AMBASSADORS LOVE TO TWEET
‘Influence is bliss… With every response and action that results from our engagement, we are slowly introduced to the laws of social physics: for every action there is a reaction – even if that reaction is silence’, writes Brian Solis, social media expert and principal at Altimeter, on his blog.[45] ‘The extent of this resulting activity is measured by levels of influence and other factors such as the size and shape of niche-works as well as attention aperture and time.’ Influence metrics are vast and mostly derived from proprietary formulas and algorithms developed by marketing firms. Influence, in fact, is a key element to better rebalance a company’s strategy, product development, and ad campaigns. It is as important for governments and diplomacies around the world to re-calibrate foreign policy priorities and to understand those numerous non-traditional players that social media has thrown into the diplomatic arena, players who are now as engaging as the traditional actors. ‘As the Web grows more massive all the time, it’s becoming increasingly important to quickly assess what Internet users are influential about and how they are influenced in order to make more informed decisions’, said Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez in an interview with CNN.[46]
TWITTER FOR DIPLOMATS
Klout, a four-year-old online service that measures influence or the user’s ‘ability to drive action’ – as Fernandez puts it – is one of the many companies that have dipped their feet into measuring the elusiveness of influence. Itis even more elusive and difficult to put on paper as the Web is registering a great shift from desktop to mobile, making calculations and algorithms more and more difficult. Because influence is based on very diverse factors – the social factor being one of the most difficult to measure – results vary, sometimes even greatly, but they indeed hand interesting data, as the ranking of the 10 most followed ambassadors in Washington DC shows. While communicating and interacting with the public, both at home and abroad, is the main goal of most of the ambassadors on Twitter – and a key element to achieve greater influence in the so-called Twitter-sphere – some are trying to go even further in their use of the tool to exploit its immediacy and real-time capabilities. 44