HP study suggests that Twitter is more of an amplifier and filter than an alternative source of news.
You may recall that in May last year we had a look at who has more influence over the future of the web: Old or new media?. In that post we examined the map of Twitter’s Top 140 Influencers created by Information Architects and discovered that the old media (e.g. CNN and the New York Times) picked up on the breaking technology well before the high-profile tech blogs (e.g. Techcrunch, Wired, Mashable and Read Write Web).
Anyway HP have released white paper that has records the results of comprehensive study of Twitter activity.
The study reflects much of what we have discovered here on excapite through our ad-hoc experiments with Twitter (Think: So what’s the economic value of a follower on twitter?). The conclusions of the HP study being …
“When we considered the impact of the users of the network, we discovered that the number of followers and tweet-rate of users are not the attributes that cause trends. What proves to be more important in determining trends is the retweets by other users, which is more related to the content that is being shared than the attributes of the users. Furthermore, we found that the content that trended was largely news from traditional media sources, which are then amplified by repeated retweets on Twitter to generate trends… This illustrates that social media, far from being an alternate source of news, functions more as a filter and an amplifier for interesting news from traditional media.”
These finding confirm my suspicions that although So.Me may be a lead indicator of specialist and localised issues (i.e. micro and nano media) it is a lag indicator of regional, national and global issues (i.e. Mass Media). The also suggest the most appropriate metric for measuring So.Me influence is the ability to start and sustain conversations… now why doesn’t that surprise me?
