Gaming the System – Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence

In December of 2009, I wrote about Misleading Indicators – Followers and Friends after seeing a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. In that post, I explained why follower or friend counts do not represent a metric of influence nor should they be utilized as a relevant metric of importance. After several good comments as well as several emails to Impact Interactions giving me grief for disputing one of social media’s closely held beliefs, I decided to run an experiment on gaming the system.

My basic premise was that these counts are a false statistic which like placing value on “hits” in web metrics analysis leads you to focus on the wrong metric of your activities. Want to increase “hits”? Add more photos, widgets, content blocks, etc. to each of your pages. Each one adds a hit each time the page is opened. You can make the hit count be anything you want simply by adding more items to each page. In 2000, most people didn’t understand that aspect of the measurement so they used “hits” as a proxy for visits or even for influence of their content and site. We still have companies that talk about “hits” when they approach us about measurement. It’s a lasting issue that has thrown a lot of folks away from the important issues in measurement.

There have been several blog posts written about how to game Twitter to gain followers in order to look more important than your competition.  One of my absolute favorites is from Chris Cree of Success Creeations. His blog entry “How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day” should be mandatory reading for all social media marketing professionals. It spells out how you can game Twitter, but also why that is such a bad idea. So with that advice in hand, we set up a little experiment using free tools to game the system.

The Experiment Begins

Using a tool we won’t name here, we were able to almost double our number of followers for our @impactinteract twitter account in five days. Granted we were working from a small base, but the results show how easy it was to pull off. So let’s go to our experiment.

We started last week with 143 followers who found us either from our website, our efforts on LinkedIn, our speaking engagements, or organically from our tweets. We were following 43 members who were mostly our competitors. On Monday, I signed up for a free demo of one of the many tools which advertise that they can add followers quickly. By using the key words of “Social Media” and “Online Community” the tool returned over 700 accounts on Twitter that had potential for us as followers. These accounts had either tweeted the key words “Social Media” or “Online Community” in the past ten days. Sounds good so far right?

The tool then allowed us to follow the accounts in order to grow our followers by getting their auto-follower to reciprocate.  The demo of the tool we choose allowed us to generate up to 250 new followers before we would have to buy a license. So we started the process using the tool of following 250 accounts. It was fast and painless. In the fifteen minutes it took to follow these accounts, we were able to work on other activities. Once the 250 follows had been accomplished, we waited about a day and then unfollowed any account that didn’t auto-follow us. Over the next several days, we repeated the steps. Here is the table of our activities:

To keep everyone who autofollowed us aware of what we were doing, we tweeted a message several times during the experiment that stated:

We are testing a few of the tools that advertise that they can build your follower base for an upcoming blog #socialmedia #Twittermarketing. 

The idea was that if the new followers actually read our tweets they would also know what we were doing. That way they could unfollow us as quickly as they auto-followed us. Incredibly only 9 new followers over the course of the week unfollowed us. None sent a direct message about what we were doing. So in a little over a business week, we came close to doubling our followers. Total time including the time to download and set up the tool was about 2 hours total.

“Ah ha, the tool worked!” you might be saying to yourself. But did it really add followers for our corporate Twitter account who might spread our message and help us grow? Let’s take a look and find out if our tweets on social media and online community news and trends, as well as our company news is really relevant to our new found followers.

Of the 136 new followers, 14 (10%) sent the same auto-messages to me about making money on my tweets:

MAKING MONEY for your Tweets? I am. Making 20 daily on autopilot. Make money too – TODAY! http://bit.ly/xxxxxx Thanks for following

Another 9 (6.7%) sent an auto-message inviting us to join their multi-level marketing scheme or affiliate marketing network:

Thank your for following me at http://bit.ly/xxxxxx. We’re looking for affiliate marketers to help us. Do you know any?

Welcome to AffilBits! Want to know how to get thousands of targeted Twitter followers and earn a 50% affiliate commission at the same time?

Two follows were from famous and semi-famous people: Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame and a porn star.

12 (9%) new followers were from two unique members who used multiple accounts, but the same photo.

So out of the 136 new followers, we found 37 (27%) were not, nor would they ever be interested in Impact Interactions.

Influence scoring of our new followers shows the truth in the fallacy of follower counts. We used a scale of 1 to 5 to rank our new followers in regards to our ability to be influential with them or in their networks. A score of 1 means Impact Interactions is not potentially influential at all, 2 means probably not potentially influential, 3 means neither potentially influential nor not influential , 4 means somewhat potentially influential, and 5 means Impact Interaction is potentially influential. (And yes, we understand that this is not scientific because we are making the judgement. But how many people on Twitter really analyze their follower base on an individual level?)

Our influence score would be 1 with the group of 37 detailed above.

But what of the other 99?

We reviewed their tweets over the past ten days to see if these would really be good followers for us or not. What we found was 65 were simply folks who had retweeted someone else’s message about a social media topic. They were neither working for companies involved in social media or online communities nor were they particularly interested in the topics based upon analysis of their tweets. In fact several of the members were serial retweeters. We went back through several weeks of tweets and never found a single tweet that they created. So our influence score for these twitterers would be a 2.

There were 7 new followers who are in the search engine optimization industry, another 20 who are potential competitors or individual consultants trying to find work in the social media industry. The influence score for these followers would be 3.

The remaining seven new followers were blog publishers creating newsletter style blogs of others’ content around social media and online communities. They were linked to content aggregation sites rather than competitors. As these sites could potentially help us to influence their readers, we gave them an influence score of 4.

There were no members of our target audience of corporate social media or online community management staff amongst our new followers.

The weighted influence score for our new members was better than we expected at 2.02 (meaning Impact Interactions is probably not potentially influential to this new group of followers).

So, does our newly increased follower count mean that we’re more influential in the social media and online community world? No, it does not. You shouldn’t be impressed with the number of your Twitter followers either. With the set of tools available today, you too can gain thousands of new followers in days. But those followers won’t buy into your view of the world or your brand. In many cases those counts have been culled from the Twitter Borg, not from an audience that cares.

Organic growth of your audience builds an audience that actually is interested in your message or company. Use your content, flair for creativity, and on-target messaging to grow your followers. Include your Twitter account information (@ImpactInteract) in your email and other outgoing communications. Your influence will be stronger, even if your follower counts are smaller. Bigger isn’t always better, but don’t buy into the myth that more followers equals more influence. If we don’t put an end to this measurement idea, we will be having the same discussion in five years that we do with “hit counts” today, more than ten years after it first came up. 

To all of you who began following us during the experiment, thank you for taking part. If you wish to unfollow us, we’ll understand.

Mike Rowland, President

It’s Not About You: Where Organizations Miss the Boat on Social Media

By Matthew Lees

Way back when (in the 80’s, perhaps?) I remember watching a stand-up comedian do a funny and perceptive routine on how magazine titles had changed over the years to reflect important changes in society. I’m paraphrasing — the old memory chips aren’t as good as they used to be — but here’s the gist:

Early on, there was a magazine called “Life.” It was pretty much about everything.

Later, someone came up with a magazine didn’t have such high aspirations, but still looked to include a large portion of what life is about. It was called “People.”

Apparently that wasn’t specific enough. So a new magazine hit the market: “Us.” It wasn’t about all people. Just some people. Not those people, of course. Us people.

Guess what! Even that was too broad. Who wants to know about Us? That still covers too much ground. Much better to focus on what’s really important. So what do we get? The magazine “Self.”

What’s next? Maybe they’ll just sell mirrors in the shape of magazines, so you can just stare at your own reflection.

There are times it seems the social Web is going down a similar path, where it’s all about “You.” What You’re doing. Who You know. Who knows You. What You sell. (And many of the times where it’s ostensibly not about You, it really is. Kind of like the old joke about the egotist, “So enough about me. How do you like my tie?”)

But what I’m really talking about here is organizations, not individuals. It’s You, the company, not You the person, who’s largely missing the boat on social media.

OK, I admit (happily) that it’s not really all about You out there. This is demonstrated by the organizations that support their own online communities, and engage on social networks in transparent, conversational, collaborative ways. And, yes, it’s appropriate for some things to indeed be about You: customers and prospective customers do want to know about Your businesses, how Your products and services can help them, and how and why You’re the best in the business; and members want to know about Your associations, and how You are helping those You’re supposed to help.

But social technologies sure make it easy to make it about You.

Yet the organizations that successfully leverage social media are the ones that don’t go this route. They’re the ones that make it about Them. Who’s Them? They’re your customers (or users, members, subscribers, readers, business partners, employees, or whatever audience is relevant and whatever terminology you prefer).

So how do you make it about Them? Here are some thoughts:

• Take Their Viewpoints and Ideas into Account. Crowdsourcing is a great way to make it about Them. Today’s technologies make it relatively easy to run a crowdsourcing program that gives Them a place not only to give you their ideas for making your business better, but also to vote on and rank each others’ ideas. The outcome is that the best and most feasible ideas bubble to the top, ready for you to take the actions that are most important to Them.

• Support What They Care About. Hard as it may seem to believe, They are interested in more than just your company, your products, and your services. So don’t just talk about your stuff; add some value related to the other things they care about. You can do this by blogging about trends you see in your industry, sponsoring an online community where They can to talk with, connect with, and learn from each other, and tweeting fast-breaking information that’s timely and relevant to what’s important to Them.

• Make Them the Center of Attention. I remember an interesting networking tip. It suggested that you bring other people with you to networking events. In particular, bring someone who is looking for something new, such as a new job or new business. When the two of you are there, don’t talk about yourself. Act almost as if you’re your friend’s agent. Introduce her to other people, highlight what she’s good at; turn conversations towards her. You’ll be seen as a connector, and as someone who goes out of his way to help others. So your own networking stock will rise, not by blowing your own horn, but by making someone else look good. Extending this to social media means retweeting good stuff your followers say, spotlighting your customers on your Web site, asking them to share their stories on your blogs, and helping them “strut their stuff” (as Patty Seybold would say) on your online community.

The promise of social media is that, when we’re all engaged and communicating with each other, all boats rise. You are part of that equation, but so are They.

How are you making it about Them?

Men vs. Women in Social Media

In surfing through the web on my routine social media update, I stumbled upon a study done by www.royal.pingdom.com that brought up an interesting question, “What is the ratio of males to females participating in online social networks?” When I initially saw the title of this study I thought, “Of course, it’s got to be females” which was a correct assumption, but what I found equally as intriguing were the individual site’s results.

The survey conducted through data from Google Ad Planner(US Data Only), tracked 19 of the most popular social networking site’s demographic behavior. The study showed that 16 of the 19 sites were female dominated in terms of number of users. Sites tested in the survey included popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as social new sites like Digg, Slashdot and Reddit.

An interesting point taken from these results was that the only 3 male dominated sites were social news sites where users post and rate news threads based on their likings. Slashdot, Reddit and Digg attracted a male user group of 82%, 66% and 59% respectively. This says something about the ways in which males and females utilize social media. An appropriate quote I found from professor Russell-Bennet of Queensland University of Technology states, “It seemed women wanted to express themselves, while men enjoyed the thrill of social competition.” This proves to be true with men taking on a more competitive role in sites that involve ranking and user scores, where more females want to interact and connect with others.

Although these findings don’t prove to be particularly surprising, I found them quite informative and insightful in to the world of social media marketing. Be sure to take these findings in to consideration when developing a marketing strategy targeted towards one gender! What are your thoughts and opinions on this?

-Ben Crutchley, Manager of Client Services

Super Bowl of Advertising

Super Bowl XLVI is now less than a month away and sports fans across the world will be tuning in to see what team will raise the Lombardi trophy this season. In recent years, the games have been filled with exciting story lines and each had their fair share of excitement. Super Bowl XLII in 2008 featured the undefeated New England Patriots and Cinderella story New York Giants and drew a Super Bowl record 97.5 million viewers and trails only the M*A*S*H series finale as the largest telecast of all time. If you are like me, you are probably wondering what the M*A*S*H series is, not to mention how they managed 105 million viewers in 1983.

If recent history is any indication to the number of viewers that will be tuned in for this year’s Super Bowl, corporate advertisers and sponsors should be as ecstatic as Mel Kiper Jr. on draft day. The unforgettable commercials that million dollar 30 second Super Bowl spots have given us over the years are priceless right? Maybe not so this year. According to a recent New York Times article, the rates have decreased for a 30 second commercial during Super Bowl XLVI. Economic downturn and a rising trend amongst corporate advertisers to buckle down spending have lead to the decrease in 2010. Each 30 second slot in Super Bowl XLVI has been sold for $2.5 to $2.8 million.

Super Bowl ad giants FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi announced they will be absent from the commercial lineup this season. Pepsi has elected instead to launch a social marketing campaign, “Pepsi Refresh,” a program that rewards the best consumer ideas with grants up to $250,000 each. For a fraction the cost of one Super Bowl ad, companies like Pepsi can extend their reach using social media tools, but the appropriate plan, strategy and team needs to be in place to support marketing efforts. Unfortunately for Pepsi, the “Pepsi Refresh” program opened with major problems with security and privacy settings for its users. Pepsi’s flawed launch will undoubtedly damage their brand image and discourage consumers from participating in future efforts online. Companies are diving into social media campaigns head first without any understanding of how outreach relates to core business goals, or if they can achieve them. Only time will tell if companies like Pepsi will continue to launch social media marketing campaigns without the proper resources in place.

Eric Willey
Manager of Client Services

Misleading Indicators – Followers & Friends

Saw this on my twitter feed yesterday:

What immediately struck me was the implied assumption that the number of followers you have infers a level of influence. In our opinion that’s a risky assumption to make especially if you are going to make a business decision using this as a key metric.

Here is what I sent back to Jeremiah via DM:

Let me translate my Twitterese….

The number of followers is not a direct measure of influence. Too many ‘experts’ in the social media field believe that it is and continue to sell this notion. I can quickly and easily increase the number of my followers using hashtags and keywords that are popular. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am a stronger influencer than I was with a lower number of followers.

Those folks with a larger number of followers should not necessarily receive special treatment from brands. The number of followers or friends a person has on Twitter or Facebook really has minimal bearing on their actual influence. (I know that’s a bit heretical, but I’ll get to the why in a little bit.)

• How many people have used the various advertised services to build their followers rather than organically growing their followers by posting relevant content and ideas?
• How many people send an invite/friend request/twitter follow to every email address they have expecting the ‘polite’ return linking/friending/following behavior?
• How many of the top people in terms of followers have a large brand behind them, providing follower building support? (Example, if you only tweet about HP or Oreo Cookies you’ll develop following due to the power of the brand not necessarily because you are a thought leader in the space.)

Because these numbers can be manipulated, they are not to be trusted as a direct metrics proxy for influence.

The example that I use in our social media workshops uses a metric that everyone thought was a useful metric way back when in 2000-2003: Hits. The logic at the time was that the more hits there were in a given period of time, the better the site was in meeting its goals. But alas, this metric could be easily manipulated. Want more hits? Add more banner ads, objects, photos, etc. to the page. Voila! Higher counts so more success, right? Well, not really.

Follower counts are the same as hit counts. Look at some of the top people on Twitter with 5,000+ followers. If they are focused on a single topic, they probably do have influence. But most people are not that focused, tweeting about business, sports teams, their family, current events, pets, politics, etc. Do these folks really have a sphere of influence that marketers can embrace and attempt to cultivate through the Twitter Celebrity? Hard to tell.

The idea of identifying influencers in an easy to understand and quick manner has been a search for the holy grail since online communities started becoming more popular in 2000. At Participate.com, we hired smart people to analyze metrics and activities to develop relevant networked connections that indicated a level of influence within the community.  We used the new techniques of social mapping as well as relationship metrics of interactions. The work was never easy and it never gave a true understanding of influence. What did give some insight into influence, was looking to see how others interacted with the individual, not how many individuals read his or her content.

For marketers, a better way to measure influence is to analyze the content being added on Twitter in conjunction with analyzing who the person’s followers are. This is a tough, manual project. But in the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of whether or not a particular individual with a high following is actually an influencer.

As much as we want one, sometimes there is no holy grail. Using simple metrics as proxies is not a substitute for the hard work that data analysis takes to prove a hypothesis. Don’t fall for the trap of taking the easy way out.

Have a different opinion? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments’ section.

Social Media Monitoring – Man vs. Machine

I’ve been reading several tweets and blog posts about how social media tools such as Radian6 and Scout Labs are gaining traction in the enterprise. That’s not a surprise given the interest in protecting your brand online and uncovering loyal enthusiasts.

In our early Web 1.0 days, we used to do this manually for SAP. Back in 2003, we monitored  competitor communities for SAP related content. In 2004 when blogs started to catch on, we found information on several blogs where we could help SAP extend its online reputation.

Now in the wide open Web 2.0+ days, many folks believe that there are too many sources for an individual to keep up with from a monitoring perspective. Many attendees of the recent Online Community Unconference held in June asked our team for our thoughts on sentiment analysis, brand monitoring software, and on brand defense issues.

Our thoughts? Simple, the tools are still evolving and are not quite there yet. For example, the leading criticism of these tools that we have is that they cannot account for context in their analysis of sentiment. Sarcasm is missed. (Of course, no one is really sarcastic in their social media posting are they?)

That’s why you need someone who understands your business to help manage the sentiment analysis and the content it identifies. Social media monitoring is still a bit of an art form. The tools are and will continue to get better, but human interactions require human analysis too. This is something that all brand managers should be doing on a regular basis, even daily for larger brands.

Want to get started with social media monitoring? It’s easy and it’s free. Use Google Alerts, Technorati, Keotag, and BoardTrackerto start. These are all free applications that do a very good job in getting you the content you need to analyze.  But analyze it you must (in Yoda-speak) because it still takes a human to understand the content.

If you’d like to learn more, leave us a comment or contact us. We’re happy to help.

Do we need an online community industry council?

After the Communities 2.0 conference earlier this week in Las Vegas, there was a meeting for those attendees and other interested parties to discuss the formation of the Community Management and Marketing Council (CMMC). It is being spear-headed by Francois Gossieaux with support from the many folks who are in this industry. But the question that many folks have is WHY?

In an attempt to learn about why people in who run online communities, sell the software and services to run online communities, as well as the academics who study the field think, I’ve emailed our Online Community Roundtable members as well as a few dozen other folks I know in the industry. My purpose is to help define what the benefits of membership could be.

After sending my initial email out on Wednesday night from Las Vegas while waiting for my Red Eye flight back to D.C., I was surprised by the number of responses from my network. A couple of early responses indicate that potential members would like to see us:

• Provide a network of peers to share relevant ideas to enhancing the community experiences of their audience
• Develop relationships with members who have more experience
• Stay on top of the changing technology landscape (who’s hot, who’s developing something we could use, etc.)
• A strong network of organizations where case studies that cross companies/organizations could be developed to demonstrate true best practices
• Benchmarking of key success metrics for online communities

But there is some concern as well:

• Peers are organizations involved in this, not individuals who have a blog
• How do you ensure that our ideas aren’t given to our direct competitors?
• There needs to be a separate group for those of us who have moved beyond the basics of online communities. We can help less experienced companies, but that shouldn’t be the main point of our joining your group.

So, we have the same concerns as we’ve seen in the past when Impact Interactions first put its roundtable together. As I get more responses, I’ll post again on this topic. You can find more information at Francois’ blog The Future of Communities and at CMMCouncil.org.

But overall, I believe this is a good idea. With the online community world growing in importance, there are many issues and projects that an industry council could tackle. It’s not just about the networking, it can also be about where this industry goes from a professional standpoint. And that’s exciting to think about. Feel free to leave a comment here or to contact us.