The Web Effect

Part of our new social media listening app is Influence Tracking - our team has created a ranking mechanism to determine the level of influence a particular review/comment has comparatively over another review (factors like reach, traffic, relevance, brand value) in order to identify differentiators (that need further action).

This has moved us into an interesting area - tracking who are the 'influencers'. A few companies are providing services in this area (PeerIndex, Klout). So, our intrepid R&D team have started developing in this direction (watch this space etc etc).

Question is - how do we describe the effect an influencer has.. is it a ripple effect, a snowball effect, a butterfly effect or a domino effect? OK butterfly is the coolest but also the least likely. If we were to visually map out the effect of a good review - track it through hashtags and hyperlinks - which type of effect would best describe it..