Traackr was one of the very early market-makers in the influencer space and, yet, we never gave into the hype of the influencer conversation, promising a silver bullet that was going to solve influencer communication for communication professionals. We actually never understood those who did, whether vendors, agencies or brands, because by making themselves or others believe that this was easy, they tremendously hurt their chances of succeeding (who’d want to run a marathon without being told??!).

We have always said that finding, analyzing, monitoring and engaging influencers is HARD WORK. It can yield amazing results as many of our clients have proven time and time again, but it takes effort, craft, and, yes, the right toolset. We have never sold Traackr as the Holy Grail to our clients; our promise has been to be the best platform on the market to accompany their efforts towards high-yield high-return communication programs with influencers.

Another critical element of our approach from very early on was that we never believed that there would ever be “one social media platform to rule them all.” Instead of trying to build a platform that did a little bit of everything from social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, influencer search, to social CRM, etc., we focused on our craft, influencer search, and made it easy for our partners and customers to integrate our influencer data with a solution that catered to their business.

This approach has paid off in more ways than we could have hoped. For one thing, it gave us a sense of focus that enabled us to leap ahead of anyone else on our core expertise of influencer discovery (to my knowledge, we have come ahead in every single due diligence exercise conducted by prospective customers). But maybe even more importantly, this approach has enabled our partners and customers to be creative in ways we never expected. They wanted to exploit the value of the data generated by Traackr and built synergetic ensembles of data, revealing new pockets of value that they identify and build on from.

In this context, last week Engage121, a leading social media platform with a focus on point-of-sale, has announced their integration with Traackr. We have never focused specifically on use cases for our search technology for retail but we now have a partner who is bringing all the pieces together for that market. In all likelihood, they will be able to unleash value from our data for this market in better ways than we could. I’m sure that the partnership and their input will in turn help us build smarter influencer searches.

In the months to come, don’t be surprised as you see more announcements like this one coming out of Traackr, as we’re expanding our reach and leveraging the expertise of business partners to make Traackr a part of many new uses cases on how to create value from influencer and expert search. So stay tuned…

Tags: Engage121, expert search, influence communication, influencer search, retail influence, sentiment analysis, Social CRM, social media monitoring

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 12:00 pm and is filed under For the Traackr Expert, MarCom 2.0, Technology, This We Believe, We Search, We Score, We Rant. 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.