How do we know who's the daddy on Twitter?

by Nathan Smith

I must say that the ‘Twitter suddenly exploded’ article in this week’s PR week  misses many points and probably just highlights how far the PR industry in the UK is trailing in the area.

The cornerstone of the article relies on Porter Novelli research, the word research is used but surely in its most limited capacity.  The ‘research’ doesn’t outline how many agencies we’re included in the ‘research’ but basically 15 agencies were contacted in asked how many of their staff use Twitter – we are then told that Hotwire are the most active agency (in the UK? World? London? Based on the research?).

The low point comes when we are told that influence is evaluated based on how many users someone has and how often they tweet.

It’s a tardy piece of writing that sheds little light on one of the most fascinating subjects to have emerged in our industry for many a year – how we evaluate influence on twitter is still being debated,  but I can categorically tell you that the explanation given by this article is very wide of the target.

Tonight I’m going to start work on an algorithm that will in no uncertain terms derive once and for all ‘Who’s the Daddy’ when it comes to influence on Twitter.  The elements that are included in the algorithm are as follows:

1)      Followers

2)      Tweets

3)      Retweets

4)      Who you are in the real world.

Out of the above 4, I would say that retweeting and who you really are probably are the most important factors. There are lots of retweet lists popping up all over the web at the moment that are definitely worth considering whenever you talk about influence and twitter in the same sentence.  As for who you are – well that’s just obvious, ask Barack Obama.

Comments

[Kerry Gaffney]

Hi Nathan,

I work at Porter Novelli as part of the WW digital team that pulled the figures together for PR Week. I agree that the article leaves a little to be desired on clarfiying how the research was performed and why. However, the full methdology, plus a few other thoughts on PRs on twitter and how we can assess influence - http://bit.ly/FdJuv.