The Egypt project is about gathering journalists in a virtual newsroom to report on  one specific theme, they would build on each other reports. The theme is  the upcoming parliamentary and Shura (Upper House) elections in Egypt, Meedan is building this newsroom, AMAY is publishing it and the professional journalists are their web and social media department staff, citizen journalists are recruited by a local partner and both citizens and professional journalists are to be receiving training workshops on a variety of topics that help them develop their reports.

Interactive Cultures is developing a curriculum for these trainings; so the citizens would learn more about how to make their media production appealing to the mainstream media, and journalists will get closer to the social media sphere, what does it mean that media is becoming social and all of them would learn how to verify the citizen reports.

Nevertheless, under the leadership of Prof. Tim Wall, I am monitoring the project and evaluating it .
The  project is going to benefit  both types of reporters  are benefiting, a  traditional way of improving popular journalism is conducting direct training to people on how to use social networks and make media reports, what should not be the case a country that already has a very active citizen journalists, proved by the vibrant networks formed organically by people during and after the revolution to cover the protest news across the most populated country ( 85 million) in the Arab region.

In other words, quality citizen reports are needed for all societies, but where the good citizen journalism practices are, the priority is to get these reports out of the social networks and make them available for people who do not use the internet. This is the gap the project is expected to cover; to optimize the audience (consumers) rather than the reporters (producers).

Now, I am  again booking a new return ticket to Cairo, to attend  the international conference of The Faculty of Mass Communication in Cairo University, in collaboration with the University of Westminster  and UNESCO, I’ll  present a paper about the interaction between social and traditional media, in which, the Egypt project is strongly present.

In the same month, two peoples of the Middle East took to streets, trying to overthrow dictators who had been ruling them or more than 25 years. Cairo and Tunis share the same problems of poverty, unemployment and continuous price hikes. And both of them were counted among the ten worst countries to be a blogger, and also they were listed as enemies of the internet.

If you gave three sheets of paper to three persons, everyone will use it differently, a child would make a toy out of it, an artist should draw something, a poet may write a verse on it…etc, as everyone is using what he or she gets according to what he needs.

In the Middle East, common people are not allowed to communicate freely, because of political oppression, social conservatism or both. Now, a new type of media has enabled them to voice their opinions with the option of staying anonymous, allowing them to be heard. The story started with a citizen journalism covering the few protests taking place initially and developed with social networks aiding mobilization of offline actions on the streets.

The first wave of popular protests in the Arab world was in Cairo late 2004, as some intellectuals gathered and started to chant ‘Enough!’ calling President Hosni Mubarak to step down. This was the first time a chant against the president was heard; people were orally circulating the story. In 2005, the scene was repeated, this time some people managed to take pictures, and others wrote down the chants, sharing them with friends. This encouraged more people to participate, and the protests were getting bigger offline and online. Egyptians number over 58 millions and internet penetration is 21.2% with hardware and access relatively cheap (20 cent/hour).

Social media take-up and protest was driven by young, middle class and educated people producing social media content,  the rest is consuming it, until 3G mobile phones found their way to the country and aided wider democratic participation.  In Egypt, you rarely meet someone does not own a mobile phone, despite poverty (55% of what?), so many Egyptians have more than one set and usually prefer the phones with an embedded camera. With such penetration, we have a tool in the hand of almost everyone hat allows the documentation of Egyptian life, from the election forgery to the belly dancing! This online activity and sociability helped to provoke discussion of critical causes such as torture.
See how many mobiles are recording

A turning point in recent developments was 6th April 2008. This date marks the first general strike in the history of Egypt, an event started by a group on Facebook asking people to stay at home. Though its success is still debatable, it was disturbing enough to the regime to get more brutal with citizens, arresting the two admins of the Facebook group and torturing one of them. Yet, Facebook was not blocked, Egypt is the type of internet enemy who tend not to block a websites, but to block its editors; it means to arrest them illegally!

Though, you clearly find smart use of social network during the ongoing protests, Twitter as an example; had the hashtage #Jan25 trending worldwide, as protestors are sending instant updates, activists are tweeting the numbers of arrests and injuries and lawyers who volunteered to offer legal support, have their own lists to connect them throughout the country.

Over the past ten days, Hosni Mubarak regime was using internet and mobile cut to punish protestors, and stop the word spread, between 28th January to 2nd of February both internet and mobile services were blocked, though so many discussions on Egypt appeared in social networks, on Twitter, the tweets on protestors were abundant enough to trend the country name world wide, in English, French, Spanish and Italian! After all headed of mainstream media were turned to the massive protests, social media was used by citizens worldwide to show solidarity with Egyptians, every night new tweets, blog posts, vlogs and mash-up videos uploaded to show support to Egypt uprising.

Now, as a social media student,  the question I wish to get it answered is how the protestors in Tahrir square in Cairo were communicating over the time of their strike; how hundreds of thousands (2 millions in Aljazeer English estimation) were making their decisions and spread it among each others without having a mobile service or being online? I believe they have been using sorts of social non-digital media, something I will get it cleared from my friends who are in the protest now, but the violence and killings by plain clothes  give them no opportunity to tell their media experience in the uprising.

Jez Collins, the originator of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive chaired a panel consisting of: Dr Marion Leonard, who was the curator of Liverpool’s The Beat Goes On, and who oversees on ongoing project to examine how museums collect and preserve (or not) popular music; Alison Surtees of the Manchester District Music Archive; Eve Wood, the director of the documentary Made in Sheffield (2001) and Mike Darby of Bristol Archive Records.

Speakers offered insights into each of their projects, revealing the variety of practices in this field, the public appetite for music heritage and the innovations and connections that curation has been making. Surtees for instance outlined how the online MDMA had generated input from around 2000 individuals, half of which regularly posted material on the site. Some of these were members of the bands featured and indeed, these explorations of music past also connected with the present scene in ways that avoided the potential necrophilia of such work.

The dynamic aspects of each of these projects was evident in the way in which they plugged into and galvanised cultural memory and generated positive responses from users and contributors. Each of course was located very firmly in the character of its respective location and had a part to play in civic and community identity. Many of the core activists worked on the archives as a labour of love (there was very little financial support available here) and a belief that music and its attendant cultures and meanings transcends the demands of the industries alone. This was an important point as one of the potential problems of work in this field is presented by copyright issues, not only around recordings but the attendant artefacts – album covers, posters, photographs etc. For many projects, the involvement of so many ‘forgotten’ bands and their good will means that these challenges can be overcome. Indeed, it is interesting to note that while one would expect such projects to feature more well-known (and potentially litigious) bands, public interest has tended to focus on some genuine retrieval work in digging up lost names, venues and events.

As a filmmaker, Eve Wood had some interesting points to make however about the cost involved in repurposing archive footage in her work. This was particularly striking with regards to the BBC and she quoted a standard rate of £3000 per minute for the use of footage (and that is exclusive of any further rights complications that may arise).

In addition, Wood also outlined some of the problems filmmaker-historians have with commissioning bodies. This related to the way in which there was an expectation that narratives should revolve around famous names and faces, although it was often the case that in pursuit of interesting stories, obscure yet interesting material would demand attention and explanation. Notwithstanding the paucity of funds available for the archiving projects, Wood’s experience also raised questions around the other kinds of pressures impacting upon these projects. Where they seek alliances with city agents and established museums and so on, there were potential demands on the nature of the stories one could tell.
All of these points of course highlighted the ways in which any kind of historical work is always inflected by a politics of practice -whether between contributors and users (why is X and not Y covered), or even by greater institutional powers.

Certainly, the growth of heritage projects around popular music is part of a challenge to the more formal and conservative ways in which archives and museums are perceived to have pursued their agendas (although I think this was a little over stated at this event). While the projects discussed on this panel have sought to expand the domain of the archive, where they have also proven to be innovative is in their participatory nature and use of online sites. In this, and given their ad hoc, enthusiast-driven origins, they have something important to impart to established institutions.

Overall, there was much to take away here for further discussion and thought.
The Bristol project for instance offered an intriguing model for collecting and making available its artefacts and of course, Leonard’s academic research activities were of great interest to me.

This handful of projects is indicative of a much more widespread international practice that has a relationship with the music and leisure industries but also operates independently of them (sometimes at odds with them), demonstrating the value of what Interactive Cultures researchers label music as culture. In light of the loss of so much material in the archives of the music business, the activities of the enthusiast, and fan, in informal (sometimes semi-legal ways online in file-sharing sites), performs an important job and indeed does much to underline the importance of popular music to communities to us.

A fuller version of this report can be found on Paul Long’s blog Media, Culture, History.

First up is The Treehouse. The Treehouse is the name we’ve given to the shared office of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research on the 4th Floor of Baker Building at Birmingham City University.

This website reflects the casual, fun, collegiate and collaborative aspects of the working environment.

I’d also like to introduce you to Popular Music History – So What? which is my posterous blog and serves as a PhD research scrapbook.

It features some of the interviews I conducted around the end of 2008 with academics, curators, authors and media producers which were intended for a radio documentary about the political economy of popular music history activity. This endeavour (which I pursed outside my day job)  was promoted by my involvement as a volunteer with Home of Metal. This was a little while before the centre’s first studentship had been announced. Working through these ideas meant that when the position was advertised I was in a great place to write a proposal.

Dave Harte, leader of our MA in Social Media talks to new international student Noha Atef, who runs the website Torture In Egypt.

I was asked to talk about music fanzines at the Birmingham Zine Festival. This informal presentation relates my experiences of music fanzines around the end of the 1980s.

The Ins and Outs of Music Fanzines by Interactive Cultures

Social capital also crops up a lot in conversations about social policy, and in this sense it flows from the ideas of James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (2000, 2003). Putnam is most commonly associated with a model for measuring social capital that equates membership of clubs and societies to the stock of social capital within a community. His work is positioned as a treatise to social policy makers calling for a renewal in civic society:

“As the twentieth century ended, Americans gradually began to recognize that the sprawling pattern of metropolitan settlement that we had built for ourselves in the preceding five decades imposes heavy personal and economic costs […] So I challenge America’s urban and regional planners, developers and home buyers: Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less time travelling and more time connecting with our neighbors than we do today, that we will live in more integrated and pedestrian-friendly areas, and that the design of our communities and the availability of public space will encourage more casual socialization with friends and neighbors.” (Putnam, 2000, pp.407-8)

It has been pointed out (Fine, 2001) that Putnam and Coleman loom large over academic literature of social capital, and many academic authors build theoretical frameworks around their ideas. So, as academics start to examine social media they are likely to think about social capital, and they are likely to read Putnam’s (2000) Bowling Alone. But Bowling Alone doesn’t talk about social capital in quite the same way that “the Internet” talks about it.

For some studies, Putnam’s work, and the work which follows it, can be incredibly useful. If your questions want to measure networks, and bonding structures then follow the citation trails from Putnam that lead you forward to Burt (2009) and back to Granovetter (1973). But if you’re looking to write about online culture, this framework is limited. You need Bourdieu.

Bourdieu defined social capital as the:

“aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu, 1986, p.248)

Bourdieu’s model of social capital is quite loose and theoretical, and all the more useful for it when attempting to understand social media culture. There are no equations here, as with Putnam, simply an acknowledgement that social capability can confer power upon individuals and groups. To my mind, that is the key issue at the basis of much that is interesting about social media.

At IAMCR 2010 I presented a paper called Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism. The paper explored a crowdsourced investigation, seeking to understand how people worked collectively to affect a positive outcome for the group. A member of the team behind the project told me they were:

“Very happy [with the outcomes of the investigation], but also wondering how easily you can recreate that. It tapped into the right community at the right time… and unearthed a big story.”

For me this is social capital, after Bourdieu, reified: a potential resource existed within a pre-existing community, and it was activated by a set of social media practices, delivering benefit to its collective owners. Without the social capital, the clever social media tools would be useless.

I’m not seeking here to critique those who use other approaches to social capital: they are valid ideas for important questions. What I hope to point out is that “social capital” is a term with different meanings; when we talk about “social capital” we need to be quite clear about what we mean. Also I want to highlight that by going back to Bourdieu, we can reclaim the idea to think through some interesting questions that describe social media as culture, rather than as a network.

This is an expansion of a point made in my paper, presented to the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research – the full paper is on my personal blog. I have also written an extended literature review on the topic of social capital which I would be happy to share.

Bibliography

BOURDIEU, P. 1986. The Forms of Capital. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

BURT, R. S. 2009. Network Duality of Social Capital. In: BARTKUS, V. O. & DAVIS, J. H. (eds.) Social Capital: Reaching Out, Reaching In. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

COLEMAN, J. S. 1988. Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95 – S120.

DOCTOROW, C. 2003. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, New York, Tor Books.

FINE, B. 2001. Social Capital versus Social Theory, London, Routledge.

GRANOVETTER, M. S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360.

PUTNAM, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone, New York, NY, USA, Simon & Schuster.

PUTNAM, R. D., FELDSTEIN, L. M. & COHEN, D. 2003. Better Together: restoring the American community, New York, NY, USA, Simon & Schuster.

Last week, I spoke here about attempts towards a formula for measuring social media engagement about a music artist on Twitter. That was one of the conversations I had with New Music Labs founder Ard Boer, whose Tribemonitor service tracks social media and online metrics for artists and labels.

I’ve been working on a small, IDEA-funded Knowledge Transfer project with New Music Labs to help think through new ideas and approaches for Tribemonitor.

Ard and I spoke at length about the idea of innovative strategies for independent artists in the social media space. At present, a default approach appears to be to do whatever it takes to get followed and increase your audience size.

Artists will encourage their fans to ‘Add me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, Sign up to my email list, Friend me on MySpace, Subscribe to my RSS feed, Go to my blog…’ and so on. The idea behind this strategy is that the artist can then continue to develop their fanbase as a discrete number of people, and communicate with them (broadcast to them) on a regular basis.

However, a reflective discussion with Ard about the realities and psychology at work within the social media space suggest that an alternative strategy can be identified. It’s one that has a potential to use the medium more effectively, and around which an innovative business development can be formed.

And that’s to turn the process inside out.

Following your fans
The degree of success to which an individual or organisation uses social media is not proportionate to the number of people to whom they manage to broadcast. As we touched upon in the social media algorithm experiment, it’s important to consider the degree of engagement, and the ‘interestingness’ of the artist – not simply the broadcast-era formula of ‘reach and frequency’ by which advertising success is measured.

As a result, a two-way, reflective and responsive approach is needed. Collecting people who will sign up to your mailing list, or add your Twitter feed to their ever-expanding stream of social media noise is not sufficient. It’s important to listen more than it is to talk.

As a result of these discussions, we proposed a hypothetical ‘inside out’ artist signup page. When you discover an artist and decide that you like their music, you go to a page where you add your own social media information.

My Twitter name:
My Facebook page:
My MySpace:
My Flickr account:
My YouTube:

and so on.

By volunteering this information, it’s possible for the artist to learn what is of interest, and how to connect directly with the fan.

Of course, with any significant numbers of fans, the role of the entrepreneurial innovator is to aggregate the information and provide meaningful data to the artist or label. For instance:

“A lot of your fans are also interested in motorsports. I know that you’re interested in motorsports. Perhaps this is a topic you could talk about on your own Twitter profile or engage with to strengthen the fan connection…”

“These fans took photos at Glastonbury festival last year. You’re playing at Glastonbury this year. Why not comment on their Flickr stream and ask if they’re coming to see you this time around?”

“This fan has been raving about your music on Facebook to their 500 friends. You should leave them a comment or send them a free track…”

And so on. The opportunity to do textual and content analysis to spot trends and identify shared areas of interest amongst your fans is only possible if you consider the social media environment as a conversational space, rather than as a broadcast medium.

This is not to say that building an ever-larger fanbase is not a helpful strategy for independent music promotion – but that thinking of that only in terms of a numbers game leads to the kind of strategy that automatically adds friends on MySpace whether or not they like (or have even heard) the music.

A smaller number of engaged and interested people is worth far more than a large number of people who are either disinterested in or actively annoyed by your communication.

By listening more than talking, an artist’s social media interaction has the opportunity to be far more engaged and responsive – and in order to facilitate this, there lies the potential for an online service (or what we conceived of as an additional aspect of Tribemonitor) to provide the opt-in signup facility, as well as the data analysis and interpretation that will inform conversational media strategy for the artist.

Obviously, these principles do not simply apply to music fandom, but can be applied equally to businesses and communities of all kinds. It’s possible to extrapolate broader principles and methodologies from this discussion – but my focus was on being helpful to Tribemonitor, whose focus is on music artists and record labels.

I’m grateful to Ard for the permission to discuss here in public what some might consider to be commercially sensitive information (Tribemonitor plan to build such a service, but have not as yet done so). However, Ard is keen to hear open discussion on the ideas around strategy. New Music Labs’ expertise with respect to this service is more in the area of interpretation, analysis – and the consultancy that can come out of this sort of market intelligence.

I’ve just been in Groningen in the Netherlands to brainstorm and research Tribemonitor – an online information service to artists and record labels, created by New Music Labs.

The purpose of Tribemonitor is to measure the popularity of music artists based on social media buzz across a range of platforms, rather than on sales or radio airplay.

Measuring online buzz is not a simple thing to do, however. There are some scrapable and publicly accessible pieces of information such as Last.FM plays or numbers of MySpace friends that are obvious and countable. These simple statistical measures that make a good starting point that can act as a basis for artist consultancy (or reassurance): number of MySpace plays, number of artist followers on Twitter, number of YouTube views, etc.

But these metrics only measure what could be described as fan activity, rather than a useful and measurable social score, which would have more to do with the extent to which that artist is being discussed outside of their own sphere of influence. And this is the reason for this intervention.

Social capital and the popular music artist
Popularity is the basis on which commercial music derives income from recordings and performances. But popularity is not the same as CD sales or gig attendances. Instead, those are mechanisms of commercial activity based on the social capital afforded by popularity. In other words, popularity is the engine of commercial music success, and not simply its measure.

Thus, gauging that social currency allows for commercial approaches that understand and maximise popularity. Being interesting, noteworthy or remarkable is not a business strategy – but it is a platform on which a business strategy can be built. Monitoring and tracking the social capital of popular music artists offers up important market information for analysis and interpretation.

The first step is to be countable and comparable – both against competing artists, and longitudinally with respect to one’s own previous performance. By comparing data over time, it’s possible to get a sense of ‘what’s working’ and ‘what’s not’. It’s a blunt tool, but does flag up when and where there are things of interest going on. On that basis, targeted content analysis can be indicated and recommended.

Seeking a simple but practical approach
Leaving aside sentiment analysis (whether the mention is positive or negative, or to what degree), there is challenge enough in simply weighing that media data – let alone analysing it for mood. However, for the sake of simplicity, and on the pretext that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, merely identifying messages and their capturing their echoes through the social media environment provides the basis for a useful indicator of online ‘buzz’.

A good place to start is the area of mentions in social media contexts. While the demographics of different services are quite different (users of Twitter tend to be older and of higher socio-economic standing than users of the popular Dutch social network Hyves, for instance), it’s difficult to take the temperature of social media buzz in closed and largely private systems such as Facebook. A predominantly public and externally measurable system like Twitter gives a good leaping-off point in terms of measuring online social currency, and how that changes over time.

At the very least, it provides a starting point for an exploration of the complexities of this sort of social media data.

Simply measuring mentions of the artist is not sufficient. There is a difference in impact between a mention and a reply – but an algorithm that worked by identifying the artist’s Twitter user name would not necessarily distinguish between the two:

Mention:
I went and saw @thisiskrause perform last night. She was amazing!

Reply:
@thisiskrause I liked your show.

Twitter distinguishes between those two types of directed message – and so as far as ‘buzz’ is concerned (certainly from a promotional culture perspective), a mention is ‘worth more’ than a reply. And a mention may equally be the artist name (‘Krause’) or their Twitter handle (‘@thisiskrause’).

Now, if I tweeted those messages above, all of my followers would see the ‘mention’ – but only those people that followed both me and @thisiskrause (as well as Krause herself) would see the ‘reply’.

Next there are variables to be considered:

1) How many followers do I have?
2) How engaged/interested are those followers?
3) How influential are my followers on average?
4) How many people responded to or retweeted that particular message?

In order to factor those in, it’s necessary to come up with a calculation that accounts for each, and then arrive at a score that can be additive, so that a total figure across all mentions within a particular period can be arrived at. That score can be monitored over time for that one artist, or compared across the board with other artists.

Doing the maths
While the numerical value of ‘social media score’ is essentially an arbitrary figure, as it does not count a specific measurable object, when applied across the board it does provide a meaningful and (most importantly) a comparable index.

The first variable – number of followers (F) – is easy to count. But it’s perhaps not the most important thing. If I have 1000 followers, but they’re not really paying attention to what I have to say, then my tweets will have less impact than someone who has the same number of followers, but whose followers actively engage that person in conversation.

So we came up with a ‘Social Score Multiplier’ (M), which is simply a means by which it is possible to arrive at a weighted figure that is based on the average number of replies that the person receives each day. In other words, the degree to which the tweeter’s followers are ‘engaged’.

After playing around with a number of formulae to come up with a figure that would make what we considered to be a reasonable adjustment with respect to the level of attention and interest that person receives online (E), we decided on an algorithm that would return a figure that started at a multiplier of 1 (zero average replies a day), and increased by 0.1 (to a multiplier of 1.1) for each 1 daily reply, averaged from a year’s worth of data.

So the social score multiplier was 1 + (0.1 x (Replies in the past year ÷ 365))

M = 1 + (0.1 x (E ÷ 365))

Then we factored in the small impact of the overall influence of the followers of the person who has tweeted about the artist, by including the AVERAGE number of followers that the tweeter’s followers have (A), as well as an adjustment for the number of retweets and responses that individual tweet inspired (N).

In so doing, we arrive at a weighted ‘Buzz’ score (B) for each tweet:

B = ((F x M) + ((1+N) x A))) ÷ 100

To explain – the buzz score of a certain tweet is measured by the number of followers, adjusted by the social score multiplier (to account for how engaged that user is), PLUS the number of retweets multiplied by the average number of followers (plus one, to avoid a zero result where the tweet is not retweeted at all), divided by 100 – to give a usable and comparable score.

So… if a person with 1000 followers, who has had 1825 replies in the past year (an average of 5 replies per day), tweets about Krause, their social score multiplier is 1.5. If their tweet about Krause is not retweeted, and their followers collectively have an average following of 150, then the sum is as follows:

((1000 x 1.5) + ((1 + 0) x 150))) ÷ 100 = 16.5

The overall social score of that one tweet is measured at 16.5

Alternatively, a tweet from a person with 2000 followers, who had 1200 replies in the past year have a social score multiplier of 1.33 (ie: 1 + (0.1 x (1200 ÷ 365))). Let’s assume that their followers also have an average following of 150, but that they were retweeted once. The social score of their similar tweet will be as follows:

((2000 x 1.33) + ((1 + 1) x 150))) ÷ 100 = 29.58

And finally, that one person who retweeted our last example has the following impact, given that nobody retweets them, they have fewer followers (say, 100), their followers are less engaged with them (20 replies in the past year) and their followers have, on average, fewer followers themselves (60).

((100 x 1.01) + ((1 + 0) x 60))) ÷ 100 = 2.21

Now, in order to arrive at an overall social score for Krause for this week (day, month…), we simply add up the scores of all of the mentions in that period.

16.5 + 29.58 + 2.21 = 53.3

Now we have a number that we can compare to previous periods, and to other artists.

This is not a “value”
It’s important to bear in mind that there are plenty of other variables that could potentially influence this social score, if they were factored into the calculations. For instance, if a person who tweets a link to a YouTube video is then retweeted by two other people, there are some very simple calculations that would follow above. However, those calculations do not factor in the extent to which an audience overlaps. If I have 1000 followers, and I send out a message – and two people each with 1000 people retweet that message, we come to a conclusion as if there is no overlap between those three audiences of 1000 different people. However, it is conceivable that they are the SAME 1000 people (or at least, significantly overlapping), so that rather than reach 3000 people, you have reached 1000 people three times.

And there are plenty of other variables besides.

However, the social score is not a measurement as much as it is an indicative figure. It would be possible to complicate the algorithm with this, and any number of other variables, but there would be diminishing returns in terms of factoring those variables in – and counteracting factors such as the principle of reinforcement. Arguably, a message heard three times has more than three times the psychological influence than that message heard once – so what may appear on the surface to be a diminished impact may be more influential through repetition.

Without getting too deeply into cognitive science (and, for that matter, deep maths), it is possible to arrive at a figure that while neither pinpoint accurate nor comprehensive in terms of what it represents, can still be a meaningful and useful figure. While a broad and necessarily imprecise statistic, the social score can provide a consistent and comparable guide that factors in some of the main influencing factors within a social media framework.

This is not a “cause”
However, I’d caution further that it’s not possible to ascribe causal factors to that data.

For instance, while it is meaningful to assert that an artist with a score of 100 is more “interesting” in the online social sphere than an artist with a score of 10, one cannot draw correlations between those scores and sales of records or attendances at performances. An artist who has not released an album for ten years, but has recently died may draw more ‘buzz’ online, but will not attract any more concertgoers as a result.

And while it’s possible that the interest in this newly-deceased artist may result in an increase in sales, that would only be true if their record is in the store available in shops or online.

In other words, the social score gives an indication ONLY of how “interesting” the artist is at a given point. But that level of interest provides useful market information to artists and labels that might indicate where opportunities may exist.

It is neither the role of Twitter nor its effect to cause consumers to act in a particular way – nor is it connected with the extent to which businesses are supplying a market. The social score is a broad marker of discussion – and not a reason that one artist may be more successful than another in financial terms. Some moderately successful artists are entirely invisible in the online sphere, and some lesser known acts are very active with large and engaged fan communities online.

This is an instructive and indicative data set
There are three main ways in which this data can be used:

A snapshot figure – a single score looked at in a moment in time. Useful as a comparison amongst other, similar artists. (“How interesting am I, comparatively speaking?”

Over time – whether or not that number increases or decreases from week to week. (“Am I doing better or worse online? Did my publicity stunt draw more people?”)

Rate of change – the acceleration (or deceleration) of buzz. If the score goes from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1000 week by week, that is an exponential rate of change – as opposed to a score that goes from 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 – which has a linear growth. (“Is there something interesting going on with this artist that we can capitalise on?”)

Providing commercial clients with these statistics, which would be difficult to collect, analyse and interpret themselves, provides an opportunity to discuss ways in which the social media environment could be captalised on and changes in interest can be used as an occasion for marketing.

Moreover, it would be possible to identify and engage with key online influencers – in order to incentivise and reward those fans and opinion leaders who contribute the most to this social media process.

We don’t think the formula is correct
While the algorithm we’ve arrived at is simply a tool to arrive at a comparable and trackable social score, we think it will be very possible to improve upon its methods and become more sophisticated with time.

The second part of this research is to invite people to suggest alterations to the formula, integrate other factors you think may be important, and correct the ways in which the design of the formula calculates and communicates what we are trying to capture and present.

While Tribemonitor is a commercial service, which includes further analysis and interpretation of the data, we believe the means by which some of the data is arrived at would benefit from an open source approach. Mathematicians, statisticians, psychologists, social scientists – as well as musicians – will have opinions as to how this algorithm could be developed further.

As a piece of research, we are very keen to hear what effects could be incorporated to represent important social impacts; and ways in which the numbers could be more meaningful.

For instance, we were interested in ways in which the social score multiplier (M) could be expressed as a ratio of the number of followers (F). Having 1 reply per day, on average, could be considered not very engaged for a Twitter user with thousands of followers – but very engaged indeed for a Twitter user with only ten followers.

Likewise, adjustments could conceivably be made to allow for differences between occasional tweeters and verbose Twitter users. It’s certainly possible that a single tweet could be buried under an avalanche of tweets if the person is a heavy twitter user. To what extent is this significant, and how could this be represented in the formula?

We look forward to hearing (and sharing) your thoughts.

Sam Coley and Oliver Carter presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010.

Radio documentary, fandom and new participatory cultures from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.