TRAACKR

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!