Quantifications or Qualifications on the Top Analyst Twitter List.

I’m honored to share that I made another list — this time, the most influential twitter analysts.  I’m currently ranked #10 in the list of 500.  I know that these are short-lived little bursts of fame.  In a week someone will run a new calculation and perhaps I’ll be somewhere else on the list.  So I’m honored, but I don’t let this stuff get to my head.  I’m just a guy who blogs and tweets.  One more voice in the very noisy Internet.  But it comes with a nice badge I can put on my blog to make my parents proud of me.  You know that it’s all about — making your parents proud.

But since I have your attention, I want to point to the very good thinking on the part of the Jonny Bentwood – the creator of this list.  Simplistic thinking would have you say that the way to measure twitter users is to measure the number of followers.  But Jonny took the analysis much further and included many other indicators that measure influence, trust, engagement, and popularity.  Measurements of this kind are very difficult to do — as you can play with the numbers in so many ways to craft many different stories.  What does it mean?

To me, I look for the obvious stuff:  Jeremiah Owyang is at the top.  This makes total sense to me.  I had the pleasure of working with him at Forrester last year.  He is really an amazingly smart and hard working person.  He is also a model of someone who practices what he preaches and presents himself as authentically as one can in the public arena.

I don’t know about the ordering of the next 10, but when I look at the top 50 — these also make sense to me .  I’m not sure about the individual positions — but that’s a detail.  The top 50 are analysts who leverage Twitter very effectively to engage with their communities.  As you go down the list from there — it gets much harder for me to measure.  Some analysts have a very focused area of coverage, or cover areas where their community is simply not on Twitter — so their lower number is not a measure of their value as an analyst, but perhaps just a measure of something measurable (but not as meaningful).

Another observation — Gartner, Forrester, and Cutter’s feed rank very high, whereas IDC, EMA, YankeeGroup, Burton (acquired by Gartner), Frost and Sullivan’s feeds rank much lower.  Again, this is not a measure of the quality of the firm, but of their effective use of Twitter.  What does that mean?  I’m not sure.  I remember getting lots of push-back from some management at Forrester that analysts should focus on paying customers, not Twitter-friends.  I don’t mean this as a critique, but this is an active question on the part of many companies.  Many managers there (and I project this is true elsewhere) don’t see the point of Twitter.  But clearly many do too.  I do think that these could have been put in a different list — since a corporate twitter feed and an individual’s twitter feed are very different things.

Then there are some odd numbers:  George Colony, the CEO of Forrester is a man I trust.  Yes, he laid me off last year, and I cannot say I’m happy about that whole event.  But I don’t distrust him as an analyst.  He’s actually an incredible person.  But his twitter feed is ranked with a low trust score.  That’s an unfortunate measure.  Other analysts I know and trust also have low trust scores too — a feature of the algorithm used (and how they use Twitter). But not really a measure of their trustworthiness.  And hey — #334 – ForresterJobs is not really an Analyst for the purposes of ranking — so that’s not fair either.  And there are a couple of folks on this list who are no longer analysts — they should be ranked either.

So the “obvious” result for me is that quantitative analysis is fun, but not always as meaningful as qualitative analysis.  Much like any ranking system, they are nice ways to naval-gaze and honor those who really set the bar high.  But you need to follow the voices that are most relevant to you, and read everything any analyst writes with a critical eye.

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Tagged as: analysts, expert, Forrester, Twitter