01 Jan 09 Implicit social networks: If Guy Kawasaki is right, so am I

Just read Guy Kawasaki’s Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter, in which he offered the following tip:

Tip 4: Follow everyone who follows you. When I first started on Twitter, Robert Scoble told me to follow everyone who followed me. “But why, Robert, would I follow everyone like that?” The answer is that it’s courteous to do so and because when you do, some people will respond to you and eveyone who follows them will see this—which is more exposure for you.

Having said this, when you get to more than fifty or so followers, it’s impossible to read what all your followers tweet. At that point, you have to focus on direct private messages (“Ds”) and direct public messages (“@s””).

Yipes. 

The first analysis I did on Twitter was to count the followers of followers, as an illustration of how influence is a more-than-first-order phenomenon.  The number of followers your followers have almost surely correlates to your potential influence.  People like Guy are just about impossible to measure that way – they have so many followers that it is impractical to count their followers’ followers.

When I first looked at Twitterholic and saw how many followers Guy has, I thought “How the heck does anybody follow that many people?”   That question is answered – he doesn’t.  It is possible that Guy decided to do me a favor (along with everybody else who looks at implicit, in addition to explicit, social networks).  Guy knows that this is where I’ve focused for years… but, okay, that’s probably not why he advises people (who want a lot of followers) to follow everybody who follows them.  Still, it is good news for me.

The pattern of followers is Twitter’s explicit social network.  As soon as I started analyzing it I was stymied a bit by robotic auto-followers.  They play havoc with metrics that depend on the follower-followee relationship.  My friend Dave suggested that Twitter might need user-agent meta data, which would reveal whether or not a given Twitter user is a real person or not.  This would allow software to omit users like hashtags, twemes, AmazonGoldDeals, mrtweet and so forth, all of which automatically follow you if you follow them.  But it wouldn’t solve the problem as long as there are people like Guy with robot-like behavior, automatically following everybody who follows them.  I’m fairly certain that  Guy really is not a robot – even though, in addition to tip No. 4, he advocates somewhat mindless direct replies:

Tip 2: Send @ messages to the smores. They probably won’t answer you, but that’s okay. All you want to do is appear like you have a relationship with them to enhance your credibility. The theory is, “If she is tweeting with @scobleizeer, she must be worth following.” Bull shiitake logic, admittedly, but it helps. To bastardize what a famous PR person once told me, “It’s not who you know. It’s who appears to know you.”

That tip guarantees that I’ll be sending Guy an @ message about the tweet that points to this post.  But I actually do know him, unlike the 10 or 15 other people on Twitter who don’t, who will @ message him anyway, further confounding those who naively analyze the explicit social network by looking at @ message relationships.

There’s nothing wrong with analyzing the explicit social network, but it is a big mistake to trust the results by themselves.  So I focus on the real meat in Twitter, figuring out as much as possible which items are getting real human energy into them and what they imply about relationships.  When a hundred people post links to the same URL, odds are that the page they’re tweeting really is meaningful and those people are likely to influence each other in the Twitterverse, especially if they used the same “shrunken” URL.  Throw in screen names, hash tags and language patterns and perhaps something truly useful and meaningful will come out.  I hope so.

As long as Guy doesn’t start advocating retweeting the “smores” tweets, I’m probably okay.  So far, all he’s done in that direction is to tell people to repeat their own tweets.

If Guy is right that it is a good idea to follow everybody who follows you, then I must be right to insist that any analysis that depends only on the explicit social network is inherently flawed.  Now I just have to decide if I really want to follow, not just Guy’s advice, but everybody who follows me. A voice in my head is saying, “If everybody jumped off a cliff…”

Tags: Influence, social network analysis, twitter