by Jeffrey Barrett*
I was at the Text Analytics Summit last week and among the various technical aspects of the summit there was a session on social media analytics that got very down to earth. This roundtable discussion could have gone many ways and our half of the table spent some of the time going down the path of analytics as it applies to the social graph.

The social graph (or network) of a site or group of sites is a description of links and the nature of links between people. By and large, the goal was identifying influencers within a social graph. It seemed like two strong positions were formed early on: those that felt someone being a “friend” of a person mattered and those that felt knowing who “followed” someone was more meaningful to identifying influencers. The difference may seem subtle, but when we talked it through, the difference became clear.

The division is based on “friends” being defined as someone knowing another person, while ”following” someone (not to be confused with the Twitter follow feature) being a trend of how people navigate the content of a site. This is an old attribute, not new to social media, but it looks like an accurate measurement of voice. However, it does not appear that many social media sites expose this information in the API of their social graphs. The importance of this was expressed by one attendee who mentioned they purchase viewership stats from sites and forums where their company is mentioned and trend for people who post about the attendee’s company and have a high readership. Then this attendee hires them,  paying the posters to say what they have been saying all along. While that action was debated by the group, the metric of “following” was clearly well supported.

So my question is, how do you view the importance of “friends” compared to those that are heavily “followed” when identifying influencers?

*Bio: Currently I am the chief architect of BurrellesLuce 2.0, the portal used by thousands of PR professionals to monitor, share, organize, and measure online and print news. I started as a web developer for Merck & Company and I am an accomplished technologist with a focus on large scale system architecture and implementation. With over ten years of experience designing and deploying technical solutions for a wide range of companies, I most recently managed web projects for NBC Universal, where I delivered social networking applications and supported high traffic applications. Prior to that, I served as director of technology for Silver Carrot, a marketing firm, creating and delivering the technology that powered high-performance online campaigns. In my spare time, I enjoy reading about economics and anything that has to do with modeling social interaction and social media. LinkedIn: Jeffrey Barrett; Twitter: @BurrellesLuce; Facebook: BurrellesLuce