Planner Reads

  Nice musings by chum David C and Stowe Boyd around this study that suggests it's the not the number of connections you have that determines your influence, but rather the nature of those connections – your "betweenness" as Stowe calls it:

"It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses." [SB]

But David makes this important point:

"Influence is fluid. It resides less in the node and more in the interactions between the nodes. It is the interactions which change the state of the group, not a change in the condition of the nodes (think water H2O molecules and ice, water, steam…

…This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence ...