The Numbers Game

Counting your friends and followers - signs of influence or narcissism?

As with other aspects of modern culture, social media suffers from an obsession with numbers. Is this simply part of a human need to quantify information, or is something else at play once individuals can interact on a limitless playing field with few barriers to entry?


I walk her, feed her, let  her on my bed, and she still won't "Friend" me on Facebook.

Every morning on our Boston area TV news there seems to be a report about something going viral with x number of views, x number of hits, x number of twitter followers, or a celebrity with x number of "friends" on Facebook.

When I saw the article Are 5,001 Facebook Friends One Too Many? by Aimee Lee Ball,  published May 28, 2010 in the New York Times, I thought it was another "faux trend", but a Google search revealed that some individuals were actually concerned about Facebook's limit of 5,000 friends and are looking for solutions. (If you want more, you need a business page or fan page, but this seems unacceptable to these users.) So we now have a new status symbol - Facebook waiting lists.

According to the article,

"friending sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention,” said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends)."

Now, we know these are not all really "friends", and there is a suggestion that there is a physical limit to the number of actual, stable relationships a human can have, known as Dunbar's number, and that number is approximately 150.

  

But, if you are still looking for more "friends", here is some advice, from a Facebook "expert" :

 

 

 

Now certainly, for celebrities, brands, commercial enterprises and organizations, there is a real value here. But for the average person?

Twitter is another exercise in status by numbers. When the news reports on celebrity tweets, unless it is something embarrassing or controversial, the content is not the issue, but the number of followers and retweets.




Gretchen and Bill Voth, New York Times photo. " But that wasn’t a day to have the phone attached to the hip."

And it's not just the number of Twitter followers - you want to be trending - in the NYT Sunday Times Style section, Sept. 9, 2012 there was a report on the wedding hashtag trend about couples whose friends were determined that the wedding would be a "trending event" on Twitter. (Of course, almost all involved, including brides and grooms are in the social marketing field, which makes this entire exercise suspect.)
The story of one couple in the Times article was picked up in a variety of social media sites - including a blog " "Love, Brittney" (enough said) and comments from the couple threaten to take the word "disingenuous" to new heights:

BILL: Well, it wasn't really anything we did. Mike Solarte (@MikeSolarte), a sports broadcasting colleague of mine, got the ball rolling the morning of the wedding. He figured it would be something we'd enjoy. People then caught onto the hashtag and it kind of took off. It certainly helped that Gretchen and I are both social media dorks (Note: both of them have careers in social media and content managment/publicity), but we weren't all that aware of what was going on. Neither of us did a lot of tweeting that day, which was hard for us. But that wasn’t a day to have the phone attached to the hip.

GRETCHEN: We never in our wildest dreams imagined we’d have such a talked-about wedding. I think it’s safe to say that making #vothwedding trend locally was one of the most unique gifts our friends and family could have given us.

This article in Slate, Twitter Is Really Bad at Measuring Your Online Influence. Let's Keep It That Way, by Will Oremus, posted Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012, talks about the quality of measurements in social media.

In the article, Twitter cofounder and board member Ev Williams shares concerns that there is an emphasis on the number of followers, versus the influence of the users. The author of the article, Will Oremus, talks about the use of tools that purport to measure Twitter influence, and is not in favor of them:

"Attaching a rating to each participant only reinforces the idea that it’s a contest rather than a discussion—and there are already too many people on the site who treat it that way."

 

Then there are the tools that purport to measure the quality of your social media presence. One of them, Klout, offers the following according to their site:

"Klout measures your influence based on your ability to drive action on social networks. We crunch your social data to give you insight into how influential you are and what you are influential about."

Hey, it's "free", so I registered. Now, I didn't expect much here, particularly since I wasn't going to allow the site to access apps whether or not I was using them, or hand over my Linkedin password, etc. But I still came up with a Klout score of 10 (out of 100). I suspect that they give everyone at least 10 points so they don't get depressed. To add to the narcissism factor, Klout will also share information with your social media "friends".

While it may be a useful tool to check your Klout score if you have business reasons (you work in the media, your last name is Kardashian, etc.), it seems to run the risk of being another digital status symbol. So, let's not lose sight of the need for quality in our communications and relationships, and not rely on measurements that may be of dubious validity.
 

The following cartoon is taken from the October 1, 2012 issue of The New Yorker magazine, with no permission whatsoever. 

 

 

 

Last minute update since the original post - two articles from Slate.com:

Buying Twitter Followers

Could Your Crummy Klout Score Keep You From Getting a Job