Social Networks

Don't know if anybody saw this study on how influence works on different social network structures, but its very interesting:

In a study of networking, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY developed computer models showing that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, that belief will be adopted by the majority of society. Their study of minority belief becoming majority opinion appears in the July 22, 2011 online edition of the journal Physical Review E.

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When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority. Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.

More interestingly, they modelled how it spreads on different social network structures and found that the type of network and the location where an opinion starts and spreads in society have little bearing on the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion. To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks.

- One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network.
- The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders.
The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders.

Each of these individuals held a view but was also, importantly, open-minded to other views. The human dynamic is something like this:

In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus.

As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change. People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further.

I recall research about 20 years ago (can't find it now of course) that said once about 10% of a population cheat, then its nearly impossible to stop cheating proliferating. Also, early Memetic Artificlal Life models showed that once an idea had "infected" about 5% of a population in a clustered aea it was very hard to eradicate as they kept on reinfecting each other, and at about 8 - 10% it started to become viral.

This is no doubt something that will be used for good and evil in the coming years.

Yesterday we pointed to the Bad Side of using social media for London's looting and rioting. This story is about the Good Side - Londoners using social media to organise ad-hoc Flashmobs to clean up. Grauniad:

Hundreds of people armed with brooms, binbags and rubber gloves turned out across London to help clean up the damage caused by a third night of rioting, looting and arson.

Co-ordinated online on Facebook and Twitter, volunteers mobilised in the worst-hit parts of the capital to sweep streets, help local shopkeepers and show solidarity with communities thrown into turmoil by the violence. Though their efforts were thwarted in many parts by police work, their presence on the streets gave a valuable morale boost to those seeking an end to the disturbances.

The origins appeared to be the Twitter user @sophontrack who suggested a #riotcleanup operation shortly after 6pm on Monday. It was, however, a tweet from @BenDylan which found its way to Dan Thompson that set the trend going.

Thompson, who runs a social initiative encouraging people to use empty shops and open spaces, decided to use social media to co-ordinate those looking to help. By 10am the tag was the top trending topic in the UK and the second worldwide.

"There are now people on the ground all across London," he said. "Even just putting on some gloves, picking up a dustpan and brush and clearing one broken window on the way into work. People are saying, 'We're Londoners, we're resilient and getting on with it.'"

Makes me proud to be a Londoner (though I was in Wales at the time.....)

In other news, it would appear that Blackberry turned off the BBN service overnight to make it more difficult for the looters to organise thier flashmobs. Hard to tell if that, or the well publicised 16000 police on duty, was responsible for the far lower number of outbreaks in London (though predictably, Flashmob looting broke out in the cities the Police sent to London had been drawn from). Police are also using working smarter, listeing in on Twitter now and using social media sites such as Flickr to identify looters

What is also interesting is the emerging evidence of "Flashmob Defenders" - locals organising to defend their areas also using social media.

London erupted in rioting over the weekend, initially sparked by questions about the police shooting of a renegade youth gang member/young local community member (make your mind up) but the most interesting bit has been the use of social media (apparently mainly Blackberry Mobile Messenger, but that may just be Twitter and Facebook apologists trying to ensure that they are only seen to promote Good Riots* )

Apparently the looters and vandals used "flashmobbing" techniques to organise the liberation of many televisons, pairs of trainers and other goods essential to the revolution, and then to dynamically keep ahead of the police - this from onlookers in Brixton - BBC:

I saw Foot Locker on fire in Brixton High Street after midnight on Sunday. They got in and made off with widescreen TVs, vacuum cleaners, and computers. KFC and McDonalds were smashed up.
About a five-minute walk away in Effra Road, Currys was getting broken into. Nearly 200 people were there trying to get through the metal shutters. Eventually they got in and made off with widescreen TVs, vacuum cleaners, and computers. There were riot police near Brixton station, but there was no police presence in Effra Road for at least 40 minutes.

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I live close to Currys in Brixton. I watched hooded youths brazenly running up my road towards the store. At about 01:00, my usually quiet road was filled with cars coming from the direction of Effra Road and Currys. This could have been due to traffic being diverted, or it could have been the opportunists taking their loot home. One man walked casually past my window carrying a fairly large box, with a wide smile on his face.

Anyway, regardless of the whys and wherefores of why the riots started and by whom, this brings home the dark side of Social Media that we have been going on about for years but is typically blithely ignored by the Social media pundits - apostles, conference promoters, authors and service suppliers. Probably a good thing, as it allows a more reasoned discussion of what checks and balances Social Media services need. Also a wake up call for the London (and any big city) police to get more "with it" with new media technology.

*Twitter was full of the data too, as my first information on ths came within minutes that way - so in my opinion blaming Blackberry only is a tad disingenuous

Had a look at Google+ reviews briefly, reminds me of Friendfeed but as it would be done by guys whose previous successes were Buzz and Wave. Anyway a lot of the A listers seem to be spouting the same shill saying much the same as they did about Friendfeed , so the Broadstuff review is to be honest and to rehash our Friendfeed Review of 2008 and replace Friendfeed with Google +:

Fred Wilson* notes, re Google+ and the new new forum:

But it means I have to log into Google+ every day now and check out what people are saying and weigh in. Which I've been doing in the past couple weeks. And that increases the chances that I'll comment on someone else's posts at Google+.

So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to whats' going on in Google+. So it's gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That's the way to play the game on the web.

But I would like to see them get those comments portable in some way. Or I'd like to see someone aggregate those comments.

I love the last line's implications - I need another aggregator to aggregate the stuff this aggregator is aggregating so I don't have to visit yet another website

Fred also quotes Umair Haque**:

Umair, who is so right so often, said:

The real point is: Google+ is a next-gen, open version of Facebook's social feed.

Sorry guys, I'm being a bit slow here - which bit of the "yet-another-proprietary-service-that-I-have-to-have-an-identity-and-a-social-graph-in" is the next-gen, open version here?

Or is it that it pumps out stuff in that hate-object of the Web 2.0 faithful, email?

* Fred didn't say it this time round....but pick any sensible pundit you like.
** Ditto Umair

Anyway, I reckon this review will stand the test of time as well as the Friendfeed one did - with one eddition - Friendfeed never got an iPad app at launch.

The story so far - no sooner had News of The World announced its role as an ablative coating for News International closure, than various parties were quick to proclaim Facebook, Twitter and Mumsnet as the causes of its collapse.

Mumsnet? I hear you ask - WTF is that? Well, no less a luminary than the Times (another News International paper) in fact accused Mumsnet of breaking the News Of The World - Editor Roger Alton (See video above) accused Mumsnet:

“the comfortable middle-class mothers of MumsNet sitting down to their fair-trade tea and organic shortbread biscuits I hope are very pleased with the Twitter campaign they organised, getting advertisers not to advertise in the News of The World. They’ve done as much as anybody to close this paper and put 200 reporters, photographers, editors and young people just starting their careers out of work.. These yummy mummies have done as much as anybody to put them out of work. I hope they’re feeling pleased with themselves.”

Of course, as many people on Twitter pointed out at the time, he omitted to mention Andy Coulson or any other News Corps employees, or even the phone hacking issue - no surprises there given his newspaper's propensity for censoring of comments that they didnt like, even behind its paywall from paying subscribers.

There were the standard paeans to Facebook and Twitter of course, and we have commented on those sort of things many times before, but MumsNet is a new one so we did a bit of digging (so you lazy lot don't have to) - and its quite interesting, so allow us a little diversion first.

For those who don't know it, the foundation narrative runs something like this:

Mumsnet's two founders met at an ante-natal class in 1999 when they were both pregnant with their first children. Frustrated at the lack of decent information about parenting, they set up a website for new mums to be. At the time one founder hadn't even sent an email, let alone considered setting up a website. But, having spotted a gap in the market and keen to strike a good work/life balance, they set about creating Mumsnet. It was their high profile court battle with Gina Ford in 2006 which gifted Mumsnet the sort of publicity money couldn't buy. (Ford, author of The Contented Little Baby Book, took issue at some of the forum members' heavy criticism of her childcare methods and went for libel against the site. The case was eventually settled out of court with an apology to Ford). But it generated a lot of press and they came out of it quite well. It has burgeoned as a service since then.

But be that as it may, when you have a look at Mumsnet the way it works is in fact merely another Social Media system that aggregates the voices of many people, who can then agitate for a campaign in a certain direction, much like Twitter or Facebook. But it does seem to campaign as an organisation too, something Twitter and Facebook don't do (if you discount privacy lobbying, of course...). Now the Times clearly has form on them already, arguing in 2010 that it's the Founders who are driving the agitation and that "there were bullies hiding behind it's skirts":

"what started life as a gentle, mutually supportive online community of mothers seems to be turning into something different as it grows up. A decade after its birth, Mumsnet sometimes seems more like a bitchy, opinionated teenager than a sweet 10-year-old.

......

Flattered by suggestions that their 850,000 members could swing the general election, Mumsnet’s savvy co-founders, who set up the website after meeting at an antenatal class, have gone into PR overdrive in the past year, recruiting a dazzling array of big-name politicians for heavily publicised live webchats....

...[The Founders] Roberts and Longton are using the huge collective influence of Mumsnetters to push for changes in areas that matter to mothers."

The clue to their influence is more in the size of their user base, over a million now and of the more educated middle class mums (i.e. the sort who are less backward about coming forward), which gives them their power. Its critical role in reaching women made all parties in the last election very keen to be seen on it, to the extent it was dubbed the "Mumsnet Election". Also, one of the founders being married to a Grauniad Editor clearly doesn't hinder said PR media overdrive

Now the Times clearly has "Ishoos" with Mumsnet, but the Founders' increasing frequency of appearance on TV etc also clearly shows that they are doing more than just letting their membersip kick off in various random directions, and that is where they differ from Twitter or Facebook, which tend to be pure platforms for people to raise issues. In that respect thay are more like the campaigning newspapers of old, using their readership's views (or curating them?) as a base to champion various issues (The Times was once famous for this ironically, being known as "The Thunderer"). This makes them different to Twitter and Facebook, in that those two argue they are truly neutral platforms that allow people to say what they will, whereas the MumsNet founders are clearly more a part of the process, which may cause some problems down the line if someone really takes them to task.

But enough about Mumsnet - what did Social Media actually do?. It's worth looking at the timeline (in 10 easy stages):

1. Up until the last week or so, there has been a slow drip feed of revelations coming out, but all small enough and slow enough that various traditional means of assertive PR (paying policemen, possibly even buying off police enquiries, getting politicians to look the other way etc) had sufficed. Dedicated journalists and bloggers have been stitching things together, but the news that celebrities had their phones hacked to get at their lurid (or not) sex lives didn't really exercise the public mind.

2. The "Tipping Point" was the story broken by Nick Davies, a Guardian Journalist*, that they had also been hacking the phones of murdered schoolgirls, even deleting messages. A wave of revulsion wept the nation, and this was followed by news that they had also hacked the phones of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and their famlies. This is where Social Media first came into play, rapidly disseminating these stories ahead of the traditional Media/PR/Political circus that News International controlled, so NI were left putting the screws on gates long after the horses had bolted.

3. Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, MumsNet et al) drove a number campaigns of revulsion, turning News Of The World into a "Toxic Brand". When the story started to surface in the USA, it was easy to count the furore in the Social Nets, Advertisers became concerned and shied away, and then started to pull their support.

4. News International then closed News of The World, the storyline being that it was a toxic brand and so no longer a viable business. This was picked up by all the media, but the blogosphere was probably the most cynical about it straight off compared to the (sue-able) mass media, which played a more straight bat.

5. A campaign started, to drive protest responses to the public listening exercise on the News International takeover of BSkyB, this was flashed across Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere (I can't see it on Mumsnet though) and c 156,000 responses were received (normally a few hundred are received) forcing the embattled Media Secretary to announce an indefinite delay and OfCom to muse on whether News International were "fit and proper" to own it. This impacts on whether they are fit and proper to own anything, and in the long term this is The Big Story..

6. As with the Egyptian Revolution however, it was Television that put the real boot in. On Thursday night the very influential (and hugely watched) BBC Question Time programme kicked off with the question that had been on Twittter all day "Is the closure of the News Of The World just a cynical attempt to insulate News International from the fallout over phone hacking" (as quite a few of tjhe people in charge at the time now hold bigger jobs in the News International empire, and the real agenda is getting the BSkyB deal done). Hacked actor Hugh Grant was on the panel, and played his best role ever - that of an eloquent, elegant and aggrieved hacked actor (see video here) - while the panel's usual cadre of politicos and journos wriggled on the various News International petards thay had hoisted themselves on over the years. Question Time has its own Twitterstream (#bbcqt - we covered it some time ago) and this was ticking over like a geiger counter.

7. Roll forward to Friday morning an Opposition leader Ed Milliband went live on TV, crossing the Rubicon and going against News International on prime time TV (it has been an open secret in UK political circles for at least a decade that Murdoch is a kingmaker). The Prime Minister managed another wriggly politico petard performance, but by now Twitter was in overdrive and he was sliced, diced and dismissed in minutes. Twitter was the main conduit throughout the day, pointing to analyses across the UK and US as they emerged, but by now the 24 hour TV channels and mass media were on the case and were bearing the main story load.

8. On Friday afternoon, NI UK supremo Rebekah Brooks (who had been News Of The World editor at the time of the hackings of Millie Dowler, one of the dead girls's phone) held an off -the-record meeting to the sacked News Of the World employees, which was of course recored on various "User Generated Media" sources such as Audioboo and instantaneously disseminated on Twitter and Facebook, and picked up by the 24 hour TV news channels as it happened, including her comment that worse was yet to come.

9. On the BBC flagship political programme Newsnight on Friday night, another hacked actor, comedian Steve Coogan, gave another virtuoso performance (see video here) to millions of watchers (and more tuned in as it flashed across Twitter). Again, mainstream media carrying the load, Social Media carrying the signal.

10. Roll forward to Saturday, now the story is across all the mass media, and the Twitter #notw hashtag is still spinning like a geiger counter, the latest campaigns are to boycott not just the News Of The World but the Sunday Times tomorrow. Facebook has campaigns a-plenty as well, it would seem. Carl Bernstein (yes, that one) has weighed in on the UK's Watergate. Also by Saturday, the Googlebots have indexed all the media so it is fairly easy to pick up on the story. Oddly enough, according to Twitter the #Icantgoadaywithout hashtag is the biggest trending, but as I watch its not turning over as fast as #notw, so quite how they define "trending" I don't know.

And Mumsnet? well, on the main demi-political sections, the "Chat" and "Am I Being Unreasonable" boards, the biggest stories (apart from the perennials) are ""Message deleted by Mumsnet"" and "To start a Friday night drunk"

(To be fair, there are a few discussions of News Of The World related topics on Mumsnet but they are quite small volumes comparatively - but given they were accused of breaking News Of The World, they are clearly very influential....).

In conclusion then, Social Media is a messenger. It was not able to unearth or set up the target (that took courageous analytical journalism), but was excellent at running faster than the opposing media blocking plays, was excellent at alerting, aggregating and activating simple mass responses (boycott NOTW! boycott the Advertisers! Sign the petition against BsKyB takeover!) and pointing to alternative analyses. However, to really have mass impact it has required prime time TV with well known personalities to drive the agenda. My take on the Arab Spring ongoing story is that Socisal Media is also not that good at setting up alternative structures, its better at protesting against existing ones.

And Tomorrow? Well, we shall just have to see.....but one thing is for sure, adding Social Media to the mix has allowed small, nimble media to run rings around even interests as vested as the Tory party and News International. The real proof will be how quickly the investigations start (the Government is procrastinating) and what happens to BSkyB.....

*Nick wrote "Flat Earth News" which in my opinion is The seminal book on modern media

On the news that usage is falling in the early markets.

Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data service. Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year. But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual.

The company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. In contrast, it grew by at least 20 million new users over the typical month in the past 12; while there have been a few months that have registered lower growth numbers, they have not been back to back.

Why the drop? Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000. If these countries — most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago — had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month.

We predicted this 3 years ago, using the social network dynamic explained in the post. The graph is reproduced above

The blue line represents the total number of users, the red line represents usage, each user is assumed to have a usage pattern that is high intially and then settles down to a lower frequency over time (second graph below). Bear in mind that it's the red graph that is the major predictor of Ad based revenues.



The result for Facebook is worrying as they move up to IPO, the last thing they can afford is widespread signs of this sort of collapse so we would not be surprised that, if this trend carries on, the IPO is pulled forward.

Sometimes you have to scratch your head....TechCrunch:

We’re witnessing a generation of consumer web companies growing at an unprecedented rate in terms of both user adoption and revenue.

But here’s a little secret that’s gone unnoticed by most. It’s women. Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies. Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.

Consider some more data. Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web. Comscore says women are the majority of users of social networking sites and spend 30% more time on these sites than men; mobile social network usage is 55% female according to Nielsen.

In e-commerce, female purchasing power is also pretty clear. Sites like Zappos (>$1 billion in revenue last year), Groupon ($760m last year), Gilt Groupe ($500m projected revenue this year), Etsy (over $300m in GMV last year), and Diapers ($300m estimated revenue last year) are all driven by a majority of female customers. According to Gilt Groupe, women are 70% of the customer base and they drive 74% of revenue. And 77% of Groupon’s customers are female according to their site.

That was Kleiner Perkins partner Aimeen Barnes in March 2011. May I take you back to '08, and Janet Parkinson at Web 2.0 in Berlin:

Women represent a good half of the number of users of the web and even more on social networks. They make over 80% of all real world consumer purchases and according to a recent survey conducted by Mastercard run across 7 countries recently, women now shop more online than men – though they spend less. Some of the reasons for this being security issues and bad website design. As Justin Drummond notes in Brandrepublic ‘It is recognised that women, more so than men in the US and UK, are culturally encouraged to be more inclined to discuss their purchases with friends, recommending items they are pleased with and asking for advice from peers in decision-making; “they utilize the powerful marketing tool: word of mouth” (Source: www.alternet.org). This goes hand in hand with an expectance of openness to information about goods they wish to purchase, and makes them harder customers than men in many ways’.

The Web 1.0 online hard sell “Point-Click-Purchase” approach doesn’t always work, and given the choice women often prefer to browse, dig deep and get to understand our choices. Perhaps this is the reason for the success of sites like Etsy http://www.etsy.com/ which offer more of a shopping experience – with social networking at its core. Social media is becoming more of an integral part of websites – and, as Business Week reports the use of social media is particularly attractive to women.

Web design and online marketing companies which are areas generally dominated by men are having to adapt to social marketing. Having more women involved with their eye for what women want can only be a good thing.

Moving on to advertising, Martha Barletta in her book ‘Marketing to Women’ comments that 91% of women say ‘advertisers don’t understand us’,and IPC Media reveals that within the ever growing market of women over 35, 36% feel that advertising aimed at them is patronising.

I must admit that I’m getting particularly fed up with the marketers and product designers assuming that the way to get me to buy some piece of tech is to make it in pink!

But there are a few glimmerings of hope with Dove, M&S and a few others having launched highly successful campaigns aimed at the older woman. But my favourite to date has to be Harley Davidson which has added a section on its website dedicated to women motorcyclists. Women now buy 12% of all Harleys sold, and in an article in the New York Times, Jerry G. Wilke, Harley-Davidon’s vice president for customer relationships and product planning comments: “I think 12 percent is just the beginning…. The opportunities to cater to women are endless, and we will continue to do more.” The video games industry is an area worth watching too with 40% of all gamers being women – though they represent just 12% of the industry.

This is still just the beginning though, and the money is starting to appear. Advertising on, and traffic to, women-specific sites has increased rapidly and the big boys are starting to get in on the act:

A mere 2 and a half years later and Kleiner is saying the same thing. But what is even more interesting is the number of commentors on the TechCrunch piece making "wow, isn't that amazing" noises. In some ways I'd like to believe that they are just sucking up to Kleiner, because the alternative is to believe it really is new news to most of them!

But nevertheless, the real lesson is that if you are reading the genuine early thinkers (like Janet), or even those who follow early trends, like us, then you can easily have a 2 year lead on the main market.

The third session today at the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference in London had Joanna Shields (EU COO, ex Bebo) of Facebook up, again subtly pressed by the FT's Richard Waters on the basics of the Facebook business model, here are my notes:

- Facebook's value to the user is "Unique"

- As a platform it drove far higher demand for Al Jazeera English than otherwise would have happened

- Facebook shares data with companies but they can only see what you want thenm to see (Facebook sees all)

- Facebook's proposition is to "help people feel more engaged", i.e. stay on the site, and is thus is trying to bring as much content / functions / diversions onto the site so you don't need to leave - ever (and when you do, the Facebook tentacles follow you with Likes etc)

On Zynga - It is a great business because it "puts people at the centre of its business". Joanna was more demure when pressed about the gerfuffle about how much loot Facebook gets from Zynga for sitting on the platform.

On Facebook Credits - yes it is the only way people will buy anything on Facebook (aka why would you let anyone else in..)

On why Facebook has stopped publically reporting new users since last summer - Joanna dodged that one, instead saying that Facebook was:

- "Going Deeper" (aka trying to get more minutes onsite per user

- Now have 200m users on Mobile

- Has 30m UK users (c 60% of adult population - I wonder how many "users" are duplicate or corporate names) and 50% come back every day.

- Is growing in new markets

On $50bn valuation - based on:

- very tight knowledge of users

- increasing relevance to usesr based on this knowledge

- can target friends / friends of friends

My take - nothing new except that interesting dodge of "Growth" - that explains the huge activity to increase time on site, as if you do the maths, when growth starts to slow down, engagement on the site starts to drop off radically, which Joanna should know all about from Bebo days (new users spend more time on site and usage decays over time). I wanted to ask about why Facebook would last whereas Bebo didn't, but there wasn't time

Update - Facebook co-founder is selling 10 million shares - c $300m - hmmm, as they say.

There was an educational article in the Undiependent yersterday, in a sort of "OmiGod" way. It was about the UK "Top 100 Twitterers", and was ostensibly based on the PeerIndex algorithm. Now those of you who know about measuring influence on Twitter will know we are in Iteration 4 of Influence Monitoring.

Iteration 1 was "how many followers do they have" - the logic being that if you have lots of followers, you are influential. Turns out that lost of peopel gamed the system by following as many peopel as that can, and as so many had "autofollow" on, they got followed back. Ergo Joe Social climber is now instantly influential.

Iteration 2 was to try and gauge influence by the "Follow/followed" ratio - ie if you were truly influential, then lots if people follow you and you follow no one else. Cue above spammers to start unfollowing many of the people thay had followed to get their ratios up. Given no auto-unfollow, all their "audience" remained. The only problem was, it was also becoming clear that ratios were not the be all and end all, people actually had to say something (ie volume of twts) and make it interesting enough to actually influence other people. Not only that, it was becoming clear that on social media you were having to be social - the "pimp and dump" mode was in fact counter-pruductive.

Iteration 3 was to be a bit more sophisticated, and to see how often other people repeated (re-tweeted) what you said. This of course led to a Retweet Explosion by the sort of people who want to be Influential on Twitter (The Social Media Climbers) , but the only measurable influence was lots of p*ssed off people saying "stop retweeting everything or I'll unfollow you, you eejit" or similar, and changing of Retweet rules on Twitter. Also, as many grumpy people pointed out when Ashton Kutcher and friends had a "race for a million followers", people may let him influence their decision on a movie to watch, but not really on things they felt he knew nothing about. But this was the Explosion of Corporate interest in Social Advertising, so the newly minted Social PR agencies had to have something to feed the beast, so needs must and many attempts - some very good (eg Mat Morrison) and some much less good - were made to understand more deeply how influence works on a social network. And guess what - it's complicated

Iteration 4, where we now are, is trying to be more sophisticated - trying to blend in all the above approaches, plus add some form of "where is this person an authority", some understanding of "when is a retweet an influence and when is it just some prat trying to curry favour with the person they are channeling" etc, and even looking at outside calibration in other social media systems.

Anyway, the Independent yesterday invented Iteration 5 with its Top 100 UK Twitter methodology. It is so breathtakingly simple we wonder why people didn't think of it before:

Twitter is not yet evenly distributed: some fields, like technology and science, have very large communities of fans; others, like literature or art, have more incipient Twitter communities – but are none the less plainly influential. So we also searched specifically (further down the rankings) for people who had particular resonance in certain fields; and further refined our list by focusing on those who were especially trusted by other experts. This was where the advice of our expert panel came in.

Our five-person panel comprised Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex; Ian Burrell, media editor of The Independent; Julia Hobsbawm, founder of Julia Hobsbawm Consulting and the media networking business Editorial Intelligence; Steve Moore, director of the Big Society Network; and Stefan Stern, cultural commentator and director of strategy at the Edelman PR agency. They analysed the initial results of PeerIndex's calculations, made recommendations and disqualifications, and argued for extra weighting for certain key tweeters whose significance to the medium is, in their expert judgement, greater than the numbers imply. Such interventions were kept to a minimum but give our final list the crucial virtue of having been assembled through the prism of human intelligence.

So, what you do is you take the output of an Iteration 4 algorithm system (Peerindex in this case). you take a long, hard, considered look at the algorithmic output and say "f*ck that for a game of soldiers, who are all these odd people - we need more people like us and some slebs with big t*ts". In other words, get a small closed circle of meedja types, look at the output, and chuck away anyone who doesn't look like a sleb or a current meedja darling, as those are the Right Stuff - the people who are (to quote) "plainly influential" and "especially trusted by other experts".

Well no, because if they were they would have higher scores on the algorithm, surely? - the population on Twitter is now quite large, its goes way beyond early techies. The reason - I would argue - that their scores are not higher is that people on Twitter are not being influenced by them as much, and there are (I propose) two main reasons for that:

(i) The Mainstream media is sleb-obsessed, but its mainly because slebs are walking advertising billboards, whereas said media have no tight feedback mechanism for measuring (a) what their readers really think of said slebs and (b) how influential they are (For example some slebs are influential insofar as their lives are total train wrecks - but no one would actually buy anything on their say so)

(ii) Twitter is (largely) still ABC1 demographic - people of wit, discernment and taste - or at any rate, they expect to see interesting interaction with their favourite famous ones. Going from Mass to Social Media is a bit like the jump from Silent to Talkie movies - suddenly one finds some of the stars of the silent screens sound ridiculous, and the 'Net effect is people run away from them.

The fundamental problem is that the Mainstream Media is unable to recognise anyone that the mainstream media doesn't recognise, if you get my drift - which is of course why it is becoming daily less relevant, while a new lansdcape of media performers have come up via blogging, Web TV et al.

Now I believe the algorithm is probably as good as any of this Iteration (It has to be, my Peer Index score means I should have been on that Indy Top 100, in about position 75-80* ) but you have to ask, why bother with an algorithm method if you can just grab a quick coffee clatch and over a circle-jerk decide, based on (your perception of) mainstream media fame, who is influential on an entirely new medium. Straight up Hello or Cosmo's alley I'd of thought, but the Erudite, Intellectual, Independent?

Or is it now the Obeisant, Populist, Undiependent?

Update - a few days later, Jeremiah Owyang makes the same observation


* Hence this post - and the grapes were sour as well

From some of the stuff being written right now, you would think the Egyptians (and Algerians?) were totally unable to run a revolution without Twitter and Facebook. On TechCrunch we have Alexia Tsotsis saying "Mubarak Shut Down The Internet, And The Internet Paid Him In Kind":

It has become fashionable amongst Western media and armchair foreign policy experts (hi Malcolm) to dismiss the idea that what happened in Egypt was a digital revolution mainly because most people associate Facebook and Twitter with the mundane over-sharing of what you ate for breakfast. That and the fact that its been pretty damn hard to pin down what exactly causes revolutions. This belief isn’t helped by the truth that a ton of social media noise did not actually lead to a regime change in Iran during #IranElection.

But the many who said that social media was no match for Mubarak’s stubbornness and the fact that his dictatorship had been there for thirty years overlooked one key thing. #Egypt wasn’t just about Facebook and Twitter, it was about the Internet as a whole.

I started writing about Egypt because I was moved by an email we received on January 27th, with only a subject line, “Re: URGENT: Egypt blocks text messaging as well” and no body.

(The "Hi Malcolm" bit there was a sideswipe at Malcolm Gladwell, who is anathema in Revolution 2.0 circles for arguing that social media, with its focus on weak ties, cannot catalyse a revolution on its own and needs People)

Anyway, it has become fashionable amongst Western new media and armchair social media experts (Hi Alexia) to dismiss the idea that what happened in Egypt was a People's Revolution (or, as one of the comments put it - "Mubarak Shut Down The People, And The People Paid Him In Kind"). The role of mobile, TV, word of mouth, posters etc etc - and just motivated people - are also largely ignored in the rush to Revolution 2.0.

Look at the numbers - Internet penetration in Egypt is still very low (c 16%), whereas mobile (71%) and TV (90%, though not all can get Al Jazeera - but I'd bet nearly everyone knows somewhere that can) is much higher - or are the Revolution 2.0 crowd claiming that its only the Internet enabled in Egypt who made the revolutuion happen? Also, its an inconvenient truth that the 'Net was shut down over the critical periods as well, but oddly enough the Egyptian revolution carried on (as did Al Jazeera) thus disproving (I would have thought) the whole thesis from the first.

It was far more clear that the revolution would, in fact, be Televised.....

Also, one wonders how the French, Russians, Mexicans et al managed to have revolutions without even a telephone dial-up connection to rub together. How did the Eastern Europeans and South Africans do it in the 1980s and 90s Before Facebook? Unfortuntely for the Revolution 2.0 crowd, it is easier to prove that revolutions happened before Social Media, rather than vice versa.

Next on TechCrunch Leena Rao on Wael Ghonim:

Google MENA Marketing Executive Wael Ghonim spoke to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about his perspective on the situation. Ghonim had been previously been detained and blindfolded for 12 days for organizing protests against the Mubarak government, and was only released earlier this week. Ghonim, who has been a figurehead for the movement against the Egyptian government, told Blitzer “If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.”

Ghonim, is of course, referring to the fact much of this revolution was organized on Twitter and Facebook (similar to the Tunisian protests). Ghonim was believed to have hosted the first Facebook page that organized the January 25th protests. When Blitzer asked “Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?,” Ghonim replied succinctly “Ask Facebook.”

He went on to personally thank Mark Zuckerberg, and said he’d love to meet Facebook’s CEO. Ghonim says that he’s looking forward to getting back to his work at Google but he plans to write a book, “Revolution 2.0″ about the role of social media and the internet in political demonstration. There’s no doubt that social media has changed political activism irrevocably, and this moment will surely be a historic moment for Facebook and Twitter.

Far be it for me to knock the work Wael put in, for him I only have respect (I am more knocking those who take it as an argument that the Net was the only factor, something even Wael is upset by) but may I respectfully suggest he was only seeing a small part of a far bigger picture (for example, the picture I was seeing was on Al Jazeera TV, who curiously again go totally unremarked). My "opposite but equal" Egyptian quote is this:

"I think it's been incredibly condescending to diminish, if you will, what was an incredibly popular revolution the likes of which the Arab world has not seen, perhaps the whole world has not seen, and just to say that it was a Facebook event or a Twitter event." -- Parvez Sharma, filmmaker and writer

As to where next, in fact one of the best predictors of revolution is the % of unemployed poor young men a society has - and the Arab world has a major "youth bulge".

Fortunately, a guest post retained some sanity - Devin Coldewey wrote in a piece that "People, Not Things, Are The Tools Of Revolution" - he actually says most of what I think is the case, so over to him:

Some are using that moment to praise the social media tools used by some of the protesters, and the role the internet played in fueling the revolution. While it’s plain that these things were part of the process, I think the mindset of the online world creates a risk of overstating their importance, and elevating something useful, even powerful, to the status of essential. The people of Egypt made use of what means they had available, just as every oppressed people has in history.

Twitter and Facebook are indeed useful tools, but they are not tools of revolution — at least, no more than Paul Revere’s horse was. People are the tools of revolution, whether their dissent is spread by whisper, by letter, by Facebook, or by some means we haven’t yet imagined. What we, and the Egyptians, should justly be proud of, is not just those qualities which set Egypt’s revolution apart from the last hundred, but those which are fundamental to all of them.

Malcom Gladwell has become the whipping boy of the internet for having suggested however long ago it was that the social web is something that breeds weak connections and requires only a minimum of participation. He was right then, and he’s right now; he wrote a short post the other day defying the gloating masses (sensibly, but haughtily), and concluded with something commentators of the Egyptian revolution should take to heart: “People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”

It’s one thing to give credit where credit is due and admire the rapidity and resilience of internet-based communication. The new uses to which the younger generation is putting the internet are very interesting and point to shifts in the way people are choosing to share information. It’s another thing to ascribe to these things powers they don’t have, powers that rest in the people who use them. It sounds like quibbling, but it’s an important distinction. Facebook greased the gears, but it isn’t the gears, and never will be. The revolution has been brewing for decades, and these same protesters have been in the streets countless times, after organizing by phone, by word of mouth, or simply as a shared reaction to some fresh enormity.

Clearly Social Media, and the Internet, were comms tools in Egypt, but if it wasn't around (it was turned off for a while remember) people would have found - and did - other tools. But as Dewin points out, to a Social Media apostle:

It’s a variation of the mindset of the man with the hammer, in which every problem appears to be a nail. Today’s hammer is the social web.

There is actually (in my opinion) a deeper attitudinal problem possibly emerging here among some armchair western Social Media Experts - that it is inconceivable to some that poor, less educated, revolting Arabs could foment and carry out their own revolution - with (extremely unusual) dignity, clarity and self restraint as it happens - on their ownsome, with just Arabic TV stations and being left to their own (mobile, internet and other less techie comms) devices. No, they clearly could only have done this via good old up-to-the-minute American know-how.

Update - Jeff Jarvis writes a blog post opposing most of my views over here. He's wrong, of course