I found the group of twitter users with the most followers from several types of accounts. I used Twitter Grader to evaluate the relative influence of these users, and compared it to the relative number of followers they had.

Twitter Celebrities Have Most Followers; News Accounts Have Most Influence

Within all the twitter accounts I analyzed, Celebrities and TV personalities had a greater than average number of followers. However, they had less than average influence. On the other hand, news, social media and tech had below average following and above average influence. Interestingly, entrepreneurs failed to gain both followers and influence, and fell below average in both factors.

Twitter is about Engaging, Not Sheep Herding

Your twitter power is not just about how many followers you have. It also matters how influential they are, and how engaged you are with them.

Celebrities tend to tweet about themselves. While this may be interesting to their fans, talking about yourself (whether personally or in business) does not invite interaction.

Even though celebrities have the most followers on twitter, if you want to influence people they are not the ones you should emulate. Instead, engage as much as you can with those that already follow you. Remember that collectively, they can spread your word a lot better than you can.

This isn’t the first time the show has joked about the transformative effects of the internet. In ‘The Snuke‘, Cartman uses the internet to get information on a terrorist attack he suspects by the class’s new Muslim student. In ‘Over Logging‘, the town of South Park migrates out west in search of more internet, since they “ran out” of internet themselves. I believe their latest episode was their most direct satire on social media. As a long-time South Park fan, I knew I had to write about it.

South Park is known for integrating witty messages into its playful mockery. Exaggeration is a form of humor that the show exercises. At the same time, it uses exaggeration as a way to expose truth. While demonstrated through exaggerations, I believe the episode makes the following points.

The Value of Your Social Media Presence Can Be Quantified

In the episode, a ‘stock’ metaphor is used to measure the value of Kyle’s facebook profile. When he facebook friends a boy from school with 0 friends out of pity, the value of his own stock plummets. Everyone else unfriends Kyle and he is left with only one facebook friend himself. While this course of events seems unrealistic, quantifying the value of your online profile is not ridiculous at all! An example of a tool that does this is Twitter Grader. Furthermore, the integration of social media results into SEO has made it all the more important to give weight to opinions expressed in this medium. Social media connections can indeed be a liability. Be open, but choose your connections wisely.

Artificial Engagement Brings Short-Term Value

In an effort to regain facebook friends, Kyle uses methods that result in artificial engagement. He ends up losing the only friend he gains. Just like in social media, you can’t create friends, you need to make friends. Don’t forget that social media has changed the methods of engagement, but many of the principles are the same.

Your Social Media Presence May Have a Life of Its Own

When Stan decides to delete his facebook account, his profile takes up a life of its own (literally) in cyberspace. Does your facebook profile have a life of its own? I would say no, but at the same time it selectively represents you. People have their personal side, their family side, their professional side, and maybe even other sides. It might be awkward for me to see the private lives of my professors, because I am used to their professional side. Likewise, the children of my professors would find it funny watching their mom or dad teach. However, both sides make up who they are. In this sense, your social media identity is not equivalent to your own. It does have its own life in that it represents a person like you, but not exactly you.

Represent Yourself, Don’t Seek Social Validation

Social media can be a great forum for us to show our uniqueness. Instead, many see it as a source of social validation. The cast of South Park does it – whether it’s Kyle begging Stan to help him maintain his online farm, or Stan’s dads desperate attempt to interact with his son on facebook.

Use Social Media to Create Value, Not Avoid Work

The lesson of South Park this time: Be careful how you use social media. It can be another excuse to avoid work, or it can be a way to enhance your work. I recommend doing cool things that you like as if social media did not exist. Then publish them on the social media platforms you feel best suited for you. For photographers, Flickr can be the perfect platform for you to share your photos share tips with people with similar interests. If you’ve always felt like a talk show host at heart, make sure you check out Ustream. Quit stalking people, quit playing FarmVille, and don’t worry about how cool you look. The promise of social media is that you can share content you are passionate about and be cool with the right people.

I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of South Park’s insights – I’d love to hear what you think about the episode or the points it makes. Add a comment below and I hope we can have a good discussion.

To cover this event live, we will have pictures and notes. If you would like to tweet about this event, please use the hash tag #95800.

(pictures courtesy of and © Manolis Kounelakis)

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To us, there were a few key takeaways from the panel. Before going into the detailed notes, here are some points we found interesting:

• It is our duty as consumers of social media to be aware of the associated privacy risks of this medium
• People will tend to give away private/personal information if they have something to gain
  • ‘Good’ example – let Amazon store your purchasing history so that they can recommend
  • ‘Bad’ example – employees giving employers access to their personal email account
• Companies are relying less on “gut-feeling” decisions, and more on quantitative analysis to determine what customers want
• The platforms for performing these quantitative analyses are converging.
• Rich real time tools (e.g., Foursquare) enhance communication in one sense, but pose a threat to privacy (e.g., Please Rob Me)
• Making personal data portable from one application/platform to another could be a way to maintain some level of privacy
• Regarding privacy issues in social media, there are associated moral, legal, and business strategic questions. Unfortunately, the corresponding answers to these questions often conflict.
• Social Web has the potential to finally create bottom-up change in organizations – this is exciting to some and scary to others.
• For now, privacy is dead. But do you think the benefits outweigh the costs?

—

Below are our LIVE notes on the event (courtesy of Haris):

Gene Connors, Partner, Reed Smith
Companies should not try to control – this is a losing battle!
“If we’re not talking together, you are talking about me”
Companies should encourage social media engagement and transparency – many companies are doing this, employing some sort of policy

From a practical legal standpoint on maintaining privacy – keep educating ourselves on how we can avoid compromising our private information
e.g., facebook applications grab your information – know what you’re getting into!
Beware of hidden and unhidden cookies on websites

Companies intentionally looking for your information – studying when a person is most likely to give away compromising information
Usually giving away private information happens when people feel they have something to gain from it

In the end, whose responsibilities is it? Individual, legal, etc…
Would love to have a law that warns users before giving away private information

If so many sites should depends on trustworthiness – what is our duty? Spread the story! Social media can be a powerful force to do this.

There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy in most states.

Even if we had a way of preventing privacy infringements, you won’t stop the scam artists – which was the same before the digital age.

Horror stories are what create laws – banking and other corporate abuses have added more regulation.
Same could happen with privacy.
Expecting on the regulatory side you’ll see a lot more big brother.
We should police ourselves, because otherwise others will police us.

On the topic of whether social web shift will happen top-down or bottum-up…
Maybe the bottom need to convince the top of the benefits and necessity.

Sean Ammirati, COO, ReadWriteWeb
Interested in real time nature of social web
Twitter was interesting 2 years ago, but now we’re even getting richer real time experiences (e.g., Foursquare)
Google buying Aardvark is testimony to this -> ask a question, route the question to the right person
Privacy implications – PleaseRobMe.com

Shocking rate of growth of blippy.com – broadcasts purchasing decisions. No trick, totally transparent!
What can we draw from this? People have different sensitivities to information privacy.

You should know what you want to keep private and what you don’t.
Hard to believe that the law will beat the scam artists – the community should do this.

The online battle for identity – google, facebook
Facebook connect has better authentication than openID
This battle is not getting enough attention – but one big player will most likely win
One thing that could help – make personal data portable

Mike Smith, Assoc. Professor IT and Marketing, CMU
How will organizations adapt to social media?
What will differentiate companies is not whether they will go into social media, but how they will leverage this medium to learn more about their customers
Companies don’t make “gut feel decisions” – they use quantitative tools to predict what you’ll buy and suggest it to you

As far as privacy issues, who owns this information is an interesting question. On one hand, most people would be comfortable giving some information to amazon to get better recommendations. However, some information like bank account information is something users would not like to shared.

In online privacy, there are three kinds of questions: Moral, legal, and business strategic.
Often the answers to these questions are not the same!

People are bad at evaluating low-probability, high-risk situations – giving away private information is such a case.

Rob Howard, Founder and CTO, Telligent
Personal identifiable information -> scary how much information can be mined!
For companies, put a human face on itself and foster community engagement.
Proctor & Gamble example – communicate better to consumers, but also improve internal company communication.
Challenge is not digitizing information, but finding relevant information – Amazon has done an excellent job in this!
Integration of different information systems is a trend – can collect different forms of information (analytics, engagement, etc) under one platform.

A resume is nothing these days – always searches people you’ll meet, and find their online face.

Measuring effectiveness of online campaigns:
1) Listen
Get feedback, measure engagement
2) User Type Analysis
Break down users into categories – who comments, creates content, consumes content, etc.
These types can shift – ‘askers’ can become ‘influencers’
3) Engagement
Social Media can give even more fine grained information on enagement
Can find out more demographic information and preferences

The tools for measurement are converging.

Some organizations base their culture around keeping information in – hard to create a top down cultural shift in the age of social media. Will this change happen bottom up?

Tim Stanton, Sr. Acct. Exec. LinkedIn
Key question – how to use social media
Organizations will continue to wrestle with social media
Still believes we are in early phases of social media

Q: Broadening or deepening scope of social media influence?
Both – important to spread out, but don’t spread too thin.

At LinkedIn, the community drives the content – that is how they deliver relevant information, which makes the community willing to provide them with information. LinkedIn has built their brand on this.

It’s hard to maintain privacy, even without online life. Sounds like privacy is hard to achieve today.
For professional reasons, getting found is very important!

—

Many thanks to Heinz College for hosting this panel, and especially to my professor Ari Lightman for organizing this event. Please check twitter hashtag #95800 for tweets related to this panel, and for general discussions within our social media class.

The exponential web team will be covering this event with our live notes and streaming photos, which can both be found below.

Live Notes

Courtesy of Haris Krijestorac

Panelists -
Live
Cara Weiser Keithley, MAM 2004, Marketing and Communications Strategist and Gov 2.0 Practitioner, carakeithley.com
Stacey Monk, MAM 2000, CEO and Co-Founder, Epic Change
Darren Tome, MISM 2005, Technical Product Manager, Local Integrated Media, NBC Universal

Online
Nathaniel McNamara, SocialFeet
Glenn Pasewicz, MSPPM 1993, Public Policy Analyst, Pennsylvania House of Representatives

Darren Tome

NBC):
Target 24-44 year olds who don’t just ‘live’ in a city, but go out and experience it!
e.g., nbcnewyork.com
New social features:
So My City – Sound Off: Like a twitter for a city.
Mood of the City: Crowd-source emotion of a city. How does a story/gallery/video make you feel? There are some issues – some issues will have views that are polarized. Sometimes NBC needs to shut it down.
Overall, these social features have significantly increased the attention towards

Stacey Monk

(Founder, Epic Change)
Their goal is to amplify visibility and impact of people who are creating change in their own communities.
Company started with no money! Took part in America’s Giving Challenge by the Case Foundation. Had to work hard, reach out to every social media for change venue possible.

#tweetsgiving – share what you are thankful for. Number 1 trending topic around thanksgiving! Great example of how a small company can make a big impact through the power of the Internet. Getting ready for Tweetsgiving 2009!

Challenge of cross-culture online collaboration. It’s hard to run a democratically organized online social media event, because there are different levels of internet access around the world. Tanzanian school boy @gideon_gidori was helped find his voice through twitter!

Glenn Pasewicz

(Pennsylvania House of Representatives)
Most of his work has been in the public health sphere. Does ‘systems projects’.
House and senate have facebook pages and twitter accounts, but in the day-to-day work they are not part of what they do.
Has set up wikis for collaboration, but it is not catching on.
Why is social media not used? One thing is the generational gap. Furthermore, legislature is not a fast, real-time thing. Instead, it is more of a process. Therefore the means of communications related to it mirror this process, and communication is done largely internally and through emails and face-to-face.

Cara Keithley

(Social Media Evangelist, works for State government, professor at Franklin University)
Will discuss how to harness social media to internally foster change in higher education and government.
Both government and higher education needs leaders and innovators to help them adapt to changes of social media.
If you want to change an organization, you don’t need “permission” – you need to do your research and share your opinion intelligently. Focus on the organization’s strategic goals.
Social Media allows people to be more ‘discriminate shoppers’ when it comes to looking for a University or school. Therefore schools should join the conversation, engage potential students, answer their questions.
She claims she has identified many opportunities and fostered relationships through social media.
Tools are transient – don’t focus on them! Instead, focus on the innovations that need to take place.
(Note: all slides are on SlideShare)

Nathanial McNamara

(SocialFeet)
Social Media traffic going up 20% per month for the top 25 sites in the U.S.
It won’t just be facebook and twitter, but the overall landscape will change.
Spoke about ‘activity screen’ interfaces.

Comments from panelists on measurement of social media results:
At NBC, users are tracked throughout the entire sessions. Not just click through and page views, but resulting actions.
Measurements for a social media movement can be different than for a website. See how many mentions, who mentions you. How the people you’re working for/with respond will surely be noticed.
“Measurements can tell you whatever you want, and you can make them say whatever you want” – You’ll know if it’s working!

Live Photos

Courtesy of Manolis Kounelakis

1) Crowdsourcing of ideas using Facebook

Carnegie Mellon University / Heinz College

Looking for some ideas? Ask the students. That’s what Heinz College did in search for a title for a new faculty video series. Not only did the students feel like participating in the decision but they also felt like taking a peek at what the school is rolling out.

From the Heinz College Facebook Fan Page

2) Course Videos on Youtube

MIT OpenCourseWare

As part of the OpenCourseWare project, MIT’s youtube channel has hundreds of videos from a variety of courses. Anyone can watch full lectures from subjects like Computer Science, Chemistry, Linear Algebra or even Philosophy of Love and Black Holes. It is impressive to think that MIT is providing the world with top-class course material completely free of charge. And there is no better way to promote this initiative than to upload some part of this material on Youtube, the largest video site in the world (1 billion views per day, as Youtube proudly claimed last week).

3) Amplifying class discussion with Twitter

The University of Texas at Dallas

Last Spring, Monica Rankin, a History professor at UTD, decided to use twitter to improve the way students could interact with each other during class. In a class of 90 students taking place in a large auditorium, the discussion is usually concentrated among few students while the rest of them run the risk of losing interest. Twitter turned out to be an effective solution. In her own words: “I wanted to find a way to incorporate more student-centered learning techniques and involve the students more fully into the material… Twitter’s texting and internet options seemed to offer more students the opportunity to participate”. By using their laptop or cellphone, students tweeted comments and ideas related to the readings assigned for each lecture. With a different hashtag every week, the discussion was kept organized. The Professor also used Tweetdeck and a projector to stream the conversation live during the class. The outcome was very encouraging. “Overall, I think the twitter experiment was successful primarily because it encouraged students to engage who otherwise would not”, Monika Rankin explains. You can learn more for this experiment by watching the video below. You can also read her detailed analysis here.

Like many of my fellow students, when I’m working on an assignment that requires some research, Wikipedia is often the first place I’ll go for an overview of a topic. More often than not, I do so under the pretense of a disclaimer that Wikipedia can not be cited as a source. As a result, Wikipedia is often not seen as an acceptable academic source.

In spite of this, we still keep coming back to Wikipedia for an overview of the topic. I and my fellow students often have to find another source that restates information that Wikipedia has already given us, a gesture that I can’t help but find to be often unnecessary. To be clear, I am not 100% confident that Wikipedia should indeed be treated as a valid academic source; However, I do believe that the currently prevailing viewpoint on Wikipedia’s lack of validity has become accepted too much as fact, and that the topic needs to be challenged more.

Wisdom of the Crowds vs. ‘Expert Knowledge’

With Wikipedia, the masses have the power both to acquire and spread knowledge

Accepting the Encyclopedia as more reliable is the easy move, simply because we are used to this standard. However, since the tides are shifting towards wisdom of crowds and digitization, people in academia should begin to question the logic behind the implied assumption behind accepting the Encyclopedia and not Wikipedia. After all, in spite of digitized versions of the traditional encyclopedia that are out there, many people still use Wikipedia as their source for knowledge.

Google Knol: A Middle Road?

An interesting project that in some ways manifests the idea of balancing wisdom of masses and expertise is Google Knol. While Google sought to fuse the strengths of the Encyclopedia and the wiki, their idea never gained the popularity of either. This idea was implemented by requiring more barriers to entry for editing and creating articles than Wikipedia had.

Since I don’t personally use knol, I don’t deny that there may be some niche market for it. Nevertheless, I feel that the Knol case shows that given that much of our information is acquired digitally, most people prefer to hear from many people that are somewhat like themselves rather than from a much smaller group of supposed ‘experts’.

Wikipedia and Democracy

On a broader level, I believe that the question of Wikipedia’s validity raises parallel questions on the nature of democracy in the digital age. The digitization of information has in many ways made knowledge more accessible to masses, both in terms of acquiring it and spreading it. For a long time, many cultures have accepted democracy as the best practical approach to deciding what is right or true. Again, it is a difficult question whether this is truly the best practical approach – but something we often neglect to acknowledge is that it is most likely not the ideal theoretical approach. When we distance ourselves from the concept of democracy we have become so accustomed to, we might see that the fact that most people think something doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Are You Ready??

Latest Pictures from Flickr – Click to Start

Latest Tweets

G20 Buzz

Smart, simple and real-time. G20 Buzz mashes up G-20 related twitter conversations, youtube videos, flickr phots and google news. It is powered by Mullen and Full Stop. To take part in the conversation use these twitter hashtags: #g20, #pghg20, #g20summit, #pittsburghg20

Official Website

Even of this is the official website of the Pittsburgh G-20 Partnership, I decided to include it in the post since there is a lot of social media integration in it. You can get continuous updates with news, articles, press releases and related events. Talk to them on twitter @PittsburghG20 and check the official youtube channel.

myG20

Now this is interesting. MyG20 is a project developed by Matress Factory and Deeplocal. According to their description, which i really like, “myG20 is a real-time, crowd-curated guide to our city”. In fact it is, since they have managed to combine live twitter activity, blogging and a flickr photo stream with related pictures. The twitter integration is done by fetching tweets which contain G-20 related hashtags.

G20 Art

Ok, this rocks. G20 Art is a project that creates art inspired by the G20 summit. The team is powered by Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based interactive marketing company, and it is armed with super-talented people like Jon Dascola, Osman Khan and Geoff Barnes.
Their latest work is the “Hey G20 Morse Code Project”. The juice: If your tweet includes @heyG20, your message will be transformed to a mulitcolored morse code light show. The installation is located at Elliance’s offices which are directly across the river from the Pittsburgh Convention Center where the summit will take place. Give it a try! Check also the heyG20 project on twitter.