We are really looking forward to the busy week ahead of us and we had to make sure to fill you in! Pierre-Loic and Derek are speaking at two awesome and very relevant events, so be sure to check them out. We hope to see you there!

How to Identify the Influencers in your Marketplace to Score More Coverage and Drive Sales

Blasting press releases to a massive database is becoming less important than identifying key people in your marketplace – the people influencing consumers and journalists. The silos between marketing disciplines are quickly coming down, creating a more complex, multi-channel dynamic that has left companies unsure about where to focus their marketing and PR programs and how to measure success. Find out how to better understand these changing dynamics to identify the key influencers in your marketplace-using a quantitative, data-driven approach-and learn how your own company or clients can become influencers in their own right.

This Ragan webinar is being presented in conjunction with Eastwick Communications, a well-respected, forward-thinking PR agency on the West Coast and a great client of ours.

Where: Ragan.com Online Webinar

When: 9/28/10; 2 – 3:15 p.m. PST; 5 – 6:15 p.m. EST

To sign up, click here.

Third Tuesday Measurement Matters Conference

Measurement matters. It’s how we know whether our efforts are having any impact. It’s how we know whether we’re making progress toward a goal or whether we’re stalled. We measure what’s important to us. We measure to understand what is going on. We measure to provide insight into what works and what doesn’t. Anyone who uses social media for their work or is serious about it must understand what we can and should measure and how we can do it. That’s where Third Tuesday Measurement Matters comes in.

Where: Toronto, ON Canada

When: 9/28/10; 8 a.m. – 7 p.m.

To sign up, click here.

Pierre’s speaking times:

12:10-12:30; Leading Edge Solutions to Social Media Measurement Challenges

4:50-5:30; Vendor Spotlight Panel with PostRank and Radian6 – What’s next? What keeps the providers of Measurement and Metrics awake at night?

If you won’t be able to make it to these events, which would be a huge bummer, we’ve still got you covered (as always). We’ll be sure to post highlights from both of the events right here, so check back later next week.

Even though summer may be ending, we still have something to celebrate – the launch of TRAACKR subscription! AND we are offering any TRAACKR client (new or existing) 20% off any new project launched in our A-List  Platform for the month of September!

As you can probably tell, it’s been a very busy season at TRAACKR. We have spent our summer scouring the web for top influencers and further building our A-List application into the web’s most robust Influencer Platform.

TRAACKR’S SUBSCRIPTION PLATFORM
We are very excited to release the first version of TRAACKR’s subscription platform with two major new features:

DYNAMIC A-LISTS
In order to match the ever-changing and evolving influencer landscape, all TRAACKR A-LISTS are now dynamic and fluid.

What this means is that TRAACKR clients will now see their A-LISTS refreshed on a weekly basis. Updated scores, adjusted influencer rankings, new influencers and refreshed content every week.

With dynamic TRAACKR A-LISTS, you will always be up-to-date on those who have the greatest impact on the success of your campaigns or business.

INFLUENCER MONITORS
Are you tired of monitoring every online mention of your brand and manually trying to understand which ones matter?  TRAACKR’s Influencer Monitors enable you to filter the noise by those who matter most.

TRAACKR’s Influencer Monitors track the influencers on each of your A-LISTS and allow you to discover and measure their mentions of your brand over time.  On a weekly basis, you can see how many mentions your A-LIST generated; which influencers are talking about you (and which are not); what they’ve said; and where they’ve posted.  Over time, your Influencer Monitor will track mentions of your brand and display it on a main heartbeat chart.

If you would like to learn how you can get started with TRAACKR and uncover those online contributors which matter most to you and your business, click here and we will schedule a demo.

We sincerely want to thank all of our new and old clients for your continued support and belief in TRAACKR – we couldn’t do it without you!

You can also check out the press release here – http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/InfluencerPlatform/prweb4513094.htm.

Welcome to the first post of our series on measuring online influence. As I mentioned in the prelude to this series, we have been working on this topic for quite some time now and have learned a few things along the way. We figured we’d share some of them here, starting with the set of principles that lays the foundation of our scoring system. Each of these principles have shaped our scoring system and, in many ways, our business.

1- A definition for online influence

It turns out the dictionary has a pretty good definition of influence:

Influence, unlike popularity, is action-driven. Someone’s level of influence is gauged by others’ actions and reactions.  It’s important to recognize that we all influence each other’s decisions all the time, as mutual influence is at the core of our social fabric. For the purpose of our work though, we have focused our attention on those who exert a disproportionate influence on others.

We have also limited our field of study to online influence. What we mean by that is we only process and score those participating in online conversations in some way.

2- People influence people

This simple statement may be the most fundamental decision we made when we first started the company: behind every blog post, tweet, video, there is a person. This person – not his or her channel – is the one influencing their audience, network, or community.

We built Traackr around the idea that we needed to find individuals, not bloggers, YouTubers, or Tweeters.

This principle came with a set of challenges and benefits. A couple of the challenges were finding the individuals behind multi-author channels and reconstructing their full digital footprint as well as normalizing data from very diverse sources. The benefits kicked in once we solved these challenges and the richness of the data collected made our analysis and scoring much more reliable, therefore improving our ability to deal with missing data points.

3-  Influence is always contextual

Context is everything when it comes to measuring someone’s influence. Context is in many ways a proxy for expertise and trust. Getting people to make decisions based on a third party’s judgment requires that they trust this third party. Facebook will tell you that your Facebook friends constitute your trust network. We challenge this notion. Our data shows that your social tie to a person is only one element (and not the most reliable) of trust. Expertise vetted by the community on a specific topic, aka context (or relevance), is a much stronger candidate for trust.

The fact that we only measure influence in context is one of the founding principles of Traackr’s scoring system: the better our users define the context of what they are trying to accomplish, the more accurate the results of our influencer search will be.

4-  Influence becomes accurate when measured over time

Our scoring system is set to predict future patterns of success (influence) using historical data to determine these patterns. As we gather more historical data over time and are able to track influencer scores over time for a specific search, our algorithms become smarter and better able to accurately measure future results.

Measuring influence over time has also taught us that influence around a specific issue or conversation is never static and keeps changing. So unless you are only interested in a topic at one point in time, it’s important to keep your pulse on your influencer list, as you’ll see people coming in and out of fashion week after week.

The necessity to track all the stats and content of influencers over time has led us to major technical architecture decisions towards the adoption of big table data technology. To give you a sense of the size of what we’re talking about here: we’re tracking over 10MB of data per influencer (avg. 1,000 posts, 35 different stats across 9 platforms).

5-   No one size fits all when it comes to influencers

I’m probably one of the few people out there who doesn’t worship Malcolm Gladwell (though I did read all of his books..) but I have to give him credit for the way he defined influencer archetypes in the Tipping Point: the salesman, maven, and connector are a very simple way to remind ourselves that influence is multi-dimensional. Attempts to measure influence that don’t recognize the diversity in the way people influence others is bound to fail.

Right now, we’re using 3 separate metrics to ‘triangulate’ our influence score. Reach (salesman), Resonance (connector), and Relevance (maven) represent our 3 scores. We’re not done though. There will be more dimensions we’ll add to our scoring system to further represent the richness of what we’re attempting to quantify.

These five principles constitute the foundations of our scoring system and even though they have each evolved and matured as we have become smarter, they have each been a fairly stable base for us to build upon.

So, let’s begin this conversation. What is your baseline for influence measurement?

My team has been nagging me for weeks (ok, maybe months) to write a post explaining our scoring methods. As I’m finally starting to write, I’m asking myself why I have been skillfully resisting this moment until now.

Several companies in our space have been very vocal lately claiming to have cracked the nut of online influence and have shared with their audience a mix of very high level information and a formula magically spitting out an influencer score. In some ways, I think this is what my sales and marketing team was expecting from me: share with the world Traackr’s silver bullet to calculate online influence. I may disappoint them today because it’s not what I’m about to do.

I have too much respect for our readers, clients, and anyone truly interested in our field of study to deceive them by sharing platitudes about influence, a seemingly complex algorithm, implicitly asking readers to trust that if we can agree on the words, surely the formula must be accurate…

Right?

At Traackr, we have probably done more data collection, crunching and analysis, work building and iterating on our algorithms, and more testing and refactoring of our assumptions than anyone out there. Yet, I’d be the first to say that our measure of online influence is still an approximation (though getting better as we collect more data and become smarter on how to process it).

So, here is the disappointing truth for those in search of a silver bullet to measure online influence: it doesn’t exist, there is no one formula that will reveal the secret of online influence. Our algorithms are multi-dimensional, they are complex and they keep evolving. The data that goes through the grinder (aka our scoring engine) is massive, noisy, and sometimes incomplete. Our scoring system takes charge of the filtering, normalization, and processing of this data. As our Director of Product, a former scientist at the European Synchrotron*, would attest; “there is nothing simple about our scoring system that can be summarized in a couple of sentences and a shiny formula.”

Just like for any top-notch technology (call it Google Search or the Mercedes SLS), our goal is to make the input and output of our technology so intuitive for our users that we can leave the complexity of the work to scientists and technologists.

Now, don’t get me wrong here; I’m not saying that we shouldn’t discuss Traackr’s scoring for online influence because it’s too complicated. I’m actually suggesting the exact opposite: I would like to initiate a series of posts and hopefully spark a conversation on measuring online influence. The topic is very rich and raises many questions. We have worked on this more than most and will be bringing our point of view on the issue, but want to welcome other perspectives, experiences, and reactions.

If this series generates interest from the community, we’ll expand the conversation and create a “geek corner” to discuss machine learning, adaptive algorithms, analysis of big table data, and other tools that science and technology have brought us to become smarter and more accurate in our measurements.

My plan to get this going is to start by writing a piece on the underlying principles behind Traackr’s scoring system to measure online influence. If you have topics in mind you’d like to be discussed in the context of this conversation, please share and we’ll see if we have something interesting to contribute.

* The European Synchrotron is a research institute conducting cutting-edge science on photons

Online influence is a hot topic these days. Take, for instance,  Fast Company’s Influencer Project or Brian Solis’s recent blog post, “What Makes an Influencer?” Not only has there been a lot more talk about influence, but there is visible exploration of figuring out what it really means to be an influencer.

Anyone in the social media space is well aware of the backlash that came after only a few hours of the Influencer Project going live. Most of the arguments surrounded the idea that influence, as far as this campaign was concerned, was really a vote of popularity. While I do have to give props to Fast Company for implementing such a brilliant marketing campaign (if you didn’t know who they were, you probably do now), it is nice to know that the general public does recognize a popularity contest over the definition of true influence.

So, back to the question, “WHAT is influence and WHO defines that role?” Well, there is probably not one decisive answer – afterall, influence is very dynamic – but our constant work with influencers from the web has provided us with some insight.

Jason Falls pretty much hits it dead on in his blog post, “Look for Trust, It’s About Trust.” Influence is mainly about two things – context and trust. An influencer is a person (not a corporate blog or publication ) who interacts with and maintains trust among his community and, eventually, gains the ability to influence change within their community. These things happen by becoming a sort of expert in the context they write or talk about. In a certain context, Pete Cashmore or Ashton Kutcher could be considered influential, but in another context, Brett McKay or John Sumser may be more influential. It is all based on what type of person you are looking for and the type of people you are trying to reach. Within their communities, any one of these people are extremely influential whether they have millions of Twitter followers or thousands.

So what do you think? What makes someone a true influencer?