by Matt Culbertson

Malcom Gladwell’s best-selling book “The Tipping Point” helped popularize the concept: one reason a trend explodes on the national scene is because a group of super-influential people adopt it.*

An April study by Forrester Research suggests the same is true for social media. American consumers generated more than 500 billion online impressions about products and services in 2009, according to the study. Who was generating most of those impressions? Just 16 percent of online adults produced 80 percent of them.

The online impressions come in two categories: influence impressions, generated from social networks like Facebook and Twitter; and influence posts, generated from blog posts, blog comments, etc. Most influence impressions come from Facebook, and about 40 percent of influence posts come from blogs, research shows.

Ever wondered what the entire worldwide Internet looks like? It looks about as “big” as the entire Universe – click to enlarge. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Forrester Research further finds that Facebook is the biggest powerhouse in the social networking impressions, accounting for 62 percent of all impressions. But Twitter holds its own: A study released in August** by Exact Target makes the bold claim that Twitter users are the “most influential online consumers.” It cites findings such as:

• 11.5 million American consumers use Twitter on daily.
• Twitter’s reach about doubles its user base – 23 percent of online consumers read tweets every month.
• Active Twitter users are three times more likely than the average consumer to impact a brand’s online reputation.

Putting these findings together, it’s possible to draw a few conclusions:

• Assuming these studies are accurate, reaching one person via Twitter or Facebook could mean reaching their spheres of influence — maybe in the hard-to-measure real world, too (read: every Facebook fan equals XX additional people).
• Either influential people are drawn to social networking, or social networking increases one’s influence online, or some combination of both.
• Despite all the studies, analytics and widespread interest, we have yet to come up with the magic bullet for measuring social media’s precise impact on business.

One of my favorite criticisms of all the hype surrounding social media comes from Tim Hwang, a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

On his “Broseph Stalin” blog, he writes:

One of the big ironies about social media and marketing gurus is that the prescriptions of their (presumably massive) knowledge and experience are almost always vague and Sphinx-like in their implications. “Listen and engage with your customers,” they offer, unhelpfully. “Why don’t you set up a Twitter account?” suggests another.

That was in November 2009, and I’m not sure much has changed since then. While almost no one disputes social media’s ability to increase profits, social media marketing can still seem more like alchemy than science.

Hwang’s suggestion? Social-media wargaming. Hwang had teams compete against each other to influence a designated group of unknowing social media users, documenting their progress on http://blog.socialwargaming.org/. While perhaps controversial, I look at this experiment as what might have been one of the most original approaches to social media marketing yet. It’s the social media equivalent of the Pentagon wargaming to see what a nuclear war would look like.

If you’ve ever wondered how to chart social media influence (you probably haven’t), zoom in on this and take a look — it’s a measure of teams’ progress during the wargames ***.

*Disclaimer: I never read “The Tipping Point.”
** Study is freely available for download after entering an e-mail address.
*** I have no idea what this chart means.

Editor’s note: Matt Culbertson is an intern at Olson Communications. Follow him on Twitter: @mattculbertson