 50,000 are smart, connected, and influential individuals in their own right, their retweets to posts is close to 0.7%. Think about it. Double the top 50,000. This is a herd mentality pure and simple.

Do I think retweeting is going away. No.

Do I think its a measure of Word of mouth influence. Maybe.

Do I think it complicates the measure of word of mouth online to a point of making it useless. Absoutely.

Image credit: Wikipedia ]]> http://news.buzzgain.com/retweet-on-twitter-the-ripple-effect-of-the-echo-chamber/feed/ 0 http://news.buzzgain.com/is-chris-brogan-more-influential-than-the-potential-prime-minister-of-india/ http://news.buzzgain.com/is-chris-brogan-more-influential-than-the-potential-prime-minister-of-india/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:03:38 +0000 Mukund http://news.buzzgain.com/?p=114

We all love the topic of influence and authority. Its the primary reason any top 10 list exists. There are inherently many pitfalls in measuring and ranking any person’s authority online or offline. The questions that come up:

1. What parameters do you take into measuring authority? – for e.g. a few include: #twitter followers, # of re tweets, # blog readers, # of saved items on delicious? All of the above in some combination?

2. What about influential people that dont have a significant online presence? E.g. I know the Chief Mentor of Infosys Narayan Murthy has not a very big online presence, but every time he says something over 2 million people listen to him. How do we track that?

3. How much weight to you give to the various sources of influence – main stream news vs. blogs vs. twitter vs. any other social network.

We ran an interesting experiment with BuzzGain over the last few weeks. Friend and all around nice guy Chris Brogan was tracked against Indian prime minister candidate L. K. Advani. Here are the results.

1. In overall mentions, Chris is holding fort and in many cases getting talked about a lot more online than L K Advani. This is awesome for Chris, since over a billion people in India know L K Advani, and a lot fewer know Chris. But online, Chris is King.

2. Sentiment for Chris and L K Advani is mostly similar, mostly positive and some negative, but its trending in similar directions.

3. Main stream media news is where L K Advani beats Chris in mentions. Which is expected since the # of news outlets covering the elections in India is far greater than the # of bloggers writing about Chris and social media.

4. In the blogosphere, the exact opposite metrics hold true obviously, since the # of bloggers in the US far outweighs the # in India.

5. Finally there’s a reason he’s called the Mayor of Twitterville. Chris just overwhelms L K Advani in terms of mentions and retweets on Twitter.

This leads us to a new set of questions:

1. How much more influential is Chris than Mr. Advani online?

2. Should we start to leverage circulation numbers for main stream media (offline viewership) to account for their reach when fewer than 10% of users are on the Internet (as in the case with India)?

3. What would you like us to compare next?

Drop me a note or leave a comment and we’ll explore that next in a future post.

We spoke about the echo chamber that retweeting on Twitter does a while ago. Well, on the same topic but a totally different reason Retweet is stupid argues Dave. Because its a vote of confidence on that particular tweet.

The problem I want to address is one when you get a Retweet gets taken out of context or “shortened” because it needs to fit into 140 characters.

I had a couple of instances of when this happened to me last week. My tweets were long (close to 140 characters), but when they were ReTweeted, the twitter user that did the RT “eliminated” a few characters so it could fit the 140 character limit.

Result – “Tweet taken out of context”.

Solution: Until there is a technical solution I recommend you plan on your tweets being 130 characters or less (if you have a long twitter handle, plan on 120 characters). That gives enough room for the word RT followed by your handle.

I really cannot believe I have put a post together for this, but getting “tweet quoted” out of context can be embarassing.

This post primarily discusses corporate uses and engagement with Twitter, unlike how most people use it to keep up with friends and discuss “What are you doing”? The # of companies on twitter is growing dramatically from fewer than 5 in 2007 to over 500 in 2008.

Given that twitter has about 1.3 million registered accounts, the question we get asked frequently is:

<Update>: Jason asks where we got the 1.3 Million number vs. 3.1 reported by TwitDir. Two items: 1) We only track accounts that have more than 5 friends and at least 10 tweets. We think these are real users vs. bots. If we did all accounts, we track about 3.27 Million. Bottom line there are a TON of fake accounts on twitter.

2) We also did this initial run in July. We’ll update for September, but we doubt There were 1.5+M accounts added in 2 months.

<End Update>

“So if I get on twitter and make a lot of “friends” will our messages get propagated faster?”.

This is usually by a corporate client, who does not have a basic understanding of twitter or has just heard that twitter helps you get “Buzz”.

Usually we have to go over basics of twitter and community with them before they ask the next question:

“So how can we can get the key influencers to follow us and tweet about?”.

Another discussion ensues and topics such as engaging users and not spamming them comes up. They usually look a little lost at this point, but are able to somewhat relate to email spam so they eventually get it.

The next question comes up within the 30 minutes of discussion:

“So how many people have to follow us for our message to be heard?”.

We’re not sure if you really want to answer this question, but its a worthwhile exercise. There are varying degrees of influence on twitter. We define 3 types of twitter engagement. Each of these types of engagement is an increasing amount of influence obviously:

1. Another twitter user follows you (and based on her tweet history) tweets at about the same time as you do. Else if you are in different timezones, your influence on that person is lesser.

2. A twitter follower replies to your tweets (@replies) with a certain frequency. Or the # of @ replies you get as a twitter user.

3. A twitter follower retweets your tweets with some frequency.

There are 3 things that stand out when you analyze twitter statistics.

1. The top 250 twitter users (with the most number of followers, the most number of friends (people they follow) and the # of tweets) carry an inordinate amount of “influence”.

2. The average number of followers for the top 100 twitters is 9304, with the top at about 93,000 followers and #100 at about 6300 followers.

3. If you have less than 100 followers (with some exceptions), which over 500,000 users on twitter do, your influence rank drops to less than 8 (give time zone considerations). Meaning less than 18 people are really viewing your tweets, which indicates 4 of them are likely to @ reply and 1 is most likely to retweet.

The graph below shows Twitter influence. The top 100 users carry 65% of the influence on twitter and they have a minimum of 6300+ followers to a maximum of ~90,000 followers. Users from 100-5000 have 22% of twitter influence and so on.

Some questions:

1. Corporate clients still believe the best use of twitter is to leverage it as “yet another channel” for their message amplification. What are the best techniques you have used to convince them about the value of engaging their customers on twitter?

2. How are you recommending your clients engage with twitter users?

3. What’s the best example of large companies engaging on twitter?

Much as the technology industry is claimed to be an early adopter of all things social, Web 2.0 and community, its not making as quick progress as people think it is.

SAP TechEd08 is the annual SAP developer conference, is currently taking place in Berlin. Our good friend Mike Prosceno (who authors a good blog in his own right BTW) is there and so are many of the other SAP folks we know. I dont believe its for lack of trying. They have a TechEd Blog, a full time twitter account just for the event and forums for discussion. Over 16,000 people attend the show worldwide and a good number (over 30%) just in Berlin. So we should expect a lot of sharing, blogging, twitter, etc. Right?

1. Tweet volume (# tweets) over the last few days barely broke 300 (Just to give you a comparison, BlogWorldExpo broke 3000+ tweets daily).

2. By the hour tracking shows tweeting was more frequent in the afternoon (very counterintuitive) than in the morning. This was again very different from BlogWorldExpo.

3. The people LOVED the show though, so SAP’s gotta be happy. Positive sentiments showed up overwhelmingly which is again very different from BlogWorldExpo (where it was at 55% positive).

4. The number of unique people that did twitter was less than 0.01%. That’s very low compared to the 43-55% for BlogWorldExpo. Maybe the SAP guys are just not the chatty types.

5. Here is the best chart. Who were the influencers? The top 7: SAPTechEd, Mike Prosceno, Mike Stopforth, IdaRose Sylvester, Vuk Trifkovic, Phillip Pott, Dennis Howlett.

I do have all the data on blog posts, delicious and the rest of social media to give you a comprehensive perspective, but this post is already too long.

Summary: Few people did share and talk, and the ones that did absolutely loved it.

Questions:

1. If even a technology company with leading edge early adopters (developers) is not very socially engaged, is the market still early? Or is social media just getting acceptance? What stage do you think we are?

2. What other questions would you want to have me address from a social media perspective (what reports do you wish to see) on SAP TechEd so we can get a more comprehensive perspective?

# Update: We were primarily tracking SAPTechEd, SAPTechEd08, TechEd as the keywords. Mike and Tom Raftery emailed me saying they are seeing a lot more twitter and delicious folks, who are using no associated words to describe the event.

Its a well understood maxim that technology companies are the “early adopters” of most things new in technology. Used to be financial services and telecommunications were the flag bearers, but if you were developing any kind of software the first companies you’d go and knock on the door of were in New York or Silicon Valley. I started to analyze twitter in this same regard.  Who were the early adopters of Twitter from a corporate perspective (ignoring individual users for this discussion) and why were they adopting twitter.

SocialBrandIndex is one such directory of companies on twitter. So is Twellow. There are several uses of twitter from a corporate perspective. The biggest number (431) of companies that have a “presence” on twitter are media companies – this includes online media, newspapers, large blog networks and TV networks & movie studios. We track about 1900 companies (of which I think about 800 are fake or “hijacked” accounts on twitter.

The question I started out to answer was since twitter is such a social (as in people are needed to be social) site -

“Is it better for an individual to represent a company than for a company to have its profile as a iconed entity?”

What that means is that is would you rather have your questions answered by Mahalo OR by Jason? Its hard to disassociate a prominent individual from a company from the brand. At the same time, Lionel as your point person for all DELL is better than any DELL support is it not?

One of the main drivers for companies to adopt social media I think is to ensure that they show up as a company with real people instead of a faceless organization or “corporation”. Should they have not learned from the several bypass IVR cheat sheets on the web that customers want to talk to a real person?

What do you think? Would your rather follow someone that’s a real person or Comcast Cares even if you know there’s someone there to help?