Top 100 2013 Knowledge Management Influencers on the Twitter Hashtag #KM

MindTouch has a history of researching and producing lists of influencers. They recently shared their internal annual report of Techcomm influencers that they produced using LittleBird. This year, MindTouch also analyzed Knowledge Management influencers. It appears that they used the Twitter hashatg #KM as the basis for their research. While this captures some knowledge management people who use Twitter, specifically those who use the KM hashtag.

Here are the top eight on the list and there are some very good people here. I know all but the top one very well and they all deserve their rating.

1.  weknowmore
2.  David Gurteen
3.  Dave Snowden
4.  Stan Garfield
5.  Nancy White
6.  VMaryAbraham
7.  Jack Vinson
8.  Euan Semple

Here’s the entire list of 100 names to know in #KM. To be fair Aaron Fulkerson acknowledges, “We know there are several profoundly influential people not represented here. However, it should be clear that this list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.” I would agree that there are many influential people on the list and also that many are missing.  Those missing must not use the KM hashtag much.

Any list of top KM people that does not include Luis Suarez, Tom Davenport, Larry Prusack, and Clara O'Dell, to name a few, shows the limitations of sticking to one medium. Luis, for one, is very active on social media so he is the one I am most surprised to not see. This is not a criticism of the current list and Aaron does acknowledge the limits of the research. I commend them for making us aware of these 100, some of who I did not know before. 

We just need to be careful how we generalize from these lists. For example, I have ended up on some lists of top influences on things like SharePoint where I was not sure how I got there, even though they were algorithm based.  I am not surprised or concerned to not be on this list as I now write much more about social business and enterprise 2.0 than knowledge management and rarely, if ever, use the KM hashtag, even thoguh I rermain a strong supporter of KM. 

MindTouch plans to make available their list of top 100 influencers in customer support and customer experience. 

Comments

[Luis Suarez]

Hi Bill, thanks a lot for putting together such an insightful blog post and for the lovely comments. You are too kind! I guess MindTouch's study shows the risks of doing this kind of analysis using something so easy to manipulate as a Twitter hashtag. I am sure if I would have been using the #km hashtag for all of my tweets I would probably have made it into the list. Not that I wanted to, in the first place, but I guess it could have happened. I think the exercise was interesting to raise some awareness on whether the KM community at large is active or not in social technologies coming from an mental state where they may not have been very keen on it all along. In fact, some of what I would consider KM founders are not even using Twitter. At all. Should we then say they are not influential? No, by all means not. That's where studies like this one fail big time and why perhaps we should not pay much attention to them than the odd attempt for some link bait (Yes, 18 years later since first blog post came about, it looks like we still have got to go through that!).

Interesting that you mentioned they have used LittleBird for the analysis, because it's my understanding that LittleBird doesn't look much into hashtags, but more into what the community around you thinks of your skills, expertise and experiences, which is a bit surprising, because if they would have applied LB I am sure the results would have been much more different. Either way, I'm glad you brought this up in a blog post vs. just the 140 tweet conversation. Much more interesting and relevant...

Now, if I add here #KM will that count? ;-))

[Hope you are well...]

[Bill Ives]

Luis

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I agree about these ratings systems - see my post - Our Obsession with Scoring is Now Taking on Individuals on the Web http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2011/08/our-obsession-with-scoring-is-now-taking-on-individuals-on-the-web.html In this recent example it seems, it was not Twitter, in general, but a special hashtag. I find it useful to bring awareness of people I did not know writing about #KM. However, the limitations of any scoring system whether it is Klout or a special ranking like this one, are often overlooked in the rush to get something quantifiable and overly simple. Hope all is well with you. Your move to the Canary Islands was one of many inspirations for my move to New Orleans. Cheers, Bill

[Luis Suarez]

Hi Bill, many thanks for the follow-up comments and for the feedback input. Yes, indeed, it's an obsession we humans seem to have acquired since the beginning of the industrial era in terms of trying to measure everything, because that's what would justify business, and why it's flawed all along, because we keep focusing on the low-hanging fruit of the easy way out vs. looking beyond further into the real transformation of how businesses are changing thanks to those intangibles. It's interesting to see how few decades have passed, social networking comes on board and we still keep focusing on the very same things in terms of measuring what clearly doesn't bring as much value as other things we could be working on... That's why I keep telling people we still need to do tons of work in helping make that transformation take place and break loose from that fetish we seem to have with analytics and measuring stuff... And "big data" is not going to help much, if anything, make things worse! We will have to just keep on pushing, my friend!

Really happy and rather glad to read you are having a wonderful time in New Orleans and surely look forward to coming to visit at some point in time soon! Or you coming over to G.C. for a splendid winter vacation or something! hehe Take care

[Nancy White]

Hm, I don't think I use the #Km hashtag much, nor do I think I'm a leading KM person. (Heck, I often say I don't believe knowledge can be managed!!) I've had people try to link w/ me on LinkedIn due to this list and I feel a bit creepy and fake that they think I'm someone they should connect to for KM. I dunno. It feels weird but I can't quite put my finger on it.

I was also very intrigued to see how many http://www.km4dev.org people were on the list and it got me to thinking if there are different knowledge sharing practices from different sectors. For example, do development KM practitioners use Twitter proportionately more than those from business? Are they more likely to publicly share their ideas?

[Bill Ives]

Nancy - Nice to hear from you. I agree with you on the lists. I am been embarrassed some times by how high I was on some lists. I am sure that any one can game a list, and this would especially easy for a group. They can also optimize Google rankings, Klout scores, etc. It was interesting even that the E20 conf had people vote on their favorite sessions, but as I understand it, did not base much on the votes likely since they could be gamed. I heard this second hand but it makes sense. It seemed more of a way to get greater engagement with the upcoming event.