TRAACKR

As we welcome the new year here at Traackr, we are also happy to welcome our first official influencer of 2010. With an impressive bio at the ripe age of 36, this honor is well-deserved - read on to see why.

However, as impressive as his bio may be, what truly earned Chris the spot of the first influencer of 2010 was the fact that he has shown up in Traackr a-lists spanning from small business marketing to Iphone apps to weight management to virtualization. There is absolutely no common link between any of those topics - aside from Chris.

Chris demonstrates passion and has strong involvement in things that impact his everyday life - no matter how unrelated they may be. This is what makes him so unique and why he is Traackr’s Influencer of the Month. His more than 75,400 Twitter followers, 8,400 fans on Facebook and 91,000 devoted YouTube viewers (who have exceeded  66,000,000 views as of December 2009) may be part of the reason too.

Chris’s cunning personality and strong opinions have helped him build an impressive following and strong online presence which led him to becoming the successful online influencer and entrepreneur he is today. We truly look forward to what Chris, along with the rest of the online influencer community, have in store for the new year!

It’s that time again! The Traackr team is excited to highlight the Influencer of the Month for the “ho-ho” holiday month of December. Read on!

Who is Anthony Padilla?

Most 22-year-olds are finishing up college and getting ready to enter the grueling work world of 9-5 jobs, but not Anthony. Instead, he has led the path of the new celebrity in entertainment – YouTube Celebrities. Ask most tweens, teens and even 20-something’s and they will probably know of Anthony’s humorous antics and good looks from his comedy duo YouTube channel, Smosh, which he co-creates with childhood friend Ian Hecox.

We first spotted Anthony in his number one influencer spot on our teen male influencers list. Since then, we have been amazed by his dedication to the online space and his communities, his clever comedy skits - one of which was awarded YouTube’s Best Comedy Award in 2006 - and his keen sense of knowing exactly what it takes to become an online super star.

Since Smosh’s beginning in 2005, it has become the third most subscribed to YouTube channel and continues to rise in popularity among the younger generations. It was this popularity that landed the duo among YouTube’s initial participants in their partnership revenue-sharing program in 2007. Interestingly enough, one of the revenue generating agreements that came out of the program was a sponsorship deal with Live Video - one of YouTube’s competitors. It’s not everyday you can say you got paid by one of your host’s competitors with everyone in agreement!

In addition to the more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube and almost 300 million views of their videos (that’s right 300,000,000 views!), Smosh has large amounts of followers among their multiple social media platforms, some of which include more than 45,000 followers on Twitter and more than 150,000 friends on MySpace. Anthony and Ian have even been business saavy enough to build what some might call an empire with the Smosh name, including t-shirts, posters, gift cards, games and contests.

Most importantly, however, is that aside from the Smosh name, Anthony has done very well with his own name by creating a fan base that is happy to follow his funny attitude and charming smile anywhere he pops up. Proof is in the numbers - he has been able to accumulate over 30,000 followers on Twitter, over 2,700 fans on Facebook and over 1,300 subscribers on his personal YouTube channel.

It is the amazing reach Anthony has throughout multiple major social media platforms-whether it is through his own name or Smosh’s-that got him a spot as our December influencer. At only 22 years old, Anthony demonstrates the true epitome of the power of online influencers and possibly even the future of the entertainment industry.

Fast Company (soap box)

We read through this month’s Fast Company cover story, “Mr. Social: Ashton Kutcher Plans to Be the Next New-Media Mogul” and felt the need to discuss it. And after having read through a summary of the impact Anthony Padilla has had on the online space for a number of years, we think you might feel the same way. So please, join us on our soap box.

We just couldn’t help but notice that many of the things Fast Company said Ashton is “leading the way for” are many things influencers like Anthony have already accomplished. For instance, Ashton has been filming a mini-series that he hopes will evolve into a go-to source for brands to spread their message through influencer marketing. Well, the Smosh channel is filled with sponsored episodes that reach more than one million viewers. These are numbers that would have late night show hosts crying in joy over.  The fact of the matter is that Anthony has been doing many of these “new media mogul” things for years, and he shows no signs of slowing down. We believe the integration of new media and entertainment is already here and it began with influencers like Anthony - it didn’t begin and will not end with Ashton. So, can we get Anthony and maybe even his comedy duo, Ian, on the cover of Fast Company stat?

Ok, we’ll step off our soap box now.

Since releasing our Top 25 Authority List for the PR2.0 space, we’ve had a great response and received some very good questions.

We have decided to share the most frequently asked questions and our answers here for the benefit of everyone interested.

Question:  How did you determine what “PR moving forward” means?

This is a very legitimate question. Traackr’s search technology for influencers is keyword-based (think of it as a complex Google query), so we have to input a series of keywords that are relevant to the search we’re conducting to go fetch blog posts, tweets, videos, etc.

These keywords play a very important role in helping Traackr find the right people but also in driving our Relevance score which computes the frequency of appearance of keywords in the influencer’s online contribution, calculates the ratio of posts or videos containing the keywords vs. those from the same author that don’t, and even identifies where these keywords appear (title of a video, tag in a blog post, etc.).

We also categorize keywords in different buckets, as not all keywords (or keyword combinations) are equal. Words in the 1st, or Most Relevant, bucket are weighed more heavily than words in the subsequent buckets.  So, authors that more often use the keywords from the 1st bucket end up with a higher Relevance score and, as a result, a higher overall Influence rating.

Question:  What are the keywords you used for this “PR moving forward” list?

Here are the keywords that drove the PR2.0 search:

Most Relevant (bucket #1)

• #PR
• “PR 2.0”
• PR OR “Public Relations” AND (“social media”, engagement, SEO)
• Relationship AND “social media”
• Relationships AND “social media”
• “conversational marketing”
• “social media release”
• “social media outreach”
• “online influence”
• influencer
• influencers
• “digital influence”
• “digital influencers”

Very Relevant (bucket #2)

• PR OR “Public Relations” AND (pitch, pitching, relationship, relationships, maketing, communication, campaign, sustainability, “client relations”, “media relations”, journalists, “press release”, clients, “client services”)
• “PR Pro”
• “PR Professional”
• “public relations”
• #marcomm
• #communication

Excluded keywords

• #PRJobs
• Job
• Jobs
• su.pr
• coupon
• coupons

The exclude keywords are important to clean out the junk that comes with any online search as well as to refine a search.

If you have thoughts on additional keywords you believe we should have included or think that some of the ones we are using don’t make sense, we’d love to hear your thoughts and we’ll test your suggestions to see if we could include them in the updated PR list we plan to release on a regular basis.

Question:  How come some people on your list are not members of the major PR associations?

Well, you’d really have to ask them, not us…

More seriously though, our influencer search process does not discriminate based on geography, profession, socio-demographics, or even the stand of the authors on issues. All that we are looking for are people who talk about “PR 2.0″ issues and have managed to build a substantial participatory audience listening and responding to what they have to say.

Our experience working with clients in many industries, geographies, and sets of issues is that these unexpected authorities we manage to identify are very often the wild cards in our lists because they tend to shed a different light on the issues at hand and also too often get overlooked.

Question:  Why do you have in your list someone who hasn’t blogged in a year?

Excellent question, we’re glad some of you are paying attention to detail! You’re actually touching on something very important to us.

At Traackr, we believe that blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are means to an end, communication tools, nothing more, nothing less. The people behind these tools is what matters to us a great deal. We find that on average, an influencer identified by Traackr will be active on 4 to 5 different platforms and present on many more where he/she won’t be as active. Though our feed aggregation process is likely to find these sites where someone is present but not very active, those sites are not included in our ultimate scoring engine, and so the other platforms in which they are still active must carry a score high enough to keep them on the list .

This is a very long way to simply say that if an influencer on this list is not an active blogger, it simply means that she/he managed to migrate her/his activity on a different site. My hunch: check Twitter.

Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have more questions, we’d be happy to address them!

Thanks to everyone who sent in submissions for our PR2.0 influencer contest.  It was a very interesting experiment for us and we’re very happy for the participation.  Thanks!

The List…Revealed

Without further ado (drumroll please), we can now release the “unmasked”, totally exposed list of the Top 25 Authorities moving PR Forward.  As you can see, the Top 5 Authorities moving PR Forward are:

#5 - Steve Rubel

#4 - Jason Falls

#3 - Sarah Evans

#2 - Brian Solis

#1 - Chris Brogan

Surprised (we were)? Excited?  Disappointed?

Contest Winner

The entries were very interesting.  It was actually difficult to determine the winner with several top contributors offering very similar pics.  With that said, there was not one single entry that picked everyone on the Top 5 — let alone in the right order.  However, the one who came the closest was the team at @PerkettPR (led by @pprlisa) who guessed the Top 3 correctly…making them the closest of anyone in the contest.  So, congratulations @pprlisa and the rest at @PerkettPR — we will be forwarding your $50 Amazon gift card to Lisa’s email today!  Nice job!

In case you are interested here are the % of submissions that selected the Top 5 (respectively):

• Chris Brogan - apx 65%
• Brian Solis - apx 60%
• Sarah Evans - apx 35%
• Jason Falls - apx 20%
• Steve Rubel - apx 20%

Interesting stuff.  A couple of people who were mentioned by many of the submissions were Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch) and Richard MacManus (founder of Mashable)…this is an important point as it refers to Traackr’s methodology.  While both of these blogs are extremely influential — what we do at Traackr is locate the specific author on each site who is most relevant to the topic at hand.  In this case, Sarah Evans is the most relevant Mashable author.  Knowing this is very, very powerful for those trying to gain insight into the influencers in a specific topic area.

One Final Note

After releasing the initial list earlier this week, we received some (passionate) comments about #15: Strumpette (aka Amanda Chapel) is a fictional character that has been created by a PR professional (some say there are multiple authors behind Strumpette) to speak AGAINST social media and the traditional pro-PR 2.0 rhetoric.  So, some people thought she should be removed from the list.   We respectfully disagree.  It happens quite often with our work that influencers from both sides of an issue make the list.  It is important to note that at Traackr we believe that the sentiment of one’s content does not drive or define influence.  The fact that they built a following listening to, engaging with them and amplifying the signal defines their influence.  In fact, we would argue that knowing the influential voices on the other side of the aisle are just as important in almost any circumstance. As for the “fake” identity, Traackr’s philosophy is always to try to identify the person behind the content, rather than a mere URL or Twitter handle. That said, non of our geeky technologists have a background on intelligence gathering or P.I., and nor should they: if influencers we find don’t feel comfortable sharing their “real” name on their public feeds, we won’t look for it - this is really no different from the use of aliases by authors, actors and journalists we have come to accept for centuries.

With all that said — congrats to PerkettPR and thanks to everyone for participating!

We are very excited to release a rare public Traackr A-List today :  The Top 25 Authorities who are moving PR forward.  Check out the list here.  Be aware, however, that if you look at the list now you will notice that the Top 5 Influencers on this list have been hidden.  Why is that, you may ask?  Well because we wanted to have some fun with this list before the upcoming holiday season.  We decided to have a contest and invite everyone to make their best guess as to who they think are the TOP 5 Authorities on our list.

Here’s how the contest is going to work:

The Contest

Rather than just giving away the entire list, we want everyone to work for it a bit.  Not only is there a great prize for the winner, but there are a whole lot of bragging rights too!

Dates:

Opened – Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 8 a.m. EST

Closed – Friday, Nov. 20 at 12 p.m. EST

Winner announced – Friday, Nov. 20 at 1 p.m. EST (Winner announced on the Traackr blog)

E-mail answers to: PRcontest@traackr.com

Make sure to give your answers in ranking order 1-5.  Also make sure that you offer the REAL NAMES of the individuals (as opposed to their blog URL or Twitter handle — we don’t believe influencers are defined by any single platform)

Prize: A $50 Amazon gift card - just in time for the holidays!

Tips from the team: The three Traackr measurement scores, reach resonance and relevance, displayed on the list, can help you make an educated guess. Another tip? You don’t necessarily need to be in PR to move PR forward. The first person to submit the correct answer wins!

Traackr’s Methodology

Traackr’s Authority List is developed through a methodical approach that finds meaning in the massive amount of data that is collected and shared throughout the online space. In other words, we take all the jumble on the Internet regarding online influencers, and turn it into meaningful, understandable and useful information for our clients. Through this approach, we identify the most influential individuals who play a pivotal role in a specific space - in this case, moving the PR world into the next millennium.

*Note: While all of these influencers may not be PR professionals themselves, they still play a significant role online influencing the profession.

Like all of our searches, identifying the top 25 PR influencers began with a keyword-based search using industry terminology. Our main focus for this search was around the PR 2.0 space, so the keywords were made up of more recent terminology trends among public relations professionals. Based on the data received from this keyword search, the influencers were ranked using Traackr’s scoring algorithms; reach (the ability to generate views), resonance (the ability to spark and propagate conversations) and relevance (the ability to cover specific topics or a market).

This methodical approach encompasses all of the social media platforms from Twitter to Facebook through Friendfeed and blogs, which is what makes Traackr’s lists so relevant and useful. Traackr sees the value in each online space, and by focusing on numerous platforms, sometimes it enables us to identify influencers who are making huge contributions to their field but may not have been recognized yet. Our good friends at Corporate Eye put it best; we spot the “king-whisperers”.

If you have any other specific questions about our methodology in regards to this list, just send us a note.

Good luck making your picks.  Don’t forget, we will be releasing the final list this Friday at 1 p.m. EST, right here on this blog…

Last month we decided to start an Influencer of the Month feature on our blog.  Then, of course things got crazy around here and we didn’t have time to release our Influencer of the Month for October as planned.  So, we’re going to do it now — in the middle of November.

A bit late on our end, for which we apologize.  We will definitely get them out on time in the future (last Friday of every month).  However, please do not allow our tardiness to devalue the talent of our Influencer for October: Brett McKay.

Who is Brett McKay?

We had no idea until he showed up on one of our recent Authority Lists for online DIY influencers. Brett appeared on the list because of his work on his primary blog —  The Art of Manliness (apx 150k monthly unique visitors).  Brett’s blog is a smart, fun portal for all things Man-ly.  He’s done a tremendous job building a brand around the Art of Manliness — as well as a loyal audience.  He furthers his work on his blog through two twitter accounts, @brettmckay (1,500+ followers, 700+ re-tweets) and @artofmanliness (5,800 followers, 1,100+ re-tweets); a YouTube channel; two Facebook pages, his (631 friends) & Art of Manliness (7,800+ friends); LinkedIn; and a StumbledUpon account.

One of the reasons why we’ve selected Brett this month is for his skills and use of multiple social media tools/platforms.  That is important for any influencer we consider.

Another reason we like Brett is because he is in the midst of translating his online success to additional offline success with the release of his first book – The Art of Manliness (what else?).  From all accounts the book is doing well.  For us at Traackr, this is a very exciting trend that we continue to see…and celebrate.  More and more, people are building their brands online, through social media, and creating value, enterprises…empires offline.  Brett is one of the early ones and we’re very happy to see it happen!

With all that said, the real reason we chose Brett for our Influencer of the Month for October is that the Art of Manliness wasn’t his first successful online endeavor.  Not at all.  While a law student at the University of Tulsa, Brett started and built a very successful blog, The Frugal Law Student, which was named the top student blog by the ABA Journal in ‘07.  This is what we call a true online talent.

Our decision to select Brett as our Influencer for this month is not really about his current online endeavor and success.  We’ve selected him because he personifies one of Traackr’s fundamental beliefs in this whole new world — the idea that the individuals who generate influence online are talented people.  The content they create is very much secondary to that.  It doesn’t matter if they are talking about Ramen noodles or straight razors, knitting patterns or new marketing strategies.  It’s the person doing the talking which is where the influence is derived.  It’s why we started Traackr.  Brett (and many others) is proving our point with every post…

Thanks and congratulations to Brett McKay for being named Traackr’s Influencer of the Month for October!

DS

*by the way, here’s a good post from Chris Brogan (Content is Not King) which helps illustrate this last point.  The comments for this post are great as well…

Just wanted to thank, Lucy - a new Traackr friend working for a UK-based business called Corporate Eye, who wrote a great blog post on Traackr’s A-List this morning.  It’s always nice to see a customer (in this case a potential customer) articulating your value better than you do!

I really like Lucy’s “Gaining the Ear of the King” concept.  Well, done…

Thanks, Lucy!

With every A-List that we produce for our clients, we become more and more impressed with the people that are making waves and driving influence online.  They are creative.  They are active.  And they take advantage of every tool at their disposal to keep their audiences engaged, interested and coming back for more.  These are talented people that will continue to play a pivotal role in the future of entertainment, communication, marketing, news, business, etc.  We feel very fortunate to see all of these talents cross through our reports every day and we felt the need to acknowledge and celebrate some of these influencers.

We will start doing this through an INFLUENCER OF THE MONTH feature on this blog.  What this means is that at the end of every month, we will feature one influencer who appeared on one of our A-Lists who we found to be particularly special.  At the end of the year, maybe we’ll even put out a Traackr INFLUENCER OF THE MONTH wall calendar

What criteria will we use to determine the influencer of the month?

Great question.  While our algorithms and process to identify influencers is very scientific, our process to recognize an Influencer of the Month will be part science, part subjective.  We are always surprised by the creativity of the influencers, so we’d rather not have a rigid set of standards which defines an Influencer of the Month.  That wouldn’t be as much fun…  With that said, there are a few things that will define our criteria:

• First and foremost, they have to meet our scientific criteria of “Influence.”  By virtue of the fact that they showed up on one of our Authority Lists, they have passed this test
• They also have to have a nice balance between Reach, Resonance and Relevance — our three main Influence metrics
• They must present an interesting perspective or focus for their content
• Finally, they must effectively use of multiple social media platforms — we like to see influencers who utilize multiple tools to reach and engage their audiences

Other than that, we’ll play it by ear.  We’re looking forward to this feature.  We think it will be a lot of fun and a great way to give these influencers more deserved recognition.  We hope it’s fun and interesting for our readers as well.  Tune in on the last Friday of each month for our INFLUENCER OF THE MONTH.

**Disclaimer:  October’s Influencer will be announced on Monday, Nov. 2nd.  We wanted to get this announcement out first…

Cheers!

We are very happy and grateful for the response that we’ve had since launching out Authority List (A-List) product at DemoFall09 last week.  It’s been quite a whirlwind experience for us. We’re even more happy to see so many progressive, like-minded PR and marketing folks out there who are attacking this new world head-on!

Since last week, we’ve had a lot of requests for a demo of our A-List product.  A lot.  And many more come in every day.  Many people have request simple, free “demo accounts” which will allow them to “play around.”  Unfortunately, we don’t offer these kinds of accounts right now…for a few reasons.  Most importantly, we want to make sure to provide our new customers with the right education before they start using the A-List.  The process of finding influencers is not fully “intuitive” (yet) and we want everyone to have a full understanding of how it works.

With that said, we have decided to hold several group demos of our A-List via web conference every week.  We have schedule the first two sessions this week.  Info is as follows:

WHAT DAY?:         Wednesday, Sept. 30th AND Friday, Oct. 2nd
WHAT TIME?:       12:00-1:00pm EST

The demo part of these sessions will only last around 20 minutes.  We will spend the rest of the time answering questions. You can join the video conference by going to the following URL and using the following passcode.  You can also use the below number to call in and receive the audio portion:

URL:                www.yuuguu.com/share
PIN:                 281616
PHONE:         (712) 432 2827
PIN:                 281616

Once you have a chance to see and understand what makes Traackr unique, we can discuss projects for you and your firm in a follow-up call.

We are excited to speak with everyone this week and even more excited to work with you in the near future!

(by the way, the conference call service will max out at 30 participants, so make sure to get there early.  we could easily “sell out” for each of these sessions)

Thanks again for your interest in Traackr.

We are back from DEMO. What a fantastic event! Thank you Chris Shipley for inviting us and good luck in your future endeavor (this was Chris last year, after 13 years,  as an executive director for DEMO).

The format for the event, 6 minutes on stage, puts all the companies on an even playing field and creates a true sense of “we are all on the same boat”. The energy was terrific and you could see that all the presenters were excited about launching their new product (often the results of months of work). Companies were coming from all over the world and took the stage with a passion (even if it also meant being very nervous for most).

At DEMO, we launched our new product, Traackr’s Authority List (or A-List for short). Take a look at our presentation on stage.

We also got some great press coverage.  Check out these articles about Traackr’s Authority List: Mashable, Venture Beat, France 24

Thanks again to DEMO, the great DEMO team and the rest of the DemoFall09 alumn…