Every now and again friends of Twitalyzer will send us a note saying something like this:

While we certainly understand people’s sentiment we wanted to offer a single, simple caution: Just because you don’t recognize another Twitter user’s greatness doesn’t mean they aren’t great.

In this case, Mr. Chase Adams is referring to reality television star Nicole Polizzi, aka “Snooki” or, in Twitter @sn00ki. Say what you will about Ms. Polizzi, she rocks Twitter in a big way as evidenced by her complete set of Twitalyzer metrics.

This raises an important point about our influencer types and, more broadly, the way Twitalyzer is used. Our influencer types — “Everyday User”, “Reporter”, “Social Butterfly”, “Trendsetter”, and “Thought-Leader” — were derived from Lisa Barone’s “Five Types of Influencers on the Web.” While Chase may be frightened by the prospect, it is pretty hard to make the case that Dear Snooki isn’t being listened to, responded to, and shown the respect of her community in Twitter.

Put another way, young Nicole may not influence Chase (or us for that matter) but she does influence some percentage of her 1.06M followers and the nearly 1.3M people in Twitter she is effectively reaching right now. While it may inspire, shall we say, an unpleasant response from some, when you apply an objective lens to any individual’s use of Twitter you never know what you might learn.

More importantly this somewhat glib exchange highlights the value of having access to a number of different data points to describe a Twitter user’s use of Twitter. The evidence of Nicole’s greatness (in Twitter) appears throughout her measures and metrics in our service:

  • She currently has 1.12M followers, up over 5% from a few days ago
  • Her Impact and Influence scores are both in the 100th percentile
  • Her Clout, Referenced, and List scores are all in the 99th percentile
  • Her Retweet Ratio is 137:1
  • Her Klout and PeerIndex scores are both in the 99th percentile

Again, like her or not, Snooki rocks. And yes, I am going to burn in hell for writing that.

Long story short is this: Before you declare yourself greater than Snooki, Michael Jackson, or any other Twitter user, take a step back and think about what our data is really saying. Per my “Twitalyzer and Klout” post last week, we aren’t saying ANYTHING about the individual as a person; we are merely assessing their use and interactions in Twitter.

Armed with that information you’ll hopefully feel better about our data, learn something, and hopefully benefit from the insights that Twitter and Twitalyzer has to offer.