I think that people who have good reach tweet regularly on topic with useful impactful tweets — their own signal to noise ration is very high (lots of signal, not alot of noise). ChrisBrogan, while he may be insiteful has, IMO, a low signal to noise ration: his important and impactful tweets are buried amidst his travelogue (what city he is departing for, that he is about to leave, airport conditions, etc…) and tweets about family. I don’t know Chris, i followed him on twitter because i read a few insightful blog posts from him, but his twitter feed has proven to be less interesting and useful. This in and of itself is interesting to me since he is a pro-marketer who writes about effective use of social media. Even before i read this post of yours, I had been thinking about whether or not to unfollow chrisbrogan.

Chris proved the hypothesis indeed. That’s how I got here. I’m still trying to get a good handle on this whole microblogging thing. It never piqued my interest when I first heard about it. However, all the buzz I was hearing about Twitter and FriendFeed finally forced me into it recently. It seems like a great medium for “famous” folks like Chris with many followers to listen to his broadcast, but for a small-time schmuck like me it seems to be rather limited. Sure I can Tweet until I’m blue in the fingers, but right now it’s a lot like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it. My challenge is figuring out how to find eager eyes to read what I have to Tweet.

Michael,

I agree – I posted yesterday on Klout, after reading Jeremiah Owyang and Denis Pombriant both talking about it (http://andrewbschultz.com/social-shopping-follow-up-klout-and-influence/). Both had some issues with the way it attempted to measure influence. I think Klout will be successful as a company, simply because what they offer seems irresistible to some people, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to successfully deliver what they’re trying to deliver – a metric which shows a company who will have the most influence in promoting the company’s brand and products.

It’s also important to keep in mind that a lot of the activity that happens on the social web is often motivated by ulterior motives. For example, because most Twitter users have an automatic follow-back mechanism in place, I can go out and follow a thousand people to day and probably increase my followers by 700-800 3 days from now. But, did I really increase my influence? Maybe a little, but not as much as it would seem.