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.