Twitter: Meaning Trumps Influence?

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Some interesting discussion over at Chez Simply Zesty on the Twitter influencer syndrome. Influence is such a flat and subjective term. Again, it’s the people you follow that realises value not the numbers clocked up in followers.

For example, if we’re talking numbers then are Britney or Jordan really influential? Or is that just morbid fascination? Even in business, the first mistake any business can make is to think that just because they show up at the Twitter party, people will want to follow them. With so much noise on Twitter, influence is really a misnomer, I think.

One can slice and dice the influence problem many ways, but at the end of the day, it’s not about influence, it’s about meaning. What do the messages I read mean to me?

Messages from my mother or from my best friends carry a lot more meaning than links to last-minute flight offers. Similarly, those discount tweets mean more than Oprah’s. :)

If I’m a business, customers that spend time giving me harsh but fair feedback that informs decision-making for the better, might mean more to me than a tweet saying how great my service is.

Ascribing meaning to tweets and people we follow places a value on that relationship. Perhaps, we need to look at valuing information from a consumptive standpoint instead of trying to measure “influence” from a provider point of view?

August 17th, 2009 at 8:36 pm • Filed in Brainstrobing



Comments

One Comment to “Twitter: Meaning Trumps Influence?”

  1. Christian Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 11:53 pm

    Great post Axelia, I couldn’t agree more. Although Twitter is perhaps the largest mass broadcast platform at anyone’s disposal, I believe all meaningful interactions on it come from personal connections. If I know you and respect you, what you tweet and retweet will always draw my attention.

    From a business perspective this means that you need to do exactly the same thing as you need to do in every other Social Media channel – build personal relationships and foster trust.



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