Daniel M Romero, Wojciech Galuba, Sitaram Asur & Bernardo A. Huberman, 2010. Influence and Passivity in Social Media, page 113-121.
In ‘Influence and passivity in social media, the authors analyze the influence of people on the social media network Twitter. They want to know how and why twitter users get attention and why they influence other users. They work with the concept of passivity in a social network, which separates their method to measure influence from previous ones. Passive users are those who follow many people, but rarely retweet. These users receive information from other users, but choose to ignore it. The authors assume that the influence of a user depends on the quantity and the quality of the audience she tweets.
They also want to know more about if it is possible to identify users who are very good at spreading their ideas, knowledge, or opinions to others. To quantify the influence of all the users in the network and the size of the influenced audience (the influence and passivity score), they make use of the Influence-Passivity algorithm. One important function of this algorithm is for example ranking users by their relative influence: the number of people she influences as well as their passivity. Furthermore how popular the people she influences are, is from importance in measuring her influence. To measure passivity they look at how much someone rejects other tweets compared to everyone else.
The conclusion is that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than might be expected. The research shows that the individuals have to actively participate in forwarding the information, as opposed to passively read it and not act on it.