2013 International Conference on Social Media and Society

In this article we distill three years of social technologies research, includingstudies of Facebook, Twitter and Github, to present a synthesized theoretical frameworkfor operationalizing influence in social technologies. The construct of influence isdemonstrated to be munificent in its variation and interpreted according to the specificconstructs and theories used in research, and connected to levels of analysis derived fromempirical study of influence and analysis of electronic trace data. Specifically, weoutline a relationship between social media technology platform, individual goals forparticipation and emergent small groups to help inform future research on influence insocial technologies. We draw on theories from the small group literature, communitiesand networks of practice, and media theory to explicate a framework for measuringinfluence in context. In our discussion we propose three categories of social technology:Social media, distributed work and participatory mass media, suggesting that Facebook,GitHub and Twitter as exemplars of each respective category.