A few days ago I checked out the Twitter grades of the members of the Blog Workers Industrial Union. The Grader tools let me easily script up a tidy report of the rankings of members, although the site is a little light on information as to how grades are calculated.
Next I explored Measuring Twitter Effectiveness With tr.im which was about, surprisingly enough, the use of the web interface provided by tr.im to determine ... wait for it ... Twitter effectiveness!
Today I was using Twitter and there was mention of a tool from Klout and I checked it out. It isn't as amenable as Grader for making tables, but it seems to be much more powerful and the site explains the methodology
Klout is a slick looking, responsive site. You have to sign up, then wait a bit (up to an hour) for it to rate you and your followers, then you get access to the system.
Tweeters are divided into casual, climbers, connectors, and those having a persona. Those with significant influence are either connectors or personas, those with audience are climbers or personas. A persona is the most influential of the four classes, a casual user the least. Here is my chart, here is markos' chart, and here is plutoniumpage. We're all personas, but the two front pagers are much more powerful than I, with Markos scoring a 73 and Page a 64, to my 43.
The stats page is where the action is – understand the metrics Klout uses and you'll understand how to increase your influence.
You need both followers and people to follow, but having a huge list of people you're chasing after doesn't do much good if they don't reciprocate. Even if you have a large list and they follow you back if they're merely following out of politeness that isn't so useful. This is how your Reach is defined.
Once you've reached people you've got to Engage them. 72 people, or 19% of my followers, felt the need to mention @StrandedWind in an update. 80% of my Tweets generate a mention which is pretty good. Of course, I got a good bit of that slapping around #kooks on #tcot, which I choose to call Top Crybabies On Twitter rather than Top Conservatives On Twitter. I'm well known there, but not well loved :-)
Demand is another aspect of one's influence. I've always budgeted my follows, never pursuing more people than I had watching me. I'm up to 400 followers and I'm following about 370 – can't tell because Twitter is down as I draft this. I relentlessly use TwitBlock to kill spammers, even the ones I'm not following. I like Twitter Karma to help me locate people who've followed me that I've not followed back. I do get a clutch of wingnuts watching me due to #tcot and them I don't follow back, but probably the bulk of my followers are those I follow in return.
The last item is Velocity. You could hit one home run, or you could be consistent on your base hits. I have lots of people who retweet me, but seldom do I get more than one repeat of a tweet. I'd like it to be higher, but you can only get so much mileage out of being smarter than the average #tcot wingnut.
I did a lot of trolling when I first got to Twitter, under my name in some ways, and I ran specific experiments on reputation economics using sock puppets and always treating the foaming crowd of #kooks on #tcot as my personal chew toy. One of my puppets is actually much higher rated than I am, while a couple of them I've just let die. I like #tcot for testing because they're as a rule quite reactive and very credulous. Feel free to abuse them yourself, and tell them I sent you :-)
Since we started the Blog Workers Industrial Union over the Netroots Nation 2009 weekend I've taken a bit more serious approach to Twitter. We're running an automated announcement tool under the name Oct20Rally in support of the October 20th health care rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We've got a generalized public service announcement ID called Progressive PSA which ought to be getting new software and a new mission on Sunday. I myself am now the testbed for the PSA software, and I recently waded into the #climate, #energy, #wind, #ag, and #food hashtags with the mix of work I've done on renewable ammonia and greenhouse operations.
Changing focus bumped my Twitter grade tens of thousands of places in about a day's time, running my percentage from 93 to 95.2 in maybe 30 hours. That's nice, but I've got a ways to go to catch Mr. 99.96% Moulitsas. I'm cool with that, because getting my energy work visible has led to two potential investor interactions this weekend where they have contacted me. We've got a patent app ready to go in and once that's done I think we're actually going to see funding and then ground breaking on some renewable ammonia facilities based on the work Kossack Nb41 and I have done.
So, don't be shy, start follwing the Blog Workers Industrial Union, get in touch with Spedwybabs or AndSarahToo, and let them know you're ready to help. It could be as simple as just spending a few minutes a day retweeting things you see coming from other Kossacks. Babs has some HUGE news that came in tonight, far bigger than my few investor contacts, but I'm going to let her break it where and when she chooses ... and she is going to need more hands to help with the situation. You came here wanting to influence things? She is blazing the trail for doing that and you'll instantly recognize the names when she is ready to start talking about who we're supporting with this organization and the little bit of software we've written.