Uncovering Connections on Twitter Could Become Big Business
If there's a hard-to-reach person you want to meet, one of the best ways to do so is through their friends. That's true in the offline world and the increasingly social nature of the internet may make discovery of the social circles of key influencers a powerful business practice online.
A new class of tools intended to surface influencers and the people they are influenced by are focusing on a hub of rapid, connected conversation that's wide open for analysis - Twitter. Could analysis of individual behavior on Twitter become a valuable tool for business development and marketing? A growing number of startup companies are making a case that it could.
Last week Twitter announced that it will soon allow users to create lists of friends that they can share with others. It's an attempt to make user discovery easier and it's cute, but it looks pretty rudimentary at a time when some companies are building enterprise-scale software for real-time discovery and analysis of circles of Twitter users, their expertise, influence and sentiment on topics.
On the margins of the developing Twitter-as-business tool ecosystem are startups building light-weight influencer discovery and analysis tools. Two of the most interesting yet have launched in the last 24 hours, in fact.
Shining a Light on Webs of Connection
Still one of the most useful tools in this group, if still largely a proof of concept, is Pete Warden's Mailana. Give Mailana a Twitter username and it will tell you who the top 20 people that user has had reciprocal public conversations with on Twitter - who they are engaging with the most. Want to get into the world of Lewis Shepherd, CTO of Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments? (It's his birthday today, by the way.) Then you might consider joining CTOvision.com author Bob Gourley, Purdue University Cyber War Researcher Samuel Liles and Dr. Mark Drapeau in conversation on Twitter. That's who Shepherd communicates with the most there, according to Mailana.
Friendship Discovery As a Service
It may be a sign of market maturation that some companies are now offering APIs for this kind of functionality and others are integrating it into their core products. Yesterday social media aggregator Seesmic integrated into its web application a feature from Twitter recommendation service Mr.Tweet that surfaces what other users or anyone "pays the most attention to" on Twitter. This is really useful - you can discover key people for any influencer you follow with just a few clicks. Did you know that local-blogging guru Lisa Williams is a very close contact of media consultant Amy Gahran? I did because I've been following them both for years - but now you can discover that connection programmatically, with a click.
Performance of the new feature integration is spotty and the user experience leaves a lot to be desired - but it's only been out for 24 hours.
The platform is wide open for analysis and exposing a person's "social graph" is wildly valuable for discovery, context, relationship building and more. There's going to be a whole lot more development in this direction.
Influencer Discovery For Sale
Will people pay for this kind of information? If they are smart they will. Popular Twitter shared link tracking service Tweetmeme released its first paid product this morning and is betting it can monetize influencer discovery.
The new Tweetmeme Analytics service does a number of things, but the most useful feature may be what it calls "retweet trees." Publishers can surface the chain of retweets that passed their links around and see which Twitter users had the biggest impact on a chain of retweets.
Tweetmeme is surfacing other types of data as well and there's potential for that data to be organized, cross referenced and displayed in a wide variety of ways. Tweetmeme is already performing text analysis of the pages being shared on Twitter, so content type could become another axis point to look at the data around.
All of these services are in early days. If people will in fact pay for them, then they will develop all the more. It's a greenfield of possible added value. Finding out who is of interest to people of interest to you is a classic business activity, open social networking like Twitter makes that possible in newly interesting and efficient ways.
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Great post. Algorithmically discovering friends/possible audiences will someday be a big industry.
The first plot reminded me of a similar experiment I did a while back, looking at the tweets at TechCrunch's Real-Time Crunchup. Just wrote it up, with some additional commentary on the topic:
http://infoharmoni.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/tracking-reciprocal-twitter-relationships/
All these things are way too complicated and useless for regular business users. Sure, it turns people like you and Scoble on but not regular users. Keep it simple, stupid. That is why sites like FacebooK, LinkedIn and Twitter are successful. It is very stupidly simple. That is what business people want. They don't have time to fiddle around with things like, how close I am to them, who else knows them and how well connected they are. If I know them, hell, I will connect with then. If I don't then, F' off. I don't know time to analyze you and your followers. Just show me their damn title and company, if I know them or see if I want to connect with them. That simple. People have tried all these complex things for years and nothing have struck out. Just keep it simple and people will use it.
Agree with Mike D that it'll likely be a long time (if ever) before this type of technology gets widely adopted but, if it does, I wonder if the networks we voluntarily share (via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Friend Connect, etc.) could become a liability.
For example what happens when your competitor, realizing that you've "friended" your prospects, starts cold calling the list?
Posted by: Brian Makas
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October 6, 2009 5:47 PM
Consider a service orientation as offered by companies such as Community Analytics (http://comlytics.com) as a way of drilling down deeper into the social web.
I think LinkedIn would be a better way to go about with this kind of recommendation route.
Whilst I enjoy investigating social network, if we are not careful we forget that social media metrics are just the starting point for a discussion, not the end point.
Nonetheless it is interesting to see some of the patterns that emerge. MPs clustering by party on Twitter:
http://www.davidstuart.co.uk/blog/2009/10/twitter-network-analysis-tweetminster/
Thanks Marshall, for the interesting article and the props. I've enjoyed toying with Mailana. Looks like a great tool for networkers. Also, unfortunately, it could be a great tool for malicious actors who might seek out this info in order to better manipulate/deceive (the term "social engineering" is sometimes used for categories of human-centered attacks and tools like Mailana can help speed attacks like that, I think). Just another reason for us all to keep our wits about us.
This is a great article. There is a conversation around ROI (Return on Influence). This can potentially be a great service offering if the average user is interested in the analytics, but not the semantics. Love the featuring of the actual tools that the interested socializer can utilize.
Tiffany O.
Oops, last comment didn't have the right link, so I'm trying again...
This is a great article. There is a big conversation around ROI (Return on Influence). This can potentially be a great service offering if the average user is interested in the analytics, but not the semantics. Love the featuring of the actual tools that the interested socializer can utilize.
Tiffany O.
I adree with Mike D. This stuff is powerful but to make really effective use of Twitter you need five apps all doing something slightly different -- that's not workable.
Either this market needs consolidation or someone -- Twitter? -- needs to produce a suite product from scratch with ALL the useful stuff in it.
Just thought of a third option: CRM vendors build this stuff in as that's where most people are already managing relationships today. Why create somewhere new that ONLY shows Twitter relationhips?
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.bis