To discover  how popularity and influence correlate, the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard’s research arm analysed 2 million messages on Twitter.

While measuring popularity proved straightforward: it’s simply a case of looking at the numbers of people signed up to follow a specific person’s or organisation’s messages, determining influence was more tricky.

To measure influence, the researchers hypothesised that users of Twitter are the more influential the more they manage to get their followers to pass on messages. Surprisingly, the results showed that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than one might expect.

If you want to know who has the most influence in the digital world, you can
read the full article on the Economist Blog >

Melitta