Influential or just noisy?

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

Given that I spent most of social media week hammering at the keyboard of my MacBook, bashing out liveblogs for the good people at Like Minds, I’m faintly surprised to discover that I was, in fact, one of the top 30 most influential tweeters during the event. This, at least, was the verdict of the Brass Agency, who were doing all sorts of clever social media monitoring and analysing things during the week.

Here’s how they’ve showed the relationships amongst the top 30 (I’m at about 7 o’clock):
[![interconnectedness1.jpg](https://i2.wp.com/www.onemanandhisblog.com/content/images/2012/02/interconnectedness1-thumb-520x520-2369.jpg?resize=520%2C520)](https://i1.wp.com/www.onemanandhisblog.com/content/images/2012/02/interconnectedness1.jpg)
And here’s how they explain it:
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In the spirograph [above], each bar is an individual person or organisation’s unique twitter handle. Bar height represents ‘influence’ (as calculated by the factors mentioned above) and the lines between the people represent who is following who (blue to pink indicates the direction of the link).
These sort of tools are clearly in their infancy, and separating the wheat from the chaff (or the influential from the plain noisy) is still a challenge – but it’s still interesting. The blue /pink division give you a visual indication of where people who are isolated from the main “bubble of influence” which is a quick way of starting to judge where the outliers – and thus the potential connectors between spheres of influence – are. And that’s worth publishing, I think. 
That, and I’m easily flattered into publishing graphics. 😉
analyticsinfluenceinfluence measurementSocial Mediasocial networks

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Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

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