Social Media Week 2012: The interconnectedness of influencers

So…the figures for Social Media Week 2012 are in. Just like the SMW2011 debate, the purpose of pointing our Twitter influence leaderboard at the #smwldn hashtag is to understand who were the most ‘influential’ people at Social Media Week London, and to generate debate around the meaning of online influence.

The tool covered the #smwldn hashtag from two weeks before Social Media Week, and throughout the 180+ events that took place across London from Feb 13th – 17th, creating a live twitter leaderboard. The tool calculates ‘influence’ through a number of parameters; followers,  followers’ networks, and propensity to be retweeted are all factors in the calculation.

The tracker includes the top tweets:

And the top ‘influencers’:

And related hashtags, so linked topics and events can be explored too. (Check out the leaderboard for top tweets, influencers and related hashtags on #digitalmarketing #socialmedia #leveson #likeminds #sb100 and we’d be happy to include more; just comment on this post or tweet us @BrassAgency.) This year, we decided to take a closer look at the relationships between our top 30 #smwldn influencers, to understand the network in a little more detail.

This is an exercise we’ve undertaken for a number of our clients looking to create effective influencer strategies. We’ve completed this process for mummy bloggers, health and well-being networks and influential figures in public affairs to name but a few. In the spirograph below, each bar is an individual person or organisation’s unique twitter handle.

Bar height represents ‘influence’ (as calculated by the factors mentioned above) and the lines between the people represent who is following who (blue to pink indicates the direction of the link):

Download a larger version of this infographic here.

The data was scraped at 9am Monday 20th February 2012, and the influencers are ordered by their position on the leaderboard going clockwise from @lesanto #1 to @joannejacobs #30 Echo chamber of love? As expected, it’s an incredibly interconnected network of people (just like Joanne Jacob’s thoughts on the social media community’s ‘echo chamber of love’; the concept that inspired this piece of work), but there are some interesting points worth noting…

Wallpapermag’s ‘influence’ was so high due to their 599k followers that we had to adapt the chart to ensure we could compare those with lesser followings! Although they only tweeted twice on the #smwldn hashtag, the scale of their followers’ networks and their propensity to be retweeted placed them 7th. Although people in the smwldn community may disagree that this level of influence is within the context of social media week, @wallpapermag certainly does have the pull and kudos to invite a huge NEW audience into #smwldn, who would not previously have been connected. This ability to bring people into a topic should not be underestimated.

Similarly with the NSPCC, although only relatively few #smwldn tweets occurred throughout the week, their 17k followers are avid retweeters of the charity’s content, lending them a large indexed influence score.

Again, their position represents their potential to allow smwldn to extend beyond its own tight social media industry network, taking content to a potentially new audience through retweets. (However the charity could definitely adopt an influencer follower strategy using the connected people of #smwldn to its advantage).