If you want to be a person of influence on Twitter, then the way to do it is to acquire engaged followers who are themselves active on Twitter. That would at the very least mean being active and engaged yourself.

    如何成为一个在微博方面有影响力的人？答案就是：要让那些活跃用户成为你的“粉丝”，要让你成为他们的“关注”对象。这就意味着，你自己一定要是个异常的活跃分子，并且愿意展现自己。

    Of course, this makes life difficult for marketers and others engaged in viral activity who want to take advantage of the enormous reach that Twitter has. They can no longer rely on a single dubious metric, follower count, as a guide to how far their message gets out.

    当然，这个事实使得那些数字市场营销人员，还有那些网络病毒营销专家的生意变得不好做了，他们希望利用微博影响到更多的人。但他们将不再能够依赖一个不靠谱的标准——微博关注人数（或粉丝数）——作为他们的信息究竟以多快的速度被传播出去的标准。

    It also means that to find active and engaged people, they will have to become active and engaged themselves. Fun, maybe. Time-consuming, certainly. But it is only through interacting with highly connected people that they will be able to propagate themselves and their message through the social network.

    这也意味着，想找到那些有影响力的人，你必须变得非常活跃，吸引他们“关注”，让他们主动成为你的粉丝。有趣吗？也许吧。费事吗？那是肯定的。但是，只有那些具有高影响力的人才能够通过社交网络传播自己和他们的信息，想变得和他们一样的唯一的方法就是，与这些高度活跃的人进行互动。

    Through the process of finding the most influential people on Twitter, the team also managed to turn up the most passive users on the service as well. The majority of these users tended to be spammers and robot users.

    通过研究微博，我们知道了如何发现那些最有影响力的人。同时，研究小组也找到了微博上那群最被动的用户。这些用户多半是那些垃圾邮件的发送者，或干脆就是些机器人。

    It is as important to identify the highly-passive Twitter user because “they provide a barrier to propagation that is often hard to overcome.” It’s good to know where the Twitter dead ends are as it gives us a useful benchmark to contrast with someone who is influential. This information aids navigation through the vastness of the Twitter network, and knowing where not to go can be every bit as useful as knowing where to go.

    确定那些高度被动的微博用户，也是同样重要的，因为“他们提供了一个通常很难克服的传播障碍。”知道微博的传播终止于何处，是很有用的，它给了我们一个有用的基准，去对比那些有很大影响力的人。这个信息帮助研究人员在浩瀚的微博网络中导航，知道不用去哪儿，就像知道应该去哪一样有用。

 The HP Lab report finishes with the following conclusion:

    惠普实验室的报告得出了以下的结论：

    “This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it. Moreover, since our measure of influence is not specific to Twitter it is applicable to many other social networks. This opens the possibility of discovering influential individuals within a network which can on average have a further reach than others in the same medium regardless of their popularity.”

    “这项研究表明：知名度与影响力之间的相关性，比人们预期的还要弱。其反映了在网络中信息传播的一个事实，当人们需要把信息转发给其他人时，必须以积极的态度参与进去，而不能只是被动地阅读，且不再采取任何行动。此外，因为我们对影响力的衡量并不只限于微博，而是适用于很多其他社交网络。因此，这开创了在网络中、相同媒介里，不考虑知名度的情况下，发掘影响力的个人的可能性，并利用该网络进行进一步的研究。

    In a way, it is understandable that the findings from this research on Twitter would be applicable to other social networks as well. Influential people tend to be influential wherever they are. The IP algorithm that has been developed by the HP Labs team is going to be very useful across all of the social media domains, wherever people gather and exchange ideas and news via links.

    该项研究是基于微博发现的，在某种程度上，这不难理解，也可以适用于其他社交网络：有影响力的人通常无论在哪里都有影响力。无论人们聚集在哪里，通过网络交换想法，共享新闻，惠普实验室开发的IP算法都将适用于这些社交网络。

    The key metric to determining how effective any given person is in propagating information is to measure how often a URL that they tweet or retweet is clicked. And it is important to allow for the fact that not everyone is very adept at giving credit for their shared links, and some shared links go beyond the Twitterverse on to other services.

    决定人们传播信息效率的关键指标是：测量一个由他发布或转发的“URL”被点击的频率和量。而且重要的是，需要考虑到如下事实：并非每个人都会娴熟的给他人分享链接并给出赞扬。此外，一些共享衔接会把人群引离微博，把人带到一些其他服务中去。

    But unless you have access to a given individual’s bit.ly account or other some search service which keeps tabs on retweets, the only sure way to know if they are a person of influence is to get to know them.

    但是，除非你有机会获取某人的bit.ly账号，或使用对“再推送”有跟踪功能的服务，确定一个人是否有影响力的唯一方法就是：真的去认识他们。