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…”

This is on my mind because over the last few days, when cold medicine hasn’t fogged my brain up so much that I couldn’t think, or at least couldn’t think logically, I’ve been working with the Twitter APIs to see what I could come up with in terms of tracking topics as they move around on Twitter.   I’m attracted to Twitter because its immediacy and brevity make it relatively easy to analyze.

Eventually, what I hope to do is find useful patterns in the interplay of words, Twitter screen names, URLs cited and hashtags (and any other entities that could be extracted).  I’m focusing first on URLs, since they are sort of the “stories behind the headlines” on Twitter.  My friend Dave Land this morning mentioned that writing a tweet is like writing a headline.  If so, then the cited URLs in those tweets are like the stories behind the headlines.  

I’ve put Python and SQL to work scraping statuses from Twitter, pulling out word pairs (I’m planning to analyze them with the other entities via LSA), screen names and URLs.  I’m resolving all the little URLs to the pages they actually point to, since Twitter users, limited to 140 characters, frequently use services like TinyURL to shorten them, but I want to see when people are citing the same URLs even if the shrunken URLs are different.  In fact, looking at the ratio of shrunken URLs to actual URLs is interesting – if it is high, that means that a lot of people are finding the cited page independently, rather than retweeting it or getting it from the same source external to Twitter.

As I find cited URLs, I’m using Twitter’s search API to get the most recent mentions of them, then storing the identities of the users who also cited them and when they did so.  That gives me a timeline of URL citations.  I’m not tracking explicit retweets, so I don’t know if the first people to cite a URL first are more influential or not.

I haven’t asked Twitter to white-list me yet, so I’m working within the limitations of their API – 100 requests per hour.  That forces me to be as smart as possible about how my code explores the data.  I started by choosing somebody who has a decent number of followers, but not too many, so that it wouldn’t take too long to scrape the person’s followers’ tweets.  I chose Tim O’Reilly because I suspect he is fairly influential on Twitter and we’ve had some conversations that go back to the mid-90s about how to figure out “what the Internet is thinking today.”  

O’Reilly’s company was one of the first, if not the very first, to measure social media for market research.  Many years ago, they were scraping Usenet to help decide which technologies would make good topics for books.  I recall that one of the first decisions they made from that data was to choose between two open-source database projects, MySQL and mSQL.  They chose MySQL… and therein lies another reminder of causality v. correlation.  Did MySQL succeed because O’Reilly chose to focus on it, or did O’Reilly succeed because it chose the right books to publish?  There is no way of knowing, but I have personal evidence that O’Reilly doesn’t always choose the right topics… or perhaps the right authors.  That’s a story for another day.

After a lot of wrangling with Python, MySQL and technical issues having to do with Unicode and my inability to write a correlated subquery under the influence of Sudafed, I have something working.  It started by scraping Tim’s recent tweets and then searched for people who also cited the same URLs.  Then it explores those who it has found cite the greatest number of URLs overall.  It adds 10 people at a time and then re-ranks to see who it should explore next.

I’ve been running this for a couple of days now in various forms.  So far I have found about 7,000 unique URLs.  Only about 300 of them are duplicates – different shrunken URLs for the same page.  The URLs have been mentioned about 20,000 times by 7,500 users.  I have found about 40,000 two-word phrases (stop words, URLs, screen names and hashtags are excluded) and 52,000 mentions of those phrases, which means that a number of phrases are being used by multiple people.

What the heck, here are the top phrases and the number of Twitters (Twitterers? Twits?) who used them over the last few days (remember, this is far from comprehensive):

• check out 52
• blog post 47
• New Year 36
• social media 34
• New blog 33
• new years 29
• New York 25
• ice storm 24
• sad true 23
• emergency generator 23
• about attitudes 22
• gas tax 21
• mornings paper 19
• Attention Influence 19
• one best 19
• Equal Authority 19
• prices people 18
• Jeff Jarvis 18
• Its morning 18

I suspect that the words “check out” on Twitter are much like the words “click here” were in the early days of the web.  ”Emergency generator” intrigued me, so I linked it above to Twitter search.  Hint: it has to do with the Toyota Prius.  I suspect those same people included a link to a New York Times article about it.  Interestingly, a number of the people who cited it were not retweeting (at least not explicitly)… but many of them were using a shrunken URL cited by – guess who – Tim O’Reilly.  The interesting thing about the popularity of the phrase is that it gives my code a way to discover the other shrunken URLs in a single search, instead of having to scrape everything and resolve every shrunken URL to the actual page.  Tim may or may not have influenced those people to look at the article, but it is clear that he is in tune with a topic that people are interested in, which makes him interesting, whether he is an influencer or just well-influenced, so to speak.

Time to publish this post, I guess, even though I’m tempted to wait until today’s cold medicine has worn off to proofread it one more time.

More results here as I come up with them.

Success generates noise. Millions of customers means millions of comments. The first and easiest answer to this dilemma, which may be good enough – for now – is to figure out which comments are most popular. See which ones are getting the most page views, the most Diggs, Tweets or other indicators that somebody cares.

The problem with that approach is that by the time something is popular, it is often too late do so anything about it. This is particularly true in two situations:

• You are in an industry where “hits” generate the profits and are short-lived. Unless you’re growing corn, it seems like all products increasingly fit this description. Maybe corn, too.
• Your customers are angry and unhappy.

If you have a hit on your hands and you find out too late to create more inventory before the crowd has moved on, you missed an opportunity. There’s a corollary to this: the sooner you find out you have a dud, the faster you can stop wasting resources on it.

The really unfortunate thing about angry and unhappy people is that they consistently have more energy to invest in bad-mouthing than happy people have for paying compliments. That’s a well-known fact of marketing. And life. By the time grumpiness about you and your stuff becomes popular, a lot of damage has been done, obviously. Knowing who is influential can help you prevent grumpiness in the first place or do better at quelling it before it becomes popular opinion.

In mass media, the important metrics focus on popularity. Although popularity still matters, digital social networking allows us to measure influence, at least indirectly. The difference between being popular and being influential is very simple to understand in principle.

If I have 5,000 followers on Twitter, I’m obviously fairly popular. I probably am also influential. There are ways to figure that out, such as by measuring how much interaction I engage in or how many times my tweets are “re-tweeted.”

If I have one follower, does that mean I am not influential? Not if that one follower is a fellow named Barack Obama, who has more than 150,000 followers, according to Twitterholic. That is, if that Obama fellow really is following me. I mean really following me, the way we mean “follow” in the real world.

In other words, a few influential followers can be far more significant than thousands with limited influence.

I’m using Twitter as an example because I’ve been working with the Twitter APIs to see how hard it would be to come up with measures of influence. Twitter is growing on me and I think that part of the reason is the language it uses.

• Blogs and RSS have readers; Twitter has followers.
• Forums, blogs, mailing lists and such have posts or messages; Twitter has updates.
• Blogs have feeds; Twitter has APIs.

From a social network analysis standpoint, Twitter is much easier to deal with. Mostly.

Popularity is a first-order measurement. My popularity on Twitter is the number of followers I have. Influence is a second-order or greater measurement. The simplest measure of potential influence is to see how many followers my followers have. The API makes this very easy to measure (for people who aren’t so popular that the API limits become an obstacle).

My Twitter followers are followed by a bit more than 10,000 people. Pretty good, I think, since I only have 28 followers (I haven’t been on Twitter long).

My friend Dave Land has 95 followers and those people are followed by almost 175,000 others. Wow. Dave’s followers are followed by a lot more people than mine are.

Some of my followers are people I believe are influential in the world of web analytics. Let’s see how they do (a third-order measurement of my potential influence, if I did it for all of them). In no particular order:

• Anil Batra: 232 followers, who are followed by 235,000 others.
• Eric T. Peterson: 689 followers, who are followed by 373,000 others.
• June Dershowitz: 266 followers, who are followed by 122,000 others.
• Marshall Sponder: 839 followers, who are followed by 727,000 others.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s web analytics evangelist, isn’t following me (hey, bub!), but anybody whose title is “evangelist” is supposed to be influential. At the risk of exceeding the Twitter API limits, I ran my gizmo to get his stats. Avinash has about 2,000 followers, who are followed by almost 600,000 others.

If you rank these people by popularity (followers), Avinash is No. 1, hands-down. But if you rank by potential influence, Marshall Sponder’s followers are followed by the most people, which is especially surprising given that Avinash appears to be more than twice as popular.

Dave Land comes in at No. 1 when this group is ranked by the ratio of second-order followers to followers. That means he is doing the best job of attracting followers who attract followers, which is what you need to do if you want your influence to scale beyond immediate popularity. But I should note that having a lot of followers will inevitably dilute your second-order influence, which should comfort Avinash, who came in last on that measurement (thereby saving me from last place in all three rankings).

I should note a messy bit of this measurement – sites like Woot, Twemes, hashtags.org and others that automatically follow you when you follow them. Ugh. I haven’t figured out a good way to exclude them, so I’m just doing it manually… and I haven’t thoroughly made sure I caught all of them. So there’s hope, Avinash – maybe Marshall is just signed up for more of those. In any case, don’t take these numbers too seriously. I’m going to work on some additional data points – number of replies and such, to strengthen the results.

Or can somebody save me this work and point to a site that has already done this sort of analysis? I searched but didn’t see anybody looking at second-order popularity.