Some of my readers have asked me to weigh in on Stowe Boyd‘s post on It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence as it impacts how influence in a social network is determined; Stowe Boyd’s post is also a useful framework to talk about how good Social Media Monitoring platforms do with determining Influencers.

… influence doesn’t seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It’s a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

….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.

Stowe Boyd is right, there is no Social Monitoring tool is capable of this level of analysis today, but  it’s fair to say that Google is working towards it, and , probably, no one else is  as close to it as Google is or will be (see John Battelle‘s post on  Google Rolling Out Social Search: But Does It Leverage Facebook? last week.

Hmmm….. looking suspiciously a lot like what Stowe Boyd was talking about …  he thinks Google – so sure – this is probably something Google is working on … who is more influential ….. and here’s the paths – now all they have to do is score them and figure out what “communities”, an how many.     Anyone else doing this?  Raise your hands.

I planned to compare several of the monitoring platforms on how they locate influentials – but that will be done later this weekend, and I’ll use this post as a jumping off point.

By the way, keep in mind that Google working with the NSA on the China Security Breach (and maybe other things – see video above) plus read my long article about Google and Social Media Monitoring and then think about what Stowe Boyd is saying and Google Social Search.     Hmmm ….