Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

And now, as always, please tell us what you think? What would you expect from a search engine with Social Relevancy Rank built in?

Entitled When did we start trusting strangers? How the internet turned us all into influencers, the premise is that influence was moved beyond "professional and top down" (mainstream media) and into Web-enabled peer to peer influence. But despite McCann calling this a "democratisation of influence", all influencers are not equal. There are "super influencers" who are "extremely heavy users of social media, particularly in terms of content creation." Are you one of these people? Let's check out what the characteristics are...

Who Are The Super Influencers?

Super influencers are heavy social media users, who also "fit the typical profile of early adopters who are likely to try new products, take risks and share their opinions with friends."

But it's important to note straight away that it's not just about tech. The report lists a number of different categories where people can be super influencers:

It's common for people to be influential over a range of these categories. The peak of influence is said to be around 12-14 categories, much higher than was possible before the Web.

However, it's unsurprising to learn that the so-called super influencers are "more likely to be male, 25-34 and be mid or senior influential office workers." They are also more likely to be highly educated. The report puts this down to "in the knowledge heavy, written world of the web, intelligence and computer literacy are major factors in spreading significant influence."

Of course we hope that over time super influencers will include a wider representation of people.

As for their activities, we've seen variations of the following chart before. Basically they blog a lot, use social networks, upload photos and videos, and so on:

Influencing in The Real World Too

McCann notes that super influencers are making their presence felt in mainstream life. Perhaps a little too boldly, the report claims that super influencers "helped Obama get the democratic party nomination." The report states that they did so through "prolific blogging, twittering, social networking and content creation", which generated massive influence and helped to raise funds, get people out to vote and change the opinions of mainstream media.

We're not so sure that Twittering for Obama helped get him the nomination. We're all fans of Twitter here, but it's still very very niche. The fact that the RWW Ed has more FriendFeed subscribers than Obama, tells you something about its usage in the real world (and the Ed doesn't use FriendFeed that much). fwiw Marshall Kirkpatrick is top RWW writer in those rankings, at #24.

We are pleased to note however that, according to page 10 of the report, super influencers are likely to read ReadWriteWeb ;-)

It's perhaps not all good news for super influencers. The report also claims that super influencers are "much more likely to be motivated by overt commercial messaging [and] celebrity endorsements". I guess that explains the presence of punk'd star Ashton Kutcher and washed up rapper Hammer at TC50!

Finally, super influencers are a worldwide phenonomen, according to McCann, but "there is a clear skew towards the emerging internet markets of Latin America and Asia Pacific." Brazil has the highest rate of super influencers, with 24% of active internet users falling into the super influencer category. They are followed by India, Mexico and Pakistan, which McCann puts down to "how internet users have found their voice thanks to their massive use of social media in these markets."

Conclusion

There is a lot more to this report than the super influencer data points. The report is bullish on influencers in general: "overall participation rates for contributing opinions, thoughts and content on products and brands is extremely high." McCann recommends that "all brands have to react to the influence economy - becoming more open, more transparent and more active in social and conversational media".

There's nothing really new in the report - we've known for a while now that social media is being used to create new forms of influence in the commercial and social worlds. But there's good lessons here for brands and organizations that are still figuring out how to reach consumers in the Web age.

Also we're hopeful that the super influencer demographic will become a bit more representative, over time. Here at ReadWriteWeb we try to encourage the use of the very latest web technologies in The Real World - for example see our overview of the recent DEMOfall08 conference, which we felt showcased some promising real world applications. We hope that trend continues too.

So, now that you know what makes up a Super Influencer - are you one of them? Tell us in the comments...

From MediaPost today:

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by "well-known bloggers."

"This shows that popularity doesn't always equate to credibility," said Robert Hutton, executive vice president and general manager at Pollara. "Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there."

There are a couple of things we'd suggest need to be taken into consideration here, however.

• Popular bloggers still prime the pump, offering substantial visibility at a product or service's launch and leading to later, more credible recommendations from friends and family.


• The quantity of blog posts may be a complicating factor. Who can keep up with all the recommendations? That quantity, as well as the job description of leading bloggers (to keep you excited about the new things they discover) also tend to lead to decreases in the quality of their recommendations. Your friends and family probably aren't professional stuff-reviewers, so their recommendations are less frequent, less obligatory, less rushed to be first and ultimately more meaningful. The quality deficiency in the reviews of harried, high-volume bloggers can be so severe that many readers have said they only visit those blogs for the links to early-found resources. They click through those links and make their own judgement, often not even reading the bloggers' thoughts on the subject.


• The study concluded that strangers with 10,000 friends on MySpace provide less potent recommendations than do friends and family, also on MySpace. We'd contend though that this is also a win for smaller social networks. Not that we want to encourage marketer-types to flood quality communities like Multiply, Vox, Ning and FriendFeed, but...the smart ones will find appropriate ways to be visible there. Can they do it more effectively than the many pathetic attempts to market in Twitter? Maybe, but don't hold your breath. The marketing world was really hoping they could just win over some existing social media power users and have everyone else fall like dominoes. This study says that's not how it works.


• The study is complicated by the fact that it focused on buying things. The biggest blogs on the web aren't places readers go to find ways to spend money. There's an almost rabid rejection in blog reading communities of anything that costs money, in fact.

Times are changing and the connection between technology and social relations is one that many people are watching closely. Facebook's theory that friend activity/endorsement is the best advertisement may be supported by this data. Dr. Pepper's hiring Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday to record a TV commercial may look even more ridiculous than it did on face.

The rise of the power-blogger as super-influencer makes a fun story, especially when the mainstream media profiles them as individuals - but in reality bloggers are probably playing a different roll than that of tipping point influencer. That's what we'd suggest that you think about the matter, at least!