A few days ago, I read an article citing a recently published study by the Harvard Business School which concluded that only ten per cent of Twitter’s six million subscribers are active posters. This led many commentators to muse that influence amongst typical Twitter users is extremely top heavy and concentrated in the hands of a few users. However, the influence of infrequent users, or weak links to use network analysis terminology, was dramatically brought to the fore in the widespread protests over the Iranian elections yesterday. The unique power of Twitter to provide real-time information from vast numbers of people including activists, demonstrators and journalists on the ground was astonishing. Reports indicated that certain hash tags, including #iranelection and #gr88 generated over 30 Tweets per minute at its apogee.

Watching the vast number of Tweets emerge on my TweetDeck yesterday, I could not help but think that perhaps the findings of the Harvard study needed to be questioned. The study, which polled over 300,000 users, concluded, amongst other things, that the top ten per cent of “prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical social network, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production”. Significant social events such as the G20 riots and the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when vast numbers of people used the service to both disseminate and receive information, surely demonstrated that there is no such thing as a “typical” Twitter user and, more importantly, that the categorisation of "influential" users on this social network platform needs to be reconsidered.

Having helped companies and organisations both create and implement their social media and online stakeholder engagement programmes for some years now, one of the first things I stress is the need to adapt to the constantly shifting social media landscape. Stakeholder communities change very quickly, as seen above, and companies that understand and adapt their online communications strategies accordingly more often than not reap benefits. Looking for some examples of that point, I was impressed by the social media strategies of the US Army and US Air Force, which have yielded demonstrable returns on investment such as increases in recruits and better relations with their stakeholders. When taking the time to understand the composition of their online stakeholders, both organisations devised social media strategies which focused on building relationships with various communities.

If Twitter and the Iranian election reminded me that online groups and communities are not static, but dynamic and ever-changing, these organisations highlighted that a bottom-up approach to PR using conversational media which focuses on adaptation and engagement, can yield success.

Debate surrounding the free provision of free online news content has once again come to the fore. Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that newspapers need to creatively innovate with new technologies in order to survive.

Schmidt’s remarks are a clear affront to recent the comments made by Rupert Murdoch at The Cable Show conference in Washington D.C. in which he stated that

"people are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that's going to have to change”.

Others, such as Robert Thompson of the Wall Street Journal, were even more scathing in their assessment of the availability of free content on the Web, claiming that news aggregators are

“parasites…tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet”.

Murdoch and others who share his sentiments take issue with the fact that news aggregators obtain a large share of the advertising revenue from newspapers by linking to newspaper articles, while the newspapers themselves earn comparatively little. Murdoch therefore argued that content providers should charge for their product if their businesses are to survive.

This line of argument is worrisome for a number of reasons, not least the fact that a two-tiered Web would be created where only those wealthy enough to afford subscription fees would be able to access content which they can currently access free of charge. Another point worth considering is that an industry-wide introduction of subscription fees would surely impact on readership figures as a significant number of consumers would question whether particular content was indeed worth paying for.

Murdoch’s complaint is something we’ve debated a number of times on Measurement Matters.  Questions abound as to whether it would necessarily be good for the industry if content providers were to introduce subscription fees.

Arguably, it would be much better if newspapers followed the lead set by The Guardian by using technology to its advantage and make their content align more closely in line with the demands of their consumer base whilst simultaneously making a healthy profit. 

The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that The Guardian has launched an open platform. This enables third-party developers to create unique applications that have near-unfettered access to its content and combine with other technology. The announcement has been so well-received that after scanning the numerous Tweets and blog posts on the topic over the past few days, I was hard-pressed to find any negative sentiment directed towards The Guardian’s new initiative. Indeed, many commentators eulogised that the venture is “The Future of Publishing”  and “…a well-received move”. 

Now of course, the use of third party developers to drive the dissemination of online content is not novel. The much-lauded Apple App Store, and similar offerings by Nokia, Microsoft and Google, have ushered in a sea change in the way that third party developers drive the dissemination of content to ever more specific groups of users. However The Guardian is certainly one of the few newspapers to adopt this new model. Indeed, the main talking point for media professionals is the news that the Guardian has decided to offer its content free of charge. Newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have long been reticent to freely offering their content as a business model and it is unclear at the moment if this open platform will generate the same amount of revenue as traditional newspaper sales. This trend has not been lost on other major mainstream newspapers as both the BBC and the New York Times are engaging in similar open platform ventures.

Abundantly clear to media analysts like Metrica is that the open platform is a unique way of further engaging with a greater number of users who will consume news content from either a PC or, as is more likely, a Web-enabled mobile phone. 

The introduction of these technologies raises significantly more questions than answers. Will open platforms for newspapers really change the way news is consumed? How will other major players in the newspaper industry respond? Will open platforms provide new challenges to media evaluators?

The Guardian’s open platform certainly raises profound questions to other newspapers which lock their content behind a subscription charge, like the NYT and the FT. Can they continue to charge subscription fees to access premium content and simultaneously compete with the Guardian? It certainly shows how content distribution is evolving away from Web sites to people, a strong indication that Web 3.0 is about to take up the baton from Web 2.0. 

The unlocking of news content for users to manipulate is a great move for the industry and opens up a mouth-watering array of possibilities for Web users as Metrica's Measurement Matters has blogged about before. It’s already got us in the office here wondering what could possibly happen, as it has the rest of the blogosphere it seems!

The onset of the New Year has brought with it plenty of predictions on different ways to measure influence in social media.  Of course, in these times when general media budgets are being curtailed and the PR industry is under ever-increasing pressure to provide a financial value to justify their efforts, the lure of accurately measuring consumer generated media is greater than ever.

However, finger-wagger as I tend to be ;-), this article I recently read on First Monday made me sit up and ask the question of whether some of the measurements that are often used to calculate influence in social networks really do what they say on the tin.

The article examined Twitter networks claiming that the daily grind of work coupled with the short attention spans of the general populace meant that there was far less real interaction amongst declared social networks. There is, it claimed, a second, more informal and amorphous network of “followers” and “followees” that post less updates, or none at all, but regularly follow the feeds from a given user.

The fact that a declared link between users did not necessarily result in direct interaction is telling of a gaping hole in efforts to accurately measure this medium.  Given that one of the basic measures of influence within online social networks is the number of “friends” a user has, one has to wonder whether these are valid data points to build the metrics around. Commenting on the First Monday article, Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang asked PR measurement companies like Metrica to devise a method of determining the real measure of influence in social networks.  A deceptively simple question but notoriously difficult on which to reach consensus.

What's your view on these points?  Are you an active user of Twitter and Facebook?  If so, how many of the people in your networks carry real influence with you and how often do you interact (or engage) with them?   In light of this research, do you think it's appropriate to use raw numbers as a key component of any PR engagement or influence metric?  What are your thoughts on how meaningful metrics can be built around the network conundrum?  We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Finally, are you aware that Metrica tweets regularly via our MetricaMeasures account on Twitter? Please follow us at www.twitter.com/metricameasures. 

Image link: http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/