Making Better Decision finding Influencers – Fresh Networks Social Media Influencer Report

A tip from Charlie Osmand over at Fresh Networks (who I believe spoke in London at #msm10 last week, where I was at and also spoke) caught my attention this morning and I took a look at their (his) review of Social Media Influencers.   The link to download the PDF  is contained in Charlie’s DM  below.

curious to hear what you’ll make of this one: 9 Social media monitoring tools compared for ability to find influencers: http://t.co/pANb2h

Direct message sent by charlie osmond (@cosmond) to you (@webmetricsguru) on Dec 04, 10:10 AM.

The report is excellent in that it goes into some depth of influencer identification because it confines itself to actually focusing on a particular aspect/application of each of the 9 platforms (I was not familiar with PeerIndex, but have worked on all the other platforms listed and have active accounts on most of them).

But the closer you get to the truth, the more you realize there is no “one truth” or infact, one tool good for everything.  According the FreshNetworks paper  BrandWatch is best for finding Forum and Message Board Influeners while Radian6 was better finding Twitter followers (I’d put my money any day on finding Forum followers over Twitter followers as there are so many free tools like Klout and PeerIndex that handle Twitter followers – but identifying  Forum Influencers by topic – that’s rare and potentially much more valuable).  Scout Labs/Lithium was best at finding YouTube and Image influence while Synthesio was better than the rest at finding Facebook Influencers (again, much more valuable because it’s harder to get into Facebook and really find a consolidated influence score there).

The rest of the platforms really stood out for other features but not  for influence identification such as Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 for segmentation, Sysomos for best overall tool (USP) and Social Radar for the best data visualization platform.    The subject of the influence study was “organic baby food” – something every platform should be able to do a good report on.

There is so much “fragmentation” between vendors and what outputs they produce and buyers (and what inputs they need) that each platform tends to be good at certain things but not as good at others – you pick the platform you need for the relationships and capabilities you need on one project, then find it’s unsuitable for others, and you get into the datasoup mess most agencies are in, with a hybrid set of tools that are not interoperable and do not support the workflow or analyst, never mind the stakeholders.

But still, this is the best overall influencer study of a comparative set of social listening platforms I’ve seen so far and does a good job at defining influence in a workable way that is useful for most people reading this blog.

FreshNetworks quotes Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati as …

targeting the Magic Middle of online influencers, sandwiched between Chris Anderson?s Long Tail and well-known A-list influencers.

Makes sense to me as it’s unlikely your going to get Lady Gaga to advocate much of anything (if you can even get through to her handlers) but you may have some luck getting through to people just ahead of the Long Tail (who have groups of niche followers and aren’t so inundated with requests that they are putting up barriers to being contacted).

It’s also interesting the FreshNetworks study talks about 4 types of Influencers yet only shows the three (above), where is the forth type hiding?

Another great thing about the FreshNetworks paper is how of it defines 5 levels Engagement – I don’t know if this is the best definition, but it’s certainly workable and even possible to manually rank influence based on it.

Inactive – aware of the relevant sector or topic but not actively engaging.

Brand Conscious – aware of your brand. Generates some buzz but not fully engaged and mostly fleeting references online.

Word-of-Mouth Amplifiers– spreads key messages and updates that relate directly to your brand, products or services.

Brand Advocates/Evangelists – support and champion your brand online.

Brand Ambassadors – key advocates who have a strong involvement with the your brand online. Could be a commercial relationship.

I doubt you could automate the classification of influence (but it’s worth a try).

There’s also a section on “what’s in it for me” in approaching influencers,  how to do it and how to select the right tool/platform.   I honestly could not have done a better job if I had written the report myself, though I might have tried to pick clear winners and losers instead of giving every platform kudos for something they do better than anyone else, as FreshNetworks did.

On the hand, to be fair and honest, as I am known to be – the real issue here isn’t influencer identification capabilities, it’s rather, the right tool/platform you need for your particular situation – that’s a custom consulting case scenario, not something that a paper like this can fully address.

My book will attempt to set the case and rationale for more strategic investment in tools and processes than any of these types of studies has produced (the basis for the FreshNetworks study is to build more clientele – nothing wrong with that ) but doesn’t really address that fact, nor can it, that every business and situation is different and the precision needed in influencer identification continues to evolve past where any of these tools, profiled, goes.

Also notable, is that this study covers 9 platforms and leaves out others that could have also been interesting such as Traakr (not to mention that just about every PR, Advertising and Marketing firm now is either creating influencer lists of their own or buying them and white labeling it from firms like Traackr or other similar type services).

Prices vary for such lists and are widely dissimilar, often for the similar lists to tell the truth, but having done some of this myself, in various capacities, I am of the belief we should not invent the wheel  unless we can show a much better cut of influence than what the existing tools and platforms produce now, nuff said.

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Finding Influencers using CisionPoint – Attend our CisionPoint Webinar Tuesday, November 16th 2PM EST

Let’s talk about one thing you’ll learn at the Webinar.  Influencers.   You want it, CisionPoint can find Influencers (esp if they are in Mainstream Media, since the media database evolved from MSM but now includes 50,000+ blogs).

Let’s take a simple example (and one I’m free to talk about) “Social Media Monitoring” (spoken at plenty of Luke’s conferences and going to speak at another next week in London); according to CisionPoint, who’s influential that is writing on the subject of this conference series? (hint: Select “Media Coverage“, Create a “New Search Agent” on “Social Media Monitoring” OR “#msm10? over the last 90 days.

The first thing I got was a series of media “Outlets” that CisionPoint stores (and pretty much all of these sources are in Cision‘s Media Database which means I can get detailed information on how to contact reporters or bloggers contained wherein).

What about “who” is writing about “Social Media Monitoring”?  Wha? Jacob Morgan is writing the most about it?   Interesting.  Guess Brian Solis didn’t have more than one mention.    When we get down to who is talking about the conferences, not so many clear voices, but at least we have an idea who they are.

And while most of the conversation is happening in the United States, it’s also happening in Europe (no surprise, I’ll be speaking in London next week and the whole thing started in Europe).

And if we’re into DMA’s then we can have that too… but it’s only US based (not sure what that is about, I’m sure I’ll get Jay Krall to clear that up today).

Before we go any further I want to bring up something.

CisionPoint is a Media Database platform, enhanced by Radian6 data, yet  it’s not really a Social Media platform in the same way Radian6 is.

Actually, that’s good as some of the work I’ve been asked to do has been amazingly based on finding the buzz around “media placements” using platforms like Radian6 which are not built for this kind of analysis.  On the other hand, Cision is, yet most people I know in Social Media are totally ignorant of the fact, even in Public Relations.

You’d think people would know ….. but amazingly …. they don’t!

There are so many people I run in to trying to make a Social Media Monitoring tool behave like a “media database” when what they really want was a “media database” that had “Social Media Intelligence” and just don’t realize it – which CisionPoint does have.   That’s the reason why we came up with this webinar, to show people who want media placements to look at better platforms for that information, like this one.

You can then go back and research a particular publication and find influential authors/reporters at it with phone numbers and email addresses and any notes that a person at Cision may have made on how to pitch that person.

There’s a bit more to this as you can get Radian6 data broken down by Industry with backlinks (on topic links), likes, votes, and so on with a more advanced subscription to CisionPoint, all of this happened last May when the Radian6 data was added into CisionPoint.  Other wise, Cision white labeled Radian6 as Cision Social Media, but until May, the data in Radian6 stayed in R6, while now, it’s also in Cision and mixed in with the Media Database, when it makes sense.

Now .. if you want to learn more, come to the webinar later today and I’ll give Jay Krall a run for the money, getting him to show who ever attends all the neat things CisionPoint can do that practically no one knows about.

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