Since Twitter was a start-up it has fostered a strange fascination with numbers: 140 characters, following-to-follower ratios, and a whole ecosystem to measure RTs and @’s from influential people.  Since I’m a communications professional working with social media, I’ve made it my business to try using many of these measurement tools, both for clients and my own (perhaps narcissistic) profiles.  Of course numbers only tell part of the story of interpersonal influence; gross popularity means less than the net of mutual friends who can trust each others’ judgment.

I share this fascination with measurement, especially in understanding interpersonal influence. As a result, my use of Twitter has been synonymous with my professional growth at the beginning of my career, charting my own progress all the while.  On this blog alone I’ve written about Twitter nearly a dozen times; to date search results for “Twitter Internship” bring the most organic visitors to this blog. My use of Twitter is frequently the first thing people learn about me, often before we’ve ever met.

So to celebrate tweet #8888 (88 is sort of a lucky number of mine), I wanted to thank 8 followers on Twitter who have been following me since the beginning (or at least the longest):

• @CourtneyChesley – My first follower, who introduced me to Twitter in September 2007. She’s really creative, smart to boot, and is one of the most generous people I’ve met through social media.
• @GeekDave – Dave’s a blogger I met as another blogger in STL; naturally we have a lot in common. Geeky is the new hip, as far as he’s concerned.
• @Lolololori – Lori is a passionate advocate for the things she loves – music, local culture, and online media – as thusly serves as a role model to all of us.
• @BillStreeter - Bill continues to be an early adopter, probably making him the biggest social media rockstar I know online and IRL.
• @LaurenReid – The better half of my social media relationship status was also the first person I convinced to join Twitter.  Though reluctant adopter at first, Lauren probably has the most social media savvy of anyone I know.
• @BarackObama – What, really? I’m a little skeptical of this, although Twitter insists his account is among the longest of my mutual followers. His own mastery of new media in a campaign inspired a whole generation of my peers, and led me to persue political communication in DC the fall of 2008.
• @Bitca - My long lost friend from a past social media life (on a social network which no longer exists) is an early adopter, occasional geek, and a one woman force-to-be-reckoned-with.
• @CMaue – Chris Maue is my colleague from the class of 2008 at Webster University, creative companion, and eventual inheritor of my Highway 61 (revised) legacy.  He’s never afraid to try innovative tools for himself, and has earned the right to call me out on my own BS.

I think @GBullard probably belongs somewhere in that list, alongside these other early followers who are Honorable mentions: @socialthing, @ioubeer, @NaomiSilverArt, @LisaRokusek, @StephenTColbert, @PubDef, @TwitPic, and @TheRoyale

In addition to qualitative measurement of these long standing social media relationships, I found a few surprising quantitative results:

• I made 1224 tweets before I gained my first 88 followers on May 12, 2008
• I gained my 1000 follower @DrakeTex on March 19th, 2010
• I joined Twitter 931 days ago (September 15, 2007), and like most others on Twitter my audience grew most over the last year.
• #PRcamp is my most frequently used hashtag- 35 times -before, during, and following the event in November 2009.
• I’ve earned at least 533 mutual followers out of the 775 I’m following.  Over 70% of these contact might be considered my friends on any other social network!
• I was retweeted the most during #PRCamp, where I reached a potential audience of 8839 through RTs from 6 other participants.
• At least 16% of my tweets are replies to other users, and another 7% are RTs, which help share good ideas and offer feedback.
• Over 50% of my tweets come from Twitter clients rather than on Twitter.com, as most other users do. This usually means site visits through Twitter links will be difficult to distinguish from organic or direct traffic.

Perhaps its not surprising then that Twitter itself is on of the most frequent subjects I discuss using Twitter, wherein the medium is also the message.  Let’s consider this an ongoing conversation that I invite you to join by following me @MattHurst on Twitter.

It has been said that 8 out of 10 job opportunities come from sources outside of those advertised. So it might be assumed that social networks, especially those centered around professional relationships like LinkedIn, would be ideal tools to find jobs and recruit new talent. Yet in the experiences of many job hunters, including myself, social networks like LinkedIn have yet to live up to this promise.

Social networks are a great tool for HR professionals and other job recruiters, making it easier than ever to search for employees with the right experience and skills.  Besides Facebook and Twitter, social networks such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Brazen Careerist, and Xing have become popular places to post resumes and connect with like minded professionals.  Sometimes these professional networks have been known to generate new business opportunities, but for many job seekers these sites offer no greater a resource to find employment than Monster.com.

Part of the problem lies in how LinkedIn is used differently than other social networks.  Once you’ve finished setting up your profile with your resume and begin to connect with other professionals, there is little else to do on the site. While LinkedIn has 50 million registered accounts, less than half are active at least monthly (according to Quantcast).

Besides expanding your network of connections, LinkedIn confines interaction between its users to those who are already connected. Even with the integration of Twitter into the LinkedIn platform, interactions between members of a network are largely limited to interpersonal discussion.  By comparison to the open/public conversations that make Facebook and Twitter so popular, the end effect is to make discussion seem closed-off or private, further discouraging discovery and interaction between its members.

To be sure these social networks are becoming more popular as professionals look for meaningful ways to network online, or at least in a different (less personal) way than Facebook or Myspace promotes.  According to a Pew report the median age of a LinkedIn user is 39, significantly older than Twitter (31) or Facebook (33).  Perhaps this better explains why these communities interact differently; LinkedIn users might feel they are finished using the network once they’ve set up a profile, rather than integrating social media as part their everyday lives.

In my own job search, LinkedIn could be playing a pivotal role, although so far its just a supporting piece of the puzzle.  To be sure I’ve written recommendations for colleagues, networked in groups like #PRStudChat, and reached out through mutual connections, all of which have expanded my network.  So far LinkedIn has yet to land me any meaningful job opportunities, at least compared to board-based services like Mediabistro and Craigslist.  Until LinkedIn can leverage of their social network to create opportunities, especially for individual users, its potential will continue to yield diminishing returns on investment for organizations.

Full disclosure: I’ve been addicted to Twitter since I started using it in September of 2007. Since then I have witnessed its explosive growth as a daily user of this social network, growing from thousands of daily users to millions now.  These attacks are evidence of Twitter’s importance, and like Facebook before it this social network is gorwn large enough to be experiencing a backlash.

Unlike many social networks before it, Twitter has become an agenda-setting media.  This might seem obvious because broadcast and print newsmedia about Twitter have been nonstop, frequently breaking news stories or framing an issue through its social media context. As a social network (although many of its users of Twitter do not think of it as such) Twitter facilitates interpersonal communication in which opinion leaders, or at least some with a large number of followers, introduce new ideas to their network which help set the public’s agenda.

Because Twitter serves an audience that is constantly engaged in the discussion of new ideas, frequently accompanied by hyperlinks, Twitter has succeeded at become agenda setting media like none before it.  To be sure Facebook, itself a much larger social network, only recently overtook email as the primary means for most individuals share news stories and links to websites.  But rarely have these social media, including social bookmarking websites like Digg and Delicious, taken part in constructing the news agenda with the wider public much less offline as Twitter does.

The explosive growth of Twitter is not necessarily because of any special function the site offers (there have been other microblogs before) but because of it’s core of users, who themselves have set the tone of what Twitter should be used for.  This isn’t to say there is a right way or wrong way to use media, just that some practices seem to work better. The critical difference in using a social medium comes from those who are using it; in this case the core users who serve as a social model are opinion leaders in diverse subjects such as communications, celebrities, and politics.  And it’s easy to see the appeal; opinion leaders are provided a platform to introduce ideas about culture (and even about themselves), while the accessibility of the platform allows individuals to interact within their network of connections which make even celebrities (who continue to lead the way onto Twitter) seem approachable by any fan.

Perhaps this model of influence offers a clue to one recent trend on Twitter, in which power-users remove all of the users they follow in order to reconstruct a list which better reflects a tightly-knit social network.  While some organizations scramble to create a list of followers on Twitter which seems to be the largest, these users illustrate the power of influence over a small agenda-setting audience they want to stay tuned into.  Because in social media influence is not measured as the number of followers who might read the monolougue you’re broadcasting to them, but by the relationship between individuals which is built through a dialog.

Never before has there been such a media tool to listen to the audience’s ideas, and to engage them in conversations about them.  The backlash may have been inevitable, but it has almost always come from those unwilling to participate in a dialog; it would seem from what I’m hearing that Twitter is here to stay.

In the past the music industry has relied on taste makers such as DJs, critics, and marketers to help introduce new music to would be record buyers (or downloaders).  However over the last decade Opinion Leaders, those most influential individuals in your social network, have played the most important role; think of these people as your friend who is usually the first to introduce you to a band that you go on to love.

Online these opinion leaders have started popular music blogs, their influence measured by their expertise within genres and their appeal within their blogging audience.  Offline these taste-makers usually have the largest music collection among your friends, and they make frequent recommendations that are just for you.  Opinion leaders are the arbiters of new music in a marketplace no longer limited by the label-centered distribution, serving agenda setting roles with their personalized recommendations that mirrors the shift from mass-media driven popular music (radio, Rolling Stone, MTV) to online distribution meant for niche fans and private listening (iPods and YouTube).

As our experience with music increasingly takes place in social media, the relationship between opinion leaders and their social networks shifts significantly.  While I’m still taking recommendations from my friends, chances are you’ve tried using a peer-recommendation website of your own, such as Last.fm or Pandora.  The former, Last.fm is a service I’ve been using for over 4 years (then known as Audioscrobbler), has tracked over 20000 songs played on my computer and iPod.  In return for music listening data CBS (who owns this social network) can use, I get personalized recommendations from my friends and musical “neighbors” along with occasional suggestions from Last.fm .  This hybrid of the opinion leader model with the narrowcast of media distribution is actually quite seamless, if not organic at the consumer level.

On the other hand is the model of Pandora, the popular free* streaming music service which uses analytics and social ranking to make its music recommendations.  Pandora remains extremely popular service**, although I should admit that I am relatively new to the experience of tuning into user created “stations”, in which individuals do not control playlists but can configure them through a thumbs up/down rating system.  Many consumers rave of the recommendations this analytic system can provide, and I must admit I have been turned on to some music that was outside my sphere of influence otherwise.  However Pandora doesn’t always provide the high quality recommendations one might expect from an opinion leader; although the site offers the ability to skip songs you don’t like, it must limit the number skipped tunes before it forces one to listen through the entire song.

Opinion leaders play the most significant role in sharing music outside these two social networks, where music sharing is changing as quickly as the rest of social media.  Leading the charge are sites like Blip.fm and 8tracks that allow these Opinion Leaders become would be DJs for their friends, publishing playlists and sharing individual tracks with friends on Twitter and other social networks. Meanwhile Myspace remains a significant place for new bands to break their music to a wide audience, albiet Opinion Leaders sharing music through their own profile page cater to a much smaller social network than earlier.

This list of music sharing services  is hardly definitive, since music tastes are as diverse as the communities of fans who listen to them.  Although it’s hard to predict exactly how people will listen to music or using what online services, it is clear that Opinion Leaders will continue to play their significant role in influencing their network of friends.

Says Matthew, “ I’m probably one of those people who panic when their smartphones sits battery, because without a mobile GPS, I can and the city lost.”  Morning of Matthew begins with checking e-mail.  Light lunch – and Mr. Hurst had to stop in anticipation of the bus.  Make sure that the site of public transport District of Columbia has no information about the delay of its route, he can afford to read the latest press.

Earlier this year I wrote about promoting my favorite non-profit cause, People To People, who also posted an interview with me. In addition to discussing my work with them in fundraising, we discussed the impact my years traveling as a student ambassador has had on me intellectually and personally. You can read the whole transcript on their Facebook fan page, where you can learn more about their work to create peace through understanding.

Thanks again to my esteemed colleague Gabe Bullard for the personal recommendation on his blog, which features his expert insight into media and culture that serve as a source of inspiration for this blogger.   I’m also looking forward to sharing interviews from my alma mater (Webster University) and the video we shot for People To People, which I’ll be happy to share here once they are both published.