Let me start out by stating the motivation for this post: I am interested in knowing more about how people think about activity in Twitter and the thought process they go through when they see a Tweet that is relevant to them for some reason.  There is an assumption of a direct correlation between perceived influence and consideration.  For example, if I see someone with two followers complaining about my product I probably won’t care as much as if I saw someone who was a well respected industry voice with thousands of followers complaining about me.

I think this is a pretty safe assumption to make but there may be differing perspectives on this.

The Web Ecology Project

At any rate, let’s dive in and first examine some of the work done by the Web Ecology Project, an “interdisciplinary research group” in Boston who do a lot of data mining.

They have come up with a great research article, Analyzing Influence on Twitter (PDF).  The Project define influence in Twitter as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user.”  Using this definition, they then perform comparative analysis of 12 prominent Twitter users for 10 days, who fall into three broad classifications (celebrities, news outlets and social media analysts).  The research paid particular attention to the outcomes associated with original tweets.

Based on their formative definition of influence, the study concludes,

That social media analysts receive minimal reward for the effort they exert in maintaining a conversation with their followers.  For those users that succeed, most news outlets were more successful at having their content pushed to other users.  Celebrities, on the other hand, appear to inspire conversational responses with their followers, yet with more success than the analysts.

So basically celebrities inspire conversations with their followers, news outlets compel people to share information, and  social media analysts are loudmouths who people generally ignore.  Nothing surprising about these findings.

The real value for me is in the initial categorization scheme.  From a user perspective, it probably is interesting to note what type of influencer is tweeting about you because that is likely to inform your consequent action.

Twinfluence – Influence Analysis Light

Moving on, Twinfluence is an online application that ranks users in Twitter according to three categories:

• Reach – the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers) in addition to all of their followers (second-order followers).
• Velocity – An average of the number of first and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer established their account.
• Social Capital – An estimation of how influential (how many followers) a Twitterer’s followers have.

Twinfluence offers some basic indexes based on these variables but it doesn’t seem actionable (to me).  The one takeaway for me here is their observation that there is semantic value in examining the influence of a Twitter user’s audience.  The search engine analogue for me is Google’s observation that a page’s backlinks tell only one side of the story, the authority of the pages linking to the page in question are also important variables to be considered.

Klout – Influence Analysis Heavy

Finally, I took a quick look at Klout, a venture-backed Silicon Valley start-up that “measures influence on topics across the social web to find the people the world listens to.”  Like the Web Ecology project, they define influence as “the ability to drive people to action.”

They provide a score based on 25+ variables that is a “numerical representation of the size and strength of a person’s sphere of influence on Twitter.”

Major categories of variables include:

• True Reach – a variable that filters spam bots and inactive accounts as well as dormant or non-interested followers.
• Amplification Ability – The likelihood that a message will generate retweets or spark a conversation.
• Network Score – A measure of how influential a person’s network is.

I was a little skeptical initially based on the breadth of variables they examine but a quick search for my own profile revealed some pretty good information that seemed fairly usable.  These prompted me to sign-up and take a look around.   I like the basic Klout score as a top-line metric to use however there does seem to be a bit of a learning curve because Klout has created an entirely new language to talk about influence that needs to be learned before it can be used.

My Own Fairly Non-Influential Perspective

I’m a little curious if we even need a new set of variables to analyze influencers.  When I look through my own stream of tweets, the first thing I do is see if anything sticks out as being an extreme response.  In other words, I’m not looking for non-intrusive observations but for exclamations about my product.  From there, I’ll generally think about whether to interact or not – but in general I don’t care that much if the person is influential.  In fact, I rarely look at their followers even as a top-line reference before interacting – I just look at their message. That being said, I don’t believe we have the type of chatter that major brands are going to have so some type of categorization is going to be necessary for them.   I’m just not sure how sophisticated it needs to be.

Curious to get some other perspectives on this. . .

According to most accounts, HARO was launched as a Facebook group in 2007 (although HARO had probably been manifesting organically through founder Peter Shankman’s own network for many years prior).  After HARO outgrew Facebook, they transitioned to a Web-based / e-mail-driven service and grew over the next 1.5 years to a community that today includes ~30,000 content producers and > 100K PR/marketing folks (who HARO refers to as Sources).

The basic premise is simple and smart: on one one side of the fence you have content producers with a demand for information.  On the other side of the fence, you have information sources with a vested interest in getting their name into published content.  Facilitate relevant interactions between the two and overlay the conversation with advertising.

The key to HARO’s early success can be extrapolated from their brand: they build for journalists and bloggers.  That has built a good deal of brand equity amongst content producers, which in turn leads to more interest from the marketing folks, which in turn is monetized through the ad overlay.  It’s a good model, especially as the media ecosystem continues to tighten up and become increasingly intertwined.

The new launch really seems to accomplish the following main goals:

• Increase value to content producers through some interesting features including ephemeral e-mails for content producers;
• Introduce top-line scalability by introducing verticalized e-mail digests;
• Increase overalll scalability by introducing more automation of workflow.

The product features are pretty cool but my sense is this is more about positioning HARO for growth moving forward.  I like what they are doing: they have a successful model; a good, clean UI and an insightful, talented management team.   They are definitely one company to watch in ‘10.

Turns out that Daniel has a much grander vision for the space than simply housing the PointAbout group.  The goal is to create an “entrepreneur-friendly technology innovation hotspot, where we invite tech entrepreneurs to work, luminaries to speak, and offer tech education sessions.”

I love it.  A lot of people will compare it to the Affinity Lab but there are two major differences: First, Affinity hosts a broader array of verticals (non-profit, tech, design) while 1040Q is going to focus more on the tech/start-up community.  Second, the space itself is much larger and more sleek.

There are some pictures of the space at the 1410Q Web site and a registration form to be kept in the loop on upcoming events.

Bookmarking is a vestige of the Mosaic browser (circa 1993) and has subsequently emerged into a persistent feature of Web browsers.  Bookmarks aren’t rocket science:

• There are a lot of pages on the Internet.
• Some of these pages are interesting.
• It might be handy to have a tool to help remember the interesting pages.

Pre-bust, a number of venture-backed startups tacked on an additional step in this progression:

• It might be handy to have an easy way to share interesting pages with others.

Of course, this was all pre-bust and all the companies that were working on implementing this last point flamed out because there was no financial model behind these startups.

Post-bust, a new wave of startups (most notably Delicious) began exploring this question once again and some of them achieved a modicum of financial success (i.e. Digg).  Although there has been limited financial achievement from social bookmarking sites, the general usage has been more significant and at this point in time the marketers enter the progression and add another point:

• There are a lot of bookmarking sites with a lot of eyeballs so it would be good to share our message with that audience.

And predictably, the service providers enter the equation with:

• There are a lot of marketers spending a lot of time posting business messages to social bookmark sites so let’s create a tool that helps them streamline the process.

Enter OnlyWire and a few others.

So at any rate, OnlyWire is a tool that makes it easier for marketers to post their business messages to multiple sharing sites without having to spend the time and individually share their message.  In fact, the one-off nature of other sharing tools like ShareThis and AddThis is a differentiator that they point to in the brief introductory video on their home page.

‘Saving people time’ is a great benefit prop for online applications however in general I ask the question ‘What is the act that is streamlined.’  For instance, if a tool helps people save time involved with monitoring social media sites (i.e. Radian6) then that is a good thing.  Monitoring and analysis of online conversations is good.

If a tool helps people save time interacting within various social media sites that is also good.

The issue for products like OnlyWire is that I’m not sure if they are a tool that helps people save time engaging within social media or spamming online communities.  My initial impression is that in the spam-engage continuum, OnlyWire falls further on the ’spam’ side and that is fine – as long as their roadmap is eventually focused on moving customers from spam to engagement.

From a realistic perpsective, posting a bunch of messages (without engaging) is a short term proposition.  You will probably drive traffic at the outset but over time if you are just posting and not engaging you will be either tuned out by the community or banished.

Now I know that since their acquisition they have attempted to place filters in place to prevent spam practices but if I were PM’ing OnlyWire I would seriously be thinking about how to solve the following problems:

1. How to help customers be selective about the community sites where they are going to be active (instead of providing them with a big page of community sites where they enter credentials);
2. How to help customers listen to conversations going on in those communities so they are actually plugging-in.  This doesn’t mean offering a full blown monitoring solution like Radian6 but it may mean helping them aggregate and organize feeds;
3. How to help customers engage beyond their own posts -

My guess is that a use case where one customer signs up for two or three sites and spends time engaging is going to result in greater longterm tangible benefits (SEO, traffic, business, etc.) than spending the same allotment of time autoposting to thirty sites.

What other people are saying about OnlyWire:

• OnlyWire, the Automated Bookmarketing System that Almost Died
• OnlyWire Under New Management

Note to self: Remember to take off that ridiculously large event badge next time.

• Increased mobile distribution – Business Wire will be distributing content via the mobile applications of several of their partners including the AP, Yahoo! Finance, Morningstar and several others.
• EON inclusion for all releases – Business Wire will be providing distribution over EON to all customers when they purchase a standard circuit.
• Analytics enhancements – They are rolling out some additions to their analytics platform.  Browsing the features I wasn’t able to discern what is new from what was provided prior to the launch of “global-mobile-social-measurable” but I think the sharing data is new.

These are all things that make sense however I wouldn’t use words like “unique” or “super-charge” to describe them.  They are just ongoing enhancements that should bring some incremental value to Business Wire customers.

Without taking a deep dive into the product, the key components seem to include:

• A basic CMS that will provide users with the ability to create a Web hosted version of the release;
• Analytics to show how often it has been shared, tweeted, etc.
• No external distribution or syndication

Ciarallo quotes a drop.io rep. as saying “most companies not using cheaper wire services such as PRWeb and PitchEngine. . .have to use [wires like] PRNewswire. . .and this is a compliment to that.”

If the quote is accurately stated then I’m a bit perplexed by the drop.io perspective.  If PRWeb and PitchEngine are being classified as “cheaper services,” then why would consumers “have to use” more expensive wire services?

Setting that confusion aside, why would PressLift be a compliment to traditional wire services when the traditional wire services already have their own Web-oriented products on the market like EON (Business Wire) and WebMax (PR Newswire).  Furthermore, how is this product any different from PitchEngine besides the fact that it looks like a hacked WordPress template?

I think Drop.io is a good product and I’m sure PressLift is going to be leveraging many of the core platform technologies that Drop.io has.  That’s a good thing.  Furthermore, PressLift is still very much in pre-Alpha so I’m not going to jump to any conclusions yet but I definitely have some initial questions.