I'm 29th! Yay! I'm waiting by the letterbox for my certificate

The best part of this news is not that I was ranked 29th most influential person on the Federal election (that is as ephemeral a position — and comes with all the prestige and cachet — of being in the third car at the traffic lights).

The best news is that Alister didn’t do the number-crunching himself, he used Pulse of the Tweeters, a service built by a couple of US academics, which you and I and anyone else can use to determine the people on Twitter with the most influence on any topic which Twitter determines is ‘trending’ — being used by enough people to be considered an issue of the day.

More on the people who built Pulse of the Tweeters here but sadly not very much specific detail about how influence is determined, just some general outline about what’s important when determining influence on social networks.

Most services designed to measure influence on social networks generally have a small amount of information available for free about individual users, but rarely publish a list of users in a ranked table, preferring to save that for paying customers.

For instance, Klout shows an almost unintelligible dashboard of my influence score in detail (ooh, look, I’m a “Thought Leader”) but if I want to measure myself against other people, or find a list of the most influential people on a particular topic, I’ve got to pay and/or start finding a developer to connect to their API.

Never mind the data, look at the pretty colours

Unless you’re a Nestlé or Nike there’s little value in tracking your Twitter influence. That’s not to say is some value in being an influential Twitter user — in the past twelve months I’ve gained some valuable business leads, met fascinating new friends and been sent some wine, beer and books to review. Some of my friends have even received swish new HTC smartphones.

But for most of us, Twitter is not (and should not) be business. Our Twitter stream is some new mix of personal and professional, something we’d generate anyway in other media if Twitter didn’t exist. As I say on my own Twitter profile page, we should all try to tweet like nobody’s following. The real you is the best brand you have.

In that case, the best way to turn up on a Top 100 Influential Twitter Users list is accidentally, as a byproduct of your true passions. And the best way to leave it again is to continue expressing those true passions.

Surgeon-General’s Warning: I hadn’t taken my brevity medication before the interview so you may find I rattle on for quite some time.

You know what’s great about this podcast episode? It’s only episode four of a brand-new podcast. It was recorded on a portable digital recorder, in my car, and the total post-production probably took Owen only an hour, from importing, editing and through to hosting on Soundcloud.

Despite the market-dominating power of iTunes and News Corporation and Facebook, more unique new content is being published every year by the people who would have been considered “the audience” twenty years ago.

Check out Owen’s E-Marketing Insights podcast, it’s early days yet but shows great promise, and that’s the best kind of content there is.

Sometimes my clients are uncomfortable with speaking or writing about topics in which they have no formal qualifications. It comes up when I’m trying to encourage them to blog or to present an opinion at an industry event. “But I’m not an expert,” they’ll cry, “I’m a businessperson, not a journalist!” That’s not a valid reason. Journalists aren’t experts — they are bound by their editorial standards to quote expert sources rather than write their own opinions precisely because they aren’t experts — but then they write editorials which are 100% opinion and these days, increasingly blend their own opinion with their news stories. Researchers and academics are in the business of having an opinion based on research but where the data is unclear, they are supposed to remain quiet… few do. Politicians, salesmen, bureaucrats and your mates down the pub are fine with giving their opinion and yet nobody requires them to be experts. I trust your opinion far more than any politician or bureaucrat, so let’s hear it!

In this talk, Miles and I have a straightforward case to make: placebos are as effective as most other medicines and you should be able to be prescribed a placebo if it is as (or more) likely to make you better. Many in the medical profession have an ethical problem with that idea, so we propose a draft ‘placebo consent form’ that you can sign and leave with your medical practitioner.

The event, Interesting South, limits speakers to eight minutes or less, and we had a lot of ground to cover in that time, so the resulting presentation is, well, perky!

Big thanks to Ian Lyons for taping our talk.  After you’ve watched the video, consider the following points for presenters:

• It’s OK to present on a topic in which you have no formal qualifications, but it’s important to be humble — don’t pretend to be an expert if you’re not. Disclose your amateur status upfront before you show what you’ve learned.
• Pace and pitch are as important in an eight minute talk as they are in a sixty minute talk. A dry topic can be made less-so if you’re able to vary the pace and pitch of your delivery.
• Sharing the presentation burden between us helped us with pace, variation and tone. We did a little too much turning to each other because the cinema stage wasn’t very deep, meaning eye contact was a full 90 degrees away from the audience. We could improve by making sure we both stood still, just turning our upper bodies to introduce the next slide.
• We were very freaked out by the loud woman’s voice whispering our names at the very beginning, then more than a little distracted by the partial failure of the presentation clicker (damn those Apple IR remotes!) but you’ll see that we made a joke of it and kept on with the show. Even when you’re dropping juggling balls and the top hat resolutely fails to disgorge a bunny, you can retain most of your audience by keeping on with the show. Afterwards, many audience members won’t even recall there was a problem.
• Eight minutes makes it difficult (if not impossible) to follow my preferred Rogen technique of introducing the major points, delivering the major points and summarising the major points at the end. Instead, we opted to give you all the resources online at the end so if you’re interested in further detail you can find it. Note we’ve used Tinyurl to make the URLs shorter and moderately memorable.
• We didn’t try to cram ten minutes of presentation into the eight minutes allotted to us. Instead we were ruthless in cutting it to considerably less than eight minutes so we knew from the outset we’d have all the time we’d need. The only thing worse than a slow, tedious presentation is a rushed presentation.
• All that ruthless cutting forced us to rehearse our presentation several times, over the space of two weeks, until we had it down to length. Nothing makes a presentation better than repeated rehearsal. I’m usually terrible at rehearsing in advance, and this presentation reminded me I need to be more disciplined and do my rehearsal homework.

The presentation and the links to the resource material are all here:

…as quoted in “Turn on, tune in, and drop off” (Kate Hennessy, Nett Magazine, July ’09)

Nett Magazine workshop article on site usability for small/medium businesses.

Here’s a few examples of what I mean: