TRAACKR

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!