As Twitter increases in popularity I thought I’d spend my Sunday morning searching out some anecdotal evidence to back up my gut feel – just how popular, how much is hype, where’s it all going, where is it going sideways and how might one get it right. Here are a few of the articles that helped me get to the bottom of things:

50 Million Twits: 50 million unique visitors worldwide

A TechCrunch post this week, Twitter Flew Above The 50 Million Uniques Mark For the First Time in July,  reported “ComScore now counts it as the No. 47 largest site in the world, increasing from the No.52 spot in June and (surpassing the BBC and Craigslist)”. and “It is important to note that since more than half of Twitter users don’t even go to the Website and use Twitter apps to consume and publish Tweets, Twitter’s total audience is even larger. But clearly Twitter is still growing.”

Pointless Twits: How Useful is Twitter Content

A post on Pear Analytics by Ryan Kelly, Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage – 40% is “Pointless Babble” analyzes 2,000 Tweets on the public timeline over a two week period in a white paper study. The exercise categorized Tweets into 6 buckets – News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-along value.

Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured; however, Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets captured.

Corporate Finance Twits: Twitter Use by Investor Relations

A post this week on Q4blog – Report reveals early adopters using Twitter for Investor Relations discusses Social Media adoption outside of Marketing and PR.

Key statistics revealed include that of the 80 public companies surveyed, 55% are using Twitter for investor relations and 62% provided a link to their Q2 earnings release.

Tennis Twits: Important. Player Notice. Twitter Warning

A post on the BBC News site yesterday Roddick questions Twitter ruling, mentions World number five Andy Roddick describing attempts at the US Open to regulate players’ updates on social networking site Twitter as “lame”.

The Tennis Integrity Unit warns that Twitter messages could violate anti-corruption rules, and that tweeting is not allowed on court during matches.

They add that sending “certain sensitive information concerning your match or other matches and/or players should be avoided. Depending on the information sent out this could be determined as the passing of ‘inside information.’

Football Twits:  NFL clampdown on Twitter and Other Social Media

An Associated Press article on the NFL.com site Teams struggle with policies on Twitter usage as site’s popularity grows states: “The only tweets during the Miami Dolphins’ Saturday scrimmage will come from the officials’ whistles.

The Dolphins are at the forefront of an NFL clampdown on Twitter and other social media, with new restrictions imposed on players, reporters and even spectators.”

The general fear across many teams is that opponents might gain a competitive advantage from even the briefest tweet about injuries, personnel decisions, trick plays or food.

Sports Media writers expressed a different fear, “It would be a shame for a beat writer to get beaten on a story by a 12-year-old in the stands who is allowed to blog” – the view of The Professional Football Writers of America.

Movie Twits: Tweets Don’t Equal Ticket Sales

In a ReadWriteWeb article Twitter Effect’s Power Overstated when it Comes to Making and Breaking Movies on Aug 28, Sarah Perez discusses how “the early buzz on Twitter – much of it negative – that caused these movies to crash and burn”

The post concludes that “the online chatter taking place on the popular microblogging site, while still an important vector for studying sentiment, is not powerful enough on its own to truly impact the overall success or failure of a movie”

Teen Twits: Twitter’s Youth Sees Growth

Another ReadWriteWeb post by Sarah Perez,  Teens Don’t Tweet, May they Start Soon notes that teens are more likely to use text messaging than Twitter for keeping up with their friends and that only 11% of Twitter users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore.

Commentary to this post suggested that “teens don’t tweet because they are already using Facebook, which has everything they’re looking for. Twitter would just be extra work for them” Another comment pointed out that “there were few kids on Twitter in 2008 because it was being used by people who were already sophisticated social media users and who had a blog/website. I see Twitter as both a leading edge information source and a networking tool.”

The commentary to this post is as valuable as the post itself and worth paying attention to.

17 Twits: Dipping your toe in the water

Another post on DoshDosh, 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners provides a useful brainstorm of ways that Twitter can be used in a business context – event updates, customer notifications, prospecting and hiring. A useful listing to dip your toe in the water.

Strategic Twits: Successful Social Media Strategies

In her article, 5 steps to a successful social media strategy, Amy Sample Ward discusses how a Social Media strategy should serve your organizational goals – a principle that organizations seem to forget in their feet first efforts to adopt Twitter, Facebook, Review Sites and Online Communities.

Each step comes with a dialog and a number of links for more information:

Step 3, Strategy, has 5 important sub-steps of things to Identify -

1. The audience or community you want to engage
2. The resources currently available within your organization
3. What success will look like
4. What technologies are most appropriate
5. What measures of success can be used

Whether you are for-profit or non-profit there are some sensible tips here.

Golden Twits: Following thousands of people is just ridiculous

TechCrunch this week discussed Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About) – specifically the ratios between the number of followers a user has, the number of tweets the’ve made and the number of people that user is following.

Worth reading and worth considering when your Twitter strategy becomes more successful and pertinent to your organizational goals – particularly if you are considering an Online Influencers program.

Monitoring Twits: Social Media Monitoring Tools

While seeking out statistics for this post I noticed that the latest Neilsen report states that Twitter is enjoying a 1382% monthly growth… back in February 2009 – a somewhat ironic date in a long and distant past that made me ask the question is traditional market research the best place to pick up the latest buzz? Or can you get 80% of the value for 20% of the cost using well thought out Social Media Monitoring tools.

Ken Burbary’s Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions provides a Master List of useful tools ranging across the board from the most simple and free like Twitfeel to the more expensive full service solutions such as TNS Cymfony. The list also includes my own OpenMic Social Media Analysis solution.

I’m a Twit: My Conclusions

I still maintain my geeky belief that Twitter is a protocol (like Facebook is a set of permissions) – Twitter is a communications channel that can be used in a broad range of ways for both personal and business reasons. It is at its roots a subscribable broadcast mechanism. The beauty is its API that has allowed a variety of applications where its content can be consumed. The crowdsourcing of #hashtags, its use as a pointer system via Bit.ly, photos on Twitpic and the ability to address other @users has allowed it to really flower, yet we have yet to see the killer apps and revenue models appear.

In the meantime, work out what you  are trying to achieve from a business perspective and develop your Twitter tactics as part of a broader social media strategy. And listening to the buzz can be as valuable as broadcasting.

As we are now implementing the OpenMic Influencer Identification Algorithms, we want to provide some suggestions as to what you’d do with them once you’ve found them – in the meantime, here are some notes on related articles:

Influencer Marketing Guidelines

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) defines an INFLUENCER as a person who has a greater than average reach or impact through word of mouth in a relevant marketplace. And INFLUENCER MARKETING as when a marketer identifies, seeks out, and engages with influencers in support of a business objective.

WOMMA also identifies 5 broad categories of influencer (from formal to informal) - 

1) Formal Position of Authority (e.g. Political / Business leaders)
2) Subject Matter Experts (e.g. Academics, Scientists, Authors)
3) Media Elite (e.g. Journalists, Talk Show Hosts)
4) Cultural Elite (e.g. Celebrities, Designers, Musicians)
5) Socially Connected (Community members, Business Networkers)

WOMMA’s Influencer Marketing Guidelines provides a set of best practices for running influencer campaigns – here are the items that I found most valuable:

1. Understand the influencer’s point of view before engaging them in any way – much of the time, they are acting to help other users rather than your brand
2. Make participation voluntary and by invitation only – and respect their privacy at all times, allowing them to freely opt-out
3. Build a relationship with the influencer
4. Ensure that your communications with the influencer are timely – ie respond promptly
5. Never ask an influencer to hype product claims, make usage claims without experience or back claims that cannot be substantiated
6. Provide incentives that do not create conflict of interest or shilling – keep awards simple and relevant to community objectives
7. Thank influencers who participate in your programs.

The set of guidelines goes on to discuss in more detail Thanking, Engagement and Enablement, I have noted a few worthy tips to follow:

* Creating legendary stories can be very powerful ways to both generate conversation and affinity

* Moments of truth about product failures are important

* Your biggest influencers may not always be positive about your product / company / services – your biggest fans may at times be your harshest critics – the fact that they are sometimes negative may make them far more credible to their networks

* Influencer programs are long term multi-year commitments designed to build a relationship – they are not marketing campaigns

* Private access is an excellent way to engage your influencers and influencers also love to connect to one another – Consider both online and offline connection opportunities and even deeper engagements with NDAs in place

* Influencers are a great source of product feedback – your programs should be designed to close the loop demonstrating that their feedback is being heard and acted upon

Trends In Social Influence Marketing

The Razorfish Blog, Going Social Now has an post from March 2009 entitled Trends In Social Influence Marketing

Razorfish defined SOCIAL INFLUENCE MARKETING as “marketing to the network of peers that surround and influence the customer across social platforms and on brand Web sites“

The post identified and detailed 10 trends – my highlights are below:

* Reaching the influencers gets easier via the social graph and the plethora of technology vendors that make targeting easier.
* Different influencers will matter at different stages of the marketing funnel, too.
* Agencies will find ways to put a valuation on each consumer’s potential influence for specific product categories.
* Google and a few others are already taking a crack at defining your influence rank.
* Consumers will define the brands by the sheer volume of their opinions. They’ll be shaping the brands more than the brands will be shaping them.
* Social advertising will grow up (whatever that means!)
* The portable social graph will fuel marketing innovation (this is Facebook and Twitter Connect)
* Loose ties (like the friendsters of yours on Facebook) are as valuable as your strong ties (close friends) because they’re the ones that bring new ideas into your world and share your opinions with people who are further removed from you
* Social influence research will become more important than social measurement – n evolution from measuring sentiment to understanding opinion and synchronizing it with the Net Promoter scores

There are a few more, go read the post – if you’re an agency, it’s probably worth the read.

Creating A Healthy Influencer Marketing Program

Finally, here is a Powerpoint deck by Emre Ersahin available on SlideShare entitled: Creating A Healthy Influencer Marketing Program

Definitely worth a look – it contains a step-by-step process, refined from a set of good and best practice examples of how to run an Influencer Marketing Program – not the only way, but certainly one proven way. It presents a methodology based on Discover > Create > Execute > Measure centered around ’Social Capital’ that leverages the value of online networks.

Here are the basic steps:

Discover - target audience and identify and recruit influencers

Create – influencer concepts and programs

Execute – program implementation online and offline

Measure - the results and evaluation of the benefits

We’re all of a sudden oh so busy trying to identify, quantify and qualify our online influencers. Amy Lee’s recent post, entitled The Value of Lurkers. In our efforts to measure the noise of the online conversations the lurkers (people who read, but don’t actively contribute content) often get ignored in the measurement – perhaps because they are harder to find and measure.

The Lurkers are important – these probably form the larger proportion of the community and are the one’s probably being influenced. Amy picks out three metrics that will allow measurement of Lurkers:

1. The number and turnover of lurkers
2. Segment users into groups and start tracking email open rates more carefully
3. How long a person remains a quiet part of your community

A thoughtful response by Scott Moore discussed benchmarking of participation metrics and balancing a set of metrics that contribute to the overall health of the community.

But again it all tracks back to the role and objectives of your online community – and this is equally important whether your community is independent or sponsored by a business.

Which takes me onto a post from the Web Social Architecture blog entitled Getting It Right: Designing Community to Support Your Core Offering. This post is a fantastic antidote to the current trend of every site should be a community – “People aren’t on your web-site to make friends and using community to get something done is a huge value, because it promises responsiveness, detail, honesty and affinity”. Don’t just throw up discussion boards, but think about your offering and help your customers increase that value. Ryan Turner’s post is worth a read.

As we at Overtone are designing our Influencer metrics and engagement tools, we are thinking deeply about why you’d want to  identify, qualify and quantify your online influencers. The top three usecases are:

Turning Customer Issues into Product Innovation – online communities are where customers get to make their feelings known to the organization, to other customers or to both – to get their issue resolved. You want to identify those customers who are your expert users, those who will provide the most useful feedback that will help you improve your products. You’ll want to get into a deeper level of engagement with those customers – the Lego Mindstorm case study provides a great example of how Lego recruited “citizen developers”. Sony Online Entertainment actively engage with their Community Influencers to list, publish and incorporate the most desired features of their influencer group.

Customer Self-Support – The recent Business Week article on Intuit discusses how their Online Community has spawned a number of expert customers advising other customers and taking the load off Intuit’s in-house support team. To be able to identify those customers who are performing such activities and then providing them with improved service levels when they need support provides a leveraged model.

Managing Customer Champions – Finding champions for you products who have some influence and engaging with them to ensure that they stay that way. These champions can be found on your own and on third party community sites.

We’ve got a few more, but we’re also mad keen to hear why you want to identify and engage with your online influencers.

Other articles worth checking out too if you’re keen on identifying the Influencers in your community:

How to Measure Online Influencer by Micah Baldwin, March 2009

Online Influencers: How The New Opinion Leaders Drive Buzz On The Web by Alice LaPlante, May 2007

How do you find influencers? by Sam Decker (CMO at Bazaarvoice)

Online Reviews Second Only to Word of Mouth as Purchase Influencer in US, Survey Finds in Business Week, October 2009

A Poor Man’s Guide to Finding Influencers by Mike Nelson, March 2009

SIM Scoring: Social Media Influence Metrics are an Art, July 2009

How social media influences trust in advertising

There has been an explosion of user generated content, and as a result, consumers have a new way of assessing brands, products and services.

Nielsen’s 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries and covers degrees of trust consumers have for advertisers/brands.

90% of consumers surveyed trusted recommendations from people they knew personally
70% trusted opinions from other consumers posted online
70% trusted brand websites

Key takeaway: “Strangers” opinions posted online offer as much trust to the consumer as the company website.

For companies not engaging in the social media marketing conversation with their customers, they miss out on a literal world of opinion, market research, feedback and customer service opportunities.

Those companies who value the opinions and expressions of their customers by displaying them on the company website have the most to gain.

Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation

A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires more careful specification and testing than it has received.

The structure and function of complex networks

Inspired by empirical studies of networked systems such as the Internet, social networks, and biological networks, researchers have in recent years developed a variety of techniques and models to help us understand or predict the behavior of these systems. Here we review developments in this field, including such concepts as the small-world effect, degree distributions, clustering, network correlations, random graph models, models of network growth and preferential attachment, and dynamical processes taking place on networks.

Superusers, Step by Step

Sharing some simple tips for companies launching online customer communities about how to cultivate “superusers” — that group of active users from which influencers and advocates can emerge.

PRE-LAUNCH

Identify superuser candidates among known advocates, online or off
Identify existing online communities (if any) to reach out to
Create “superuser-friendly” user guidelines and moderation policies.

LAUNCH

Invite known advocates to preview community, create seed content, and provide feedback.
Add elements to community structure that allow superusers to identify you (welcome forum) and to identify themselves (feedback forum).
Develop a rank and reputation structure to reward and incent superusers.

POST-LAUNCH, FIRST 30 TO 90 DAYS:

Identify emerging superusers as they move up the ranks and provide positive feedback.
Acknowledge their suggestions and ideas, without making commitments.
Tune reputation system based in real user data.

POST-LAUNCH, 90 DAYS AND BEYOND

Review participation history and refine superuser group down to supporters.
Create a private forum accessible only to superusers.
Create a specification for the superuser program — criteria for selection, term of membership, etc.
Reward and empower superusers with additional permissions and privileges on the community.
Explore other opportunities for rewarding and growing the superuser group (invitation to focus groups, participation in beta tests, previews of products, recognition at conferences, in-person meetings, etc.)

The Dynamics of Social Influence: A New Perspective and Agenda

In this blog post, Don Bulmer asks a number of fairly broad questions regarding how social media influences communication:

1. How are other governments and politicians successfully using or abusing social media for policy and political advancement?
2. What are the implications of social media on politics in the future (2020 and 2030)?
3. How has social media challenged governments and politicians through new rules of open/public scrutiny toward trust, transparency and accountability?
4. What are the social media tools and techniques that successful non-profit organizations/institutions use to advance awareness and motivate people, governments and businesses to take action and affect positive change (giving of time and money), creation of policy, etc.?
5. How has social media impacted the nature of philanthropic design and social responsibility (local and global)?
6. How do people use social media and social networks to address personal concerns and support better decision making?
7. How has social media affected trust and relationships between people and organizations?
8. What are the implications to future generations of individuals (who today share everything about themselves) on politics and business?
9. What are the most effective tools used by people to influence change in business and government?
10. What new syndication and business models have emerged for mainstream media today – to adapt to the phenomena of the social web?
11. How has the influence of mainstream media changed as a result of social media?
12. How has social media and social networks affected professional/business decision-making?
13. What approaches and tools are business using to ‘listen,’ ‘interact’ and ‘engage’ more with their core audiences to improve the way they do business?
14. How as social media affected and transformed traditional marketing and communication beliefs and strategies?

Community Influencer Programs

The article discussed the following (in the context of Online Communities):

• How organizations are attempting to identify influencers and elites
• The various tactics for engaging influential members
• How to spot these influencers and elites (a more manual process)
• How to build relationships with the individuals
• What available algorithms and metrics there are around influencer identificiation
• How to tabulate those metrics manually
• What to do with Community Volunteers

Online Community Tribe Round Up

Asking the initial question, What are the top three things you do or wish you could do for your community “influencers”?, Gail Williams collects a number of posts concerning Online Community Influencers

How to Manage Multiple Personalities and Relationships Online

An individual may maintain multiple personas online – for privacy, security or just plain forgetfulness. Organizations have an interest in resolving those personas, but when is it safe or advisable to do so and do the individuals have a say in the matter?

Ken Burbary’s article The Dirty Little Secret of Social Media Monitoring discusses how different monitoring tools arrive at diferent results depending on the sites they visit and how different online tools spider a different range of sites.

Got me thinking about Social Media strategies and how your Social Media engagement objectives will drive what you are trying measure. Here are a couple of examples:

For example, if you are a product manager and you are listening to your community of users discussing their use of your products, then seeing comments on review sites such as Amazon, BazaarVoice and ePinions is very useful and then being able to understand what aspects they are discussing across those sites and to have sentiment pulled out too to further enrich the information.

However, if you are investing in an online community to help your customers self-support (like Intuit in this case study) you would want to assess the quality of comments and participants in the community itself. If you are interested in encouraging and providing additional information to your most valuable participants, you may want to triangulate comments by observing the authors’ blogs and Twitter feeds.

Every Social Media enagagement project is unique and will demand a different form of analysis. Many of these shrink-wrapped Social Media services begin to breakdown as the reporting needs become more sophisticated, so a more flexible solution and sophisticated solution will be needed.

The upcoming Social Media release of OpenMic from Customer Feedback vendor Overtone may have some thing to offer. This product is able to access a custom range of sources and perform accurate topic and sentiment analysis and reporting and for a fraction of the cost of a major text analytics project from Attensity or Clarabridge.

Whichever solution you evaluate, before you begin, think carefully about your Social Media engagement strategy and how you want to monitor it.

A couple of articles worth reading:

A Brand’s Largest Social Media Obstacle by Sami Balwani

The key phrase for me was: “Many brands know they should be in the social space but their culture prohibits them from taking risks. An aura of fear permeates every decision, and the tried and true wins out over innovation.” The post goes on to discuss how traditional organizations need a shift in their cultural paradigms to fully engage with their customers using Social Media.

Brand Identity Is More Than Image – The Case for Product Informed by Brand Truth by Liz Gebhardt

Another good article discussing strategies for Challenger brands – The brand identity model presented provides a good way to fully understand the brand promise before preparing to launch any social media programs – particularly the words on Community and Participation.

Jon Mountjoy’s MacBook Pro died last week. They replaced it and sent him a feedback form.

With Apple like simplicity.

Imagine sending your customers a feedback form so simple that not only do they complete it, but they blog about it.

Genius. Of course.

I was watching tonight’s Letterman interview with Joaquin Phoenix, bizarre at the very least – check it out. Three or four minutes into the interview, we’re trying to work out if this is just weird or if it was W-I-E-R-D. First place we go was Search Twitter, where pretty much up to the minute postings confirmed it…Yep, this is indeed W-I-E-R-D (check out yesterday’s Twitter postings on this subject here). Once we saw all of this, we went of to check out Juaquin’s interview history on IMDB and it seems that he’s done that type of thing before.

A couple of lessons for you SocialMediaMarketerati here, this is how things work today,  consumer wants up to date information, goes to Twitter and gets it on the button, then can run over to YouTube to confirm, because after all, seeing it on YouTube is believing (lonelygirl15 excepted).

When I went off to Advanced Search Twitter, I did notice that there was a Sentiment Check-Box where you could filter all positive or negative messages or those that asked a question. I first checked the positive filter (for Feb 12th) and got one response. Then the negative and got a couple more. I finally checked the question filter and there were the pages. I suspect that Twitter are now using some simple text processing in a further effort to try and add some value to the analysis, afterall they are about to change their business model to try and add value for paying business users. Facebook are also sitting on a goldmine of text that demands some pretty sophisticated text analytics – I wonder how accurate their Engagement Model actually is.

There are also a number of other Text Analytics products on the market, however, I know that Overtone’s OpenMic product has a dashboard that includes a very accurate Feedback Sentiment Index (FSI) that is worth checking out.

Just getting back to Joaquin and Letterman, it didn’t take long for the Gawker’s blog post on the interview make it to #2 position with Google search terms <joaquin>, <phoenix>, <letterman>.

Time for bed (because the interview only finished 30 minutes ago).

Samir Balwani’s  Mashable article 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media describes  how the big guys are getting creative with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other Social Media. As you read the post, recognize that not only are these brands using Social Media creatively, but they are also very genuine in how they speak and listen. 

As you plan out your own forays into Social Media if you are genuine, first think about what you want to achieve, get an understanding of what the medium is, how people use it, what you as a brand can do to add value to that experience in relation to your products and services and remember, it’s a medium that you cannot control – the users will do what they want with it, so you must be genuine in your desire to engage with them. Finally you should put in place mechanisms to listen to everything that is coming back – this is where you can quickly understand where you need to take action – either to engage in discussions or to look inside your own organization to correct and improve on how you are percieved by your customers.

A conversation on Twitter in under 280 characters:

markjbauer someone needs to suggest to me good ways to find ‘interesting’ people to track on Twitter !

gammydodger @markjbauer – Go to http://search.twitter.com/ – type in your product name or your company name and follow those who are talking about them

That’s all folks… try it – you might find something interesting