Influencer Share of Meme

I have been thinking about the distributed influence discussion that Jonny Bentwood and the roundtable initiated. It is now a meme where several others have added to the conversation. The focus of the discussion is on the calculation of an individual’s online influence. An idea occurred to me this week about memes and the measurement of influence.istock_000004937324xsmall.jpg

As background, Jeremiah Owyang defined a meme as, “an idea or discussion that grows and spreads from individual to individual into a lengthy commentary”.

The whitepaper connects influencers to memes. It begins by recording the opinion of Jeff Jarvis who believes that an influencer is either a meme starter or a meme spreader. The roundtable then adds other types of influencers to the list such as the meme adapter, meme commentator, meme reader, but reaffirms that the first two have the greatest impact (starters and spreaders). The group also references Charlene Li’s technographics that categorizes online consumers into creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.

So here is my question: How should we consider an influencer who actually becomes a part of the meme they are influencing? Should we introduce a new type of influencer called a “meme insider” - an influencer who has somehow crossed over to become part of the actual meme or topic?

My sense is that a meme insider has a two-way connection with the meme itself whereby the influencer acts upon the meme (as a starter, spreader, adapter or commentator) and then the meme, as it grows, acts to increase the individual’s overall influence for the given subject matter.

It then occurred to me that this is easy to measure. It is much like citation analysis but measured within a meme. Consider the concept of a measurement called a share of meme or an Influencer Share of Meme. For now, let’s define it as “the percentage of all media content within a Meme which specifically mentions the influencer”.

So I thought I would test drive the idea for the “distributed influence” meme. I setup a topic profile to analyse the meme in our social media monitoring & analysis system. I then compared each of the roundtable participants and also added a few other influencers who contributed to the meme.

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You can see from the above chart that Jonny Bentwood is not only the meme starter, but he is also a prominent part of the meme itself. His Influencer Share of Meme is 43.6% (48 mentions out of 110 on-topic posts in a 30 day window). This means that when someone talks about distributed influence, they also talk about Jonny Bentwood 43.6% of the time. The remaining Influencer Share of Meme leaders for meme are Peter Kim with 12.7%, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel at 11.8%, David Brain at 10.9%, Max Kalehoff at 7.2%, Keith O’Brien and Henry Copeland at 6.4%, Dr. Walter Carl, Sarah Petersen and Charlene Li at 5.5%, Jim Tobin and Rick Murray 4.5%, Kami Huyse at 3.6%

I am not proposing that this measurement is the primary way to measure influence, but I am thinking that it could be useful as a part of the overall mix. I just throw it out there for discussion.

Another interesting point is that this influencer share of meme is a dynamic value that can also be measured over time.

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For example, the illustration above shows a time series chart comparing the Influencer Share of Meme for David Brain and Jim Tobin over the past 30 days. From January 16 to January 23, David Brain had a 19.3% SoM where Jim Tobin had 0%. But then you can see that Jim Tobin jumps in and grabs a 41.6% SoM from January 31 to Feb. 2 where he and his ideas suddenly became a bigger part of the meme… although the meme momentum itself (the red line) is gradually slowing at the moment.

February 8th, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Social Media | |

5 Responses to ' Influencer Share of Meme '

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  1. David Brain said,

    on February 8th, 2008 at 10:43 am

    I actually think that this is a very practical way of looking at things. A very good contribution. I can certainly see some of my clients being interested in this sort of analysis. Thanks.

  2. Jim Tobin at Ignite Social Media said,

    on February 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    This is very interesting. I had no idea that my Share of Meme was moving quite like that. I’ll have to work on keeping my numbers up. :-)

    I’d also not seen Radian6 used or talked about quite like that. Interesting. Good contribution to the meme by talking about the meme. Clever!

    ~Jim

  3. Jonny Bentwood said,

    on February 13th, 2008 at 10:15 am

    This is a great post. It was always the intention of the White Paper that it should act like a catalyst encouraging other people to move the discussion forward with their ideas.

    You have done an excellent job and have made me consider things in a new way. Fantastic post. Thanks

  4. Media Philosopher » The Social Medium is the Message said,

    on February 27th, 2008 at 10:36 am

    […] regarded communications theorist, scholar/educator and philosopher. The concept of persuasion and influence was of great interest to McLuhan. His most famous publication, Understanding Media: The Extensions […]

  5. Kami Huyse said,

    on February 27th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    I know I am getting to this late, it’s been a heck of a month.

    A great analysis. It is one of the things that I love about the Radian6 tool. I wonder though if it is not inevitable that Jonny Bentwood would lead the meme since he wrote the white paper and would have been cited in all subsequent articles as the originator? In fact, it would be impossible to talk about the meme without talking about the author.

    Does this make him more influential, sure. But it is more interesting to me to see the introduction of new ideas that you show in the second graph.

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