Posts
9/13/2012 08:46:00 PM
David Michels
So God beats glitter! I've blogged about my ambivalence about twitter but maybe I should take it more seriously. The New York Times has published a story this summer about the popularity of twitter among evangelical leaders. It seems though Lady Gaga has many more followers (29 million and counting) "religious leaders show much higher levels of engagement." It is simple math; they may have fewer followers but their tweets get much more mileage with responses and retweets. In a head-to-head response/retweet comparison between evangelical Joyce Meyer and Lady Gaga for instance; Meyers followers engaged with her tweets 27x more often. The Times survey was admittedly a small sampling of religious leaders and celebs but it is a intriguing way to measure impact.
A story was posted in the Facebook group "New Media, Religion and Digital Culture" (thanks Chris) that noted the explosive growth of the Dalai Lama's followers in cyberspace with an impressive 5 million Twitter followers and 4.3 million Facebook friends. The article noted that 3 million Twitter followers were added in one year. His speeches are regularly posted on YouTube.
So how do you measure online influence?
This week I attended the Influence12 Symposium and Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media. It was a fascinating interdisciplinary gathering of information scientists, sociologists, computer scientists, business and government. Great to see familiar faces and meet some new people. I might not have paid much attention to twitter but others certainly have. It was both fascinating and sober to consider how social media is mined and managed by celebs yes, but by big business and government. Predicting the unpredictable and managing it has become big business. I couldn't help but think of Asimov's Psychohistory: individuals' behaviours cannot be predicted but statistics applied to the behaviours of large groups of people can be predicted. If we could track trends in social media, could we have predicted The Facebook Revolutions of the Arab spring?
Measuring online influence. Influencers and authorities online. Lots to think about. Yet somehow it seems far removed from the Galilean carpenter sitting on a hillside before a crowd of the curious saying "Blessed in the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
If you're on twitter you can follow the play by play tweets #Influence12 .
A story was posted in the Facebook group "New Media, Religion and Digital Culture" (thanks Chris) that noted the explosive growth of the Dalai Lama's followers in cyberspace with an impressive 5 million Twitter followers and 4.3 million Facebook friends. The article noted that 3 million Twitter followers were added in one year. His speeches are regularly posted on YouTube.
So how do you measure online influence?
This week I attended the Influence12 Symposium and Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media. It was a fascinating interdisciplinary gathering of information scientists, sociologists, computer scientists, business and government. Great to see familiar faces and meet some new people. I might not have paid much attention to twitter but others certainly have. It was both fascinating and sober to consider how social media is mined and managed by celebs yes, but by big business and government. Predicting the unpredictable and managing it has become big business. I couldn't help but think of Asimov's Psychohistory: individuals' behaviours cannot be predicted but statistics applied to the behaviours of large groups of people can be predicted. If we could track trends in social media, could we have predicted The Facebook Revolutions of the Arab spring?
Measuring online influence. Influencers and authorities online. Lots to think about. Yet somehow it seems far removed from the Galilean carpenter sitting on a hillside before a crowd of the curious saying "Blessed in the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
If you're on twitter you can follow the play by play tweets #Influence12 .
