How to know if professionals in a field are influencers?
How to know if professionals in a field are influencers?
Here at eCairn we map the social web and constantly run experiments to increase our understanding of the social media. Recently we did an experiment in a ‘trendy’ career in the tech world, Data Scientist.
Our goal was to find out if professionals in the data science field often engage in influential conversations thru most common social media channels. AKA Twitter, blogs and facebook. This test in others words tries to solve the following hypotheses*:
H0: a techy guy into Data Scientist (job tittle/profession) will most likely be influential in the Data Science (DS) ecosystem.
H1: being into Data Science doesn’t make you a Data Science influencer
*The study takes into consideration a set of individuals actively generating content in social media for the past 6 months, and that had mention stuff related to data science as well.
In eCairn we have half a million influencers grouped into 1 thousand groups of interests called tribes. Data Science, in which the experiment was done, is one of the tribes.
The DS tribe has 1365 influencers broken down as follows:
After careful analysis we concluded that groups 1 and 2 above had a strong connection, therefore we regroup them as one.
The network map (below) shows on the on hand that the professionals with a Data Scientist job tittle [group 1] and those that perform Data Science tasks [group 2] within their companies often engage between them. On the other hand that, that influencers from other fields/specialties closely related to DS [group 3], such as Business Intelligence, Statistics, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Data and Big Data do engage with the first two groups, but in a lesser way.
Blue: represents groups 1 and 2.
Yellow: represent 3
The red area highlights how some influencer overlap with DS professionals.
In conclusion, we ruled out the null hypothesis for this example and proved there is segregation among DS experts with its influencers. Rather there are more peer to peer conversations.
Here is a close up look into each of the group 3 influencers:
The least overlap is present in the statistics and Math influencers.
This is a sample of the top expressions used by the data science influencers out of 90k conversations:
