One of the jargon buzz words at SXSWi this year that kept cropping up was “Thought Leader“. It amused me greatly as it really doesn’t mean anything more than someone who has ideas which some other people listen to and in the online world where everyone is famous for 15 people such things are incredibly relative. I might be a thought leader to some regular readers of my blog but I’m not to countless others.
But it did get me thinking a little bit, especially as I started looking for new Twitter streams to follow. Without going through the long process of checking links and judging blogs, how could I tell if these people were worth checking out? I found myself gravitating towards the stats box on the sidebar. As an example, here’s mine:
Here you can see I’ve got a Twitter ratio of 53:91 which could be represented thus:
Now, my thinking is that one can only deal with following a certain number of people before it gets unmanageable which keeps the pointless collecting of “friends” which plagues the likes of MySpace at bay. I peg this at around 50, because that’s where I’m at, but let’s have a look at someone I learned stuff from who is probably leading my thoughts. Alex Hillman has a ratio of 325:922 which looks like this:
This implies he’s more of a thought leader than me but is still within my realm and thus someone I can talk to as a peer. Which is about right.
How about old school a-list blogger Anil Dash with 232:2599?
Certainly someone I can learn from but not necessarily a peer. Which, when I met him, was sort of how it played out. He was lovely and gave me some handy tips but, for whatever reason, we didn’t exactly bond. (And that’s not a problem in the slightest, I hasten to add!)
Of course none of this means anything at all – I’m just playing around. But when we look at these stats boxes we do use them to make lazy if useful judgements. A band on MySpace will be measured by how many “friends” they have, for example, and as I’m getting more people following me who I don’t know and, on checking them out, feel no need to follow, it does strike me as a way to measure my “success”.
But yeah, this is really as useful as quoting visitor stats for websites. Sure, you’ve got 100,000 uniques a day but who are they? What value to they bring? And what are they visiting you for? That’s the stuff that really matters.
Interesting insights, Pete. And for what it’s worth, the kind of interaction you described with me is, for example why I didn’t go to SXSW for a few years — I have a hard time making those real connections with people these days because in some contexts, the ratio of people I know to people who know me is so assymetrical. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, of course, but I do wish that I *could* spend more time learning from, and talking to, folks like you whom I’ve “known” online for years.
There’s also even a real-life social tension to the 10-1 ratio of Twitter followers/followees, because then when I meet people in person, they’ll say “I follow you, how come you don’t follow me?” And it’s hard to explain that, basically, I *can’t* reciprocate with everybody, or the tool would become useless to me.
And as far as “Though Leadership” goes, I don’t know if I’m that full of good ideas, but I do know that the ability to influence people is really constrained by how well you make a real connection with them. It may be that I have too many lightweight, superficial connections to be as successful as a thought leader as I might otherwise hope to be.
Good food for thought!
Echoing what Anil said, i keep my follow list low on purpose…not to be defined as a “thought leader”, but because the value of twitter for me is in my followers, not the people i’m following. What do I mean?
Well an increased number of people im following only dilutes the pool of information I’m trying to receive. The already intense firehose of information becomes so saturated that the entire stream loses value.
On the opposite side, having a large and more importantly, diverse group of followers increases my ability to use twitter as a “lazyweb”, asking questions and getting feedback more relevantly than even google can give me.
The real trouble is what Anil described in that real life social tension. I do not follow everyone back. I have a loose “follow” policy that I try to adhere to to keep things easy for me. What it really comes down to, is, is that person contributing to or initiating conversations that are interesting to me. it has little to do with friendship, really. I’ve got awesome friends. They know who they are. Facebook can manage that…twitter is for something else.
The problem I’ve run into is this: while I find it easy to not follow someone back initially when they follow me…I find it excruciatingly difficult to UNFOLLOW someone. The pain is in the fact that it feels like a mimicked real world social experience of a breakup. When in fact, i dont care any less about the person, their tweets simply have lost relevance to the conversation i need to be focused on *right now*.
This is just one more reason twitter needs groups. Or better relationship management. Or to scale back to the whole model of being a communication platform, and have someone else be the interface that handles the relationship layer.
Thanks for dragging some useful shit out of my ramblings guys!