On July 31 2010, Twitter passed the number of 20 billion tweets sent since the service was created in 2006. This is quite remarkable, considering that the threshold of 10 billion tweets had only been reached 5 months before, in March 2010. Currently, Twitter states that there are about 750 tweets sent per second and 65 million sent per day. From these figures it is easy to see that Twitter is even more quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with than we anticipated in our podcast on the business uses of Twitter.

Among the uses we identified was employing Twitter in PR and product announcements. The goal must be to get your message across to as many people as possible. So, having many followers is good, having many more followers is even better, meaning the more followers your Twitter-Account has, the more return on your announcements you will see. But this is only half of the truth. Even more important is the question whether your followers re-tweet, i.e. redistribute, your tweets – and in doing so spread your announcement further and attract new followers to your account. This is exactly what HP Labs Research tried to analyse in a recent study called “Influence and Passivity in Social Media”.

HP-Researchers determined that the average Twitter-user only re-tweets one out of 318 tweets he receives. However, this average does not tell the whole story, because the vast majority of users almost never redistribute messages, while a select few are very active in doing so. Now, seeing that in order to make your tweets as widespread as possible it is important to get your followers to re-tweet them, you could just measure the total amount of re-tweets you get. But if you consider the difference in activity across users, as mentioned before, such a total would be biased depending on which users follow you and their general likeliness to re-tweet messages they receive. HP’s study tries to amend this by introducing their IP-algorithm, a way to assign relative influence and passivity scores to every user. In this model, influence depends on the quantity and quality of the audience a user influences, and passivity is a measure of how difficult it is for other users to influence him. In short, HP-Researchers try to determine the degree to which a Twitter-user can get his followers to re-tweet his tweets and visit the URLs he links in those tweets – given that most users are passive by nature and not easily motivated to re-distribute or visit URLs they receive in the first place. In that sense, the attention a user gets from normally passive followers is even more valuable than that of generally active ones.

After analysing 22 million tweets with this method, HP Labs Research determined that the Twitter-account “Mashable” is the most influential one. This, as you probably know, is the account of Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of Mashable.com, currently rated second on Technorati.com’s Top 100 blogs worldwide. Pete founded his blog in 2005 at the age of 19 and has since risen to “must-read-status” on all topics concerning technology and social media in particular.

What is his secret then? It is very good content. In a world of social communications, wisdom of the crowd and the long tail it is not enough to simply have good content. Aside from being interesting to readers, very good content not only sparks the interest of people but is also wrapped in a form that stimulates reflection and comments on the topic – and motivates readers to tell their friends about it. As a business user, you need to keep this in mind. It is not enough to send out PR and marketing material clearly identifiable as such. Instead, you need to try to talk to your customers on a personal level, engage them in an open conversation. In so doing, you will not only develop a favourable reputation with customers but will achieve referrals, too, bringing your customer’s contacts and their contacts’ contacts into the conversation. Making the information you distribute viral, as the term goes. Aside from referrals, reputation gains and ultimately ROI, there is another use in engaging your customers (and your partners and employees, for that matter): In the true spirit of crowd sourcing, it could very well be that you will be able to gain additional insight into the mind of your stakeholders, harness their knowledge and experience and ultimately develop better services and products for your customers – all based on talking to them as equals.

This guest post on TechCrunch  by Eric Clemons I found really thought-provoking. It is quite a long and detailed argument, pointing out step-by-step not only why advertising is failing on the Internet at present, but why it is bound to fail in the longer run. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll just give a summary in case you’re in a hurry.

Clemons says that advertising revenues are falling in the mainstream media because people don’t really trust advertising and don’t particularly want it. For example, broadcast networks put on their advertising the same time so that viewers can’t switch channels to avoid it. Even AdWords, Google’s big revenue source, depends on misdirection, or at least the threat of it. And location-based advertising, pushing messages that you are very likely to want because of where you are, the content of your recent e-mails, where your friends go etc, he thinks will also fail because of the trust issue.

It could be argued that the decline in advertising revenues in conventional media is a natural response to the increasing diversity of information sources, and that Clemons is overstating the user’s role in it, but I think there would be a smokescreen. The real point is that users have more of a choice of ways to find out more about any service or product for themselves, which weakens the persuasiveness of advertising content hugely.

To give my own take on Clemons’s argument, the fact is that advertising clearly works best where information is restricted. Where information is free, easily available, and easy to select and compare, users can easily select between information they trust and information that they don’t. A recommendation by friends or from clearly neutral sources has an inherently higher value. So, as social platforms are more and more popular, their role in disseminating information becomes increasingly important.

We’re certainly not the only people saying that the key is to be authentic, and offer users the information they want when they want it. But Clemons’s critique of the paid advertising model makes the most cogent case for this that I have seen to date. To put it in a nutshell, there are two clear consequences, one for marketing, one for PR. In marketing, the point is to engage the prospect more directly, openly and personally, using the best tools and content you can. In PR, same thing, different target, i.e. the blogger, commentator or analyst rather than the prospect. That’s got to be good for the market, the vendor and the customer.