These are the slides of a keynote I gave at Emerce Eday on 25 October 2012 in Rotterdam. The short description of my talk was as follows: With the ongoing rise of third party applications like Klout, tools for measuring Twitter influence are important to understand. This presentation takes a look at the different ways in which influence measures have been developed for Twitter. In particular it will use the case study of the UK riots of 2011 for which a database of 2.6 million tweets was collected in collaboration with Twitter and The Guardian newspaper. By examining the top 1000 most tweeted accounts, it will give further insight in how influence worked during this crisis event, specifically highlighting the emergence of the ‘ordinary influential’ during 2011 as well as how large organisations have incorporated social media practices.

1. @ flygirltwo
How (not) to measure Twitter
influence
Farida Vis
Information School, University of
Sheffield

2. REAL TIME

3. BIG DATA

4. MOBILE

5. TWITTER

6. FACEBOOK

7. [NAME OF NEXT
BIG SNS HERE]

8. GEOLOCATION

9. STREAMING

10. INFLUENCE

11. KLOUT

12. PEERINDEX

13. Following Rules and Best Practice – Twitter Help Center
We don’t limit the number of followers you can have. However, we do monitor how
aggressively users follow other users. We try to make sure that none of our limits
restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most Twitter users.
Aggressive following is define as indiscriminate following a few users if their accounts
seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive.
… every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve 2000 users, there are limits to
the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and
is based on you ratio of followers to following.

16. ‘A score in the 40s suggests a strong, but
niche, following’
‘… influence is about engagement and
motivation, not just racking up legions of
followers’ (New York Times)

17. Sleep deprivation…
Facebook
Community

19. Not on KLOUT, still scored

20. THE ALGORITHM

22. Aaron Zinman
MIT Sociable
Media Group

26. Online Sport Education Illegal and legal

27. UK TWITTERATI

28. 2011 UK Twitterati (The Independent)
1. Sarah Brown – Campaigner (PI: 93)
2. Richard Bacon – Broadcaster (PI: 92)
3. Eddie Izzard – Comedian (PI: 89)

29. 2012 UK Twitterati (The Independent)
1. Richard Branson – Tycoon (PI: 93)
2. Sarah Brown – Campaigner (PI: 92)
=2. Alan Carr, Broadcaster (PI: 92)

30. Tweets as: @richardbranson
PeerIndex:93
Authority: 95
Activity: 46
Audience: 97
Follows: 6,414
Followers: 1,834,516

33. NO Jon Hickman on PeerIndex
No score/profile created for him

34. Free stuff
More than 2,500
companies using
Klout’s data
(NYT,
26.6.2011)

35. “For the first time, we’re all on an even
playing field”
Joe Fernandez
Chief executive and co founder of Klout

36. BIG DATA

37. NOT ENOUGH

38. GIANT
DATA

39. More than 12 billion signals a day into a
Hive data warehouse of more than 1
trillion rows
Hundreds of millions of user profiles
Klout blog 11.10.2012

40. 2.6 million
riot tweets
Lisa Evans, 8.12.2011

42. ± 45% Mainstream media

44. Viral
Image
≠
Influence

45. Mentions ≠ insight

46. Online influence ≠
Offline influence

47. BIEBER VS OBAMA

48. 2012 UK Independent voices (The Independent)
UK NEWS: Owen Jones –
writer / researcher (PI: 65)
WORLD NEWS: Hossam el-Hamalawy –
Egyptian journalist/dissident (PI: 64)
PEOPLE: Wael Ghonim –
Egyptian Google staffer (PI: 41)

49. 2011 rise of the ordinary
influential?

50. CONTEXT
CONTEXT
CONTEXT

51. Small data = meaning

52. Gaming the system

55. Implications of reducing
people to a number