Earlier this month Fresh Networks, a UK-based social media agency, put out a fairly robust report comparing how the various social media monitoring tools determine, score, display and rank online influencers.  Much to our surprise (as arguably the leading & coolest influencer platform), we weren’t approached to participate in this study.  We’re not clear about the reason for this oversight, but instead of getting angry and/or complaining about it, we decided to help.

Instead of trying to convince the good people at Fresh Networks to revise their report to include the TRAACKR Platform, we decided to do it for them.  This post will represent an “amendment” to their report – adding a new section for the TRAACKR platform.  We’ll try to imitate the style of this report as best as possible so to create a seamless transition between the main report and this lowly amendment.

[*TRUE CONFESSIONS:  It may seem like we will be putting words in the mouths of the authors of the original report during this post, but I can assure you....well, never mind.  I guess that's kind of the point.  Cheers!]

For the sake of this article, we will run the same influencer search detailed in the report (organic baby food influencers).  You can see a public version of this list here (just the top10 is in the public list).

7.11   TRAACKR (we will be the 11th tool profiled in this report)

TRAACKR has always focused on finding, scoring and tracking top online influencers in any conversation.  From the time the founders wrote the original code back in 2006, they operated under the belief that PEOPLE, more than content (and more than specific URLs), are what make the social web go ’round.  TRAACKR has always worked toward finding the people behind the content of the social web.  But not just any people — the ones that matter most to any conversation.  Admittedly, this proved to be a significant challenge, but through a lot of hard work and smart technology, they have built the most focused and actionable influencer platform available.

7.11.2  Setting up the search

Because TRAACKR’s tool is 100% focused on locating and tracking influencers, setting up an influencer search is very easy.

When you set up a search in TRAACKR, you are able to use up to 50 keyword expressions (not just single keywords) to define the conversation in which you are interested.  This allows you to create a very robust search and effectively target the people for which you are looking.  The TRAACKR interface allows you to test each of your keyword expressions on blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr (which is pretty cool) before adding them to your query.

Once you add some good keywords to your query, the TRAACKR tool allows you to run a Preview of your list in order to get a taste for the types of people (ie – influencers) that your keywords generate.  Not only is this very helpful in the process of setting up a search (because it shows you where/when these people use the keywords), it is probably the coolest thing on the web because it is the only place where you can convert keywords into people.  Not individual pieces of content or webpages…but actual people.  Really cool.

Once you are done setting up your keyword list, you can choose to submit them to your TRAACKR account manager for their review/help or you can go ahead and launch your search.  Once you do this, you will get an immediate list of relevant influencers from TRAACKR’s index.  At the same time, the system launches a crawl of the social web to find more people for your list.  This process cannot be done in real time, so the results from the web are filtered into the list 24-48 hrs later.

7.11.3  The results

I reviewed my immediate list of influencers before the web results were integrated and thought it was great.  Once the web results were filtered in, however, it was tremendous.  The TRAACKR system provides the top 25 influencers identified for each search and what is great about the results coming from TRAACKR vs from other tools is that I don’t have to do any work to figure out who the influencers are.  They are delivered to me in a simple, elegant interface.  And to TRAACKR, influencers = people.  Not URLs.  The system never tells me that www.huffingtonpost.com is an influencer.  Instead it would find the author from the Huffington Post whom is most relevant to my search.

Each influencer is scored on three different metrics –

• Reach – audience size
• Resonance – audience engagement
• Relevance – how relevant they are to the conversation

This third metric (Relevance) is really unique to TRAACKR.  In TRAACKR, someone’s Relevance to a conversation is determined by a few major factors — (a) how often they use the keywords in your search; (b) the weight you put on each keywords; and (c) the number of “unique” keywords they use in their content.  This last piece (TRAACKR calls it their “Diversity index“) is very smart. The larger variety of keywords that an influencer uses from my search, the higher their relevance will be.  The people that I would intuitively call “highly relevant” to my search have the highest Relevance.

7.11.4  Drill down

You can quickly view your entire list of 25 influencers from your A-List page, but you can also dig deeper into each influencer in their detailed profile page.  This is where it gets most interesting.  For each influencer on my list, I can get a ton more information about them, including their full online footprint.  While this is really cool, what’s even more awesome is the fact that I can quickly filter through all the posts that they had posted (across their full online profile – blog, Twitter, YouTube, etc) using my keywords.  I can sort by date, by platform and even by individual keyword match.  This is incredibly useful and makes it infinitely simple to find what I am looking for.  For example, I could quickly see that Sandra Blum on my list mentioned ORGANIC “BABY FOOD” 11 times since June.

The list of people itself was very, very interesting. It presented people that were right on target, but at the same time there were some very interesting surprises.  For example, you wouldn’t necessarily look for men/fathers when looking for “Organic Baby Food” influencers, but this search uncovered Stewart Wright - a father who blogs about creating his own organic baby food at home.  Influencers like these are like little gems.  They represent the power of the three metrics that TRAACKR uses to “score” influence.  There are people on my list who are very relevant to the topic (but with lower Reach/Resonance) as well as people with large Reach/Resonance, but not terribly relevant to the topic.  This gives me a lot of flexibility in my analysis and strategy.

7.11.5  Monitoring the influencers

The next great thing about TRAACKR’s platform is that it doesn’t stop with locating the influencers in a conversation.  It also allows you to monitor the influencers on your list for when they mention any other specific keywords that you are interested in tracking.  For example, I set up a Monitor for “Earth’s Best” and several other baby organic food brands.  As soon as I created the monitor, the system produced a report covering the past 8 weeks of mentions from my influencers.  I can see how many mentions of these brands were generated by my influencers over the past 8 weeks as well as filter by each individual keyword.  This monitor will continue to monitor these influencers going forward.  The great thing about this monitor, is that is represents a GREAT way to filter the web by the people that matter most – providing a unique way to focus my efforts and energies.

7.11.6  Dynamic lists

The last exciting element to TRAACKR’s influencer lists is that they are dynamic and refresh themselves on a weekly basis.  Because conversations online are fluid and ever-changing, this feature allows us to me to make sure I am always up-to-date on those who matter in my topic area.  TRAACKR shows me trending information on each movement and calls out any New Influencer on my list on my account dashboard.  Bravo!

7.11.7  Why use TRAACKR to find influencers?

Well that’s simple.  Because the TRAACKR Platform was built, exclusively, for identifying and tracking online influencers.  It does this better than any other tool we looked at…

WINNER

Best influencer identification and monitoring platform.

Tags: fresh networks, influencer tools

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 at 9:10 am and is filed under MarCom 2.0, This We Believe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.