Blunt – The Conversation Agency

The methodologies underpinning Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and Klout are often cited by bloggers as proxy measures for twitter influence. While dubious in value, at least these computations have a certain elegant simplicity to them. But I came across something today that I found truly laughable. Not content with facile metrics, the folks at Edelman have been busy building a measurement of twitter influence that they call the Tweet Level—the twitter influence formula to end all twitter influence formulas (and they are so proud of it, that they’ve high-jacked their own home page to showcase it). Here’s how it’s derived:

Wow. I count over 15 units of measurement in that one, dwarfing the number of variables in other people’s attempt at a mystical and abstruse visitor engagement index.

Seriously, Stephen Hawking would be scratching his head in wonder at that Edelman equation. And what about the output of this complex calculation? I would expect such a nuanced bit of math to yield some eye-opening results. But according to Edelman’s algorithmic analysis, Perez, Ashton, Dr. Dre, Deepak, and Ellen are among the most influential and trustworthy persons on twitter (though Ellen gets dinged a bit, ironically, for her lack of engagement). It looks like the usual suspects can survive even the most rigorous math.

The methodology and the output are ridiculous, of course. Collectively, the five people mentioned above merely possess popularity, not influence, trust, loyalty, admiration, or any other intrinsically desirable trait. While these people are the most popular entities on twitter (as they are in many other media), they collectively exercise only the basest and most superficial type of influence on anybody (although Dr. Dre’s funny Dr. Pepper spot did once motivate me to pick up a can of the cherry-flavored drink).

I’ll restate the point of my last post: meaningful and accurate measures of influence are those that correlate twitter activity with real world activity. We need to establish an objective, external basis for influence; we can’t simply compute twitter influence as some amalgam of its own constituent parts (followers, lists, retweets, etc.). Real influence is about so much more than that. I think that’s what Brian Solis is talking about when he says that trust agents or influencers are ”omnipresent.” Their authority transcends the narrow confines of any particular medium. Their influence carries a universal scope; it goes beyond 140 character spurts and seeps into the real actions and attitudes that people undertake and adopt.

Because, quite honestly, my mother exercises greater influence upon my purchasing decisions, lifestyle traits, and world views than anybody currently featured in Edelman’s Tweet Level top 20. And she’s so Web 1.0.

Jonathan Levitt