What is social media influence? Can it be measured? Daniel Romero, a Ph.D candidate at Cornell University, in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Lab, studied about five week’s worth of tweets and drew some conclusions, including:

“Having a large number of followers does not imply having influence in news social media. Furthermore, not having a large number of followers does not mean lack of influence.”

Romero’s piece, Twitter is Linked to Quality of Content And Not Quantity of Followers, appeared yesterday on Tom Foremski’s excellent Silicon Valley Watcher blog. Romero cites the changing role of mainstream media and the recognition that traditional media outlets must get into the social media game.

The research involved a sophisticated algorithm to compute influence, which was used to compile a list of 100 most influential media outlets on Twitter. At the core of this notion of influence is the idea that the links (only tweets with links were studied) most often retweeted were an indicator of influence.

I think this is a perversion of the concept of influence, one which substitutes “ability to reach the most eyeballs” for actual influence. The dictionary definition of influence is essentially “the power to affect behavior.”

Compelling someone to repost a link indicates that they found the linked information interesting, but even more so, that they thought the people in their network would find it interesting. There are very human impulses involved here, the desire to be the first with breaking news, the desire to impress, the desire to amuse, the desire to be seen as informed.

So the link to the amusing video I posted of a cat trying to climb into a little red wagon (not bloody likely) may have received 500 retweets. But where is the influence? Is driving site traffic the only influence metric that matters? Even then, there’s no site traffic until the link is clicked and the page is loaded.

I haven’t bought off on the new media definition of influence. When a company’s marketing strategy calls for influence, they are absolutely looking to affect customer behavior. The intent is to have customers consider the company, its products and services (awareness), make a purchase, then make another purchase (loyalty) and recommend the company to others (evangelism). Clicking a link to see an interesting image, video or news item may be the first step in this process, but it is a tenuous one, disconnected from the realities of the business, with almost no certainty of conversion to any of these other more important behaviors.

The futurists are screwed. Today I downloaded the Netflix iPhone app and sat at a table outside a local deli totally in awe that I could stream feature length movies, almost anywhere, on demand, to my phone — with pretty good quality. Are you kidding? That would have been unimaginable five years ago.

Writers are constantly challenged to come up with “gee whiz imagine that” future scenarios, which is becoming harder and harder to do. As a speechwriter. I’ve worked for a number of CEOs and other senior executives in the Silicon Valley and across the globe. Often, I am asked to come up with these “incredible future” scenarios for an executive keynote.

About a year ago I was called in to work on some futurist stuff for the CEO of a major company. The corporate communications team had done a pretty good job with the first draft, but it wasn’t futurey enough. For example, they had “Imagine you hear a song on the radio you like, but you don’t know who the artist is. You hold your phone up to the radio, it ‘recognizes’ the song and the artist and title appear on your screen.” Unfortunately, as you probably know, it exists (and did then). It’s called Shazam, and there’s even a free version. I can’t tell you what I did come up with because that work belongs to the client, but I will say it was a tough assignment.

Another time I was writing for the CTO of a semiconductor company, and as I worked on the speech (a keynote can take several weeks or months to write), a couple of our future scenarios popped up in the news and had to be scrapped. I couldn’t write fast enough to stay ahead of one life-changing development after another.

It’s no wonder people say they can’t keep up (with whatever). The pace is crazy. And I’m not going to speculate (right now at least) on what’s next.