Today we are very excited to open yet another chapter in Traackr’s history with the launch of Traackr One – the web’s first marketplace for highly relevant lists of top, topical influencers. For us at Traackr, this is a major step toward our goal of redefining the web around the people that matter most…and one that will surely push the “online influencer” market to another level.

WHAT IS TRAACKR ONE?

Traackr One is the beginning of a true marketplace for lists of top influencers across all imaginable topics. You can think of Traackr One as an ‘iTunes‘ for influencer lists and it’s our goal to make it the go-to destination for top online influencers in a wide variety of topics. Looking for the top 50 influencers in hybrid car technology?  We’ve got a list for that. How about  the top US Campaign Finance Reform influencers?  There’s a list for that as well.  Baseball Sabermetrics influencers?  Yup, got that too.

Traackr One represents a big step for us at Traackr.  For the past 3 years, we have been working very hard building the most robust online influencer platform for bigger PR and social marketing pros.  And we have been very successful at this (if I don’t say so myself).  We have built a robust solution that is being used by some of the world’s biggest agencies and brands.

But over this time, we have had an enormous amount of interest from agencies and brands who understand the value of influential people to their work, but without the budget flexibility for our existing product. And this is exactly why we built Traackr One. In fact, it’s what I like most about Traackr One – it was built purely out of customer demand.  We felt strongly that it was time to give a much wider audience access to Traackr’s unique technology.

HOW DOES TRAACKR ONE WORK?

Traackr One is pretty self-explanatory.  It’s a self-serve marketplace.  Simply head over to www.traackrone.com and start searching for the lists you need. All A-Lists are organized by categories which you can search from the home page. You can also search with an open search box to find topics in which your are interested. Once you find a list in which you are interested, you can subscribe very easily with your credit card.

When subscribing to a list, you can do so on a monthly basis, or you can get access for 12-months at a heavily discounted rate. Once you subscribe, you will have access to the all the features described earlier.

WHAT ABOUT TRAACKR’S ENTERPRISE BUSINESS?

Have no fear, the release of Traackr One does not affect our dedication to our enterprise product in any way.  Traackr enterprise is still a must-have tool for big agencies and brands who need a more robust solution to truly capture their ideal influencers – and have the budgets to support it. We have big features in the works for our enterprise platform, and will continue to bring new and awesome capabilities to our existing and future users.

Thank you for continuing to support Traackr’s growth and expansion.  As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments (you can reach us at support [at] traackr [dot] com).

DS

Yesterday, Brian Solis from the Altimeter Group released a report on “The Rise of Digital Influence.”  You can see Brian’s post about it here and Techcrunch’s post here.

The timing is definitely right for this type of report and I think Brian does a nice job of summarizing the landscape at a high level.  Here are a few of the great points from Brian’s study:

• I really like his focus and understanding of “potential influence” vs “influence” (Brian refers to people’s “capacity to influence“ a couple times in his report).  We talk about this all the time at Traackr.  Understanding POTENTIAL influence is absolutely what we do.  Our thoughts on the topic can be found in this post.
• I also like Brian’s emphasis on the limitation of an influence “number” (he says, “Brands cannot afford to make marketing or engagement decisions based on scores alone“).  Again, another thing we have espoused since we launched Traackr.  A number does not represent actionable data.  In fact, we would argue it actually leads to the wrong actions.  More of our thoughts on this can be found here and here.
• His thoughts on engagement are also right on the money (“Thinking about the behavior or outcomes you wish to cause, it’s time to work backwards to find the right people and then develop a mutually beneficial engagement program.“).  Totally agree.
• And, of course, Brian’s suggested methodology for determining influence – combination of Reach, Resonance & Relevance, certainly rings a bell around our offices.  :)

An Unfortunately Shallow Look at Relevance

However, where Brian gets lazy in this report is in his categorization of “Relevance.”  To us, this is a major oversight – one that is a real diservice to the audience for this report (those professionals looking to create real business impact through social influence work).

Because above all else, RELEVANCE matters most.  Our firm belief (and one that is reiterated by our clients on a daily basis) is that when it comes to someone’s potential influence, RELEVANCE is the most actionable and important piece of data available.  It holds the key to someone’s potential influence; opinion; his/her willingness to talk to you; as well as the most effective way to engage with him/her.  Ultimately, one’s Relevance is the key to understanding WHO he/she is.

So, to say that all methods of calculating/determining someone’s Relevance on the social web are equal (as this report does) shows a very shallow understanding – not only of the technology behind these apps/products – but of their ultimate effectiveness.  To say that determining someone’s relevance to a topic by manually ‘tagging’ them with one of eight incredibly broad topics is the same as reindexing the web’s content around people and  tracking, indexing, relating, searching, scoring, hundreds of millions of posts in order determine someone’s influence based on complex keyword strings, is just wrong.  It’s shallow and it’s wrong.

Calling these methodologies equal is like comparing a road atlas with Google Maps. Related?  Sure.  But hardly the same thing…

I react to this oversight so strongly because Relevance is core to what we do here at Traackr.  And we know it’s what is most important to all of our clients.  The more shallow the methodology for determining Relevance in the context of a person’s influence, the more shallow the results are AND, most importantly, the more shallow your efforts will be.

Let’s be frank here.  Measuring and calculating a relatively accurate Reach & Resonance score on the social web, while not easy, isn’t the hard part.  It’s all about the Relevance.

Besides that….#propz to Brian for a nice, necessary piece.

DS

A client of ours recently told us:

“When I use general monitoring tools, I feel like I’m constantly on the defensive.  But when I use Traackr, I feel like I am playing offense again.”  

I thought this was a really interesting, insightful statement.  And I think it provides an important hint at the future for social media work.

To date, MONITORING has been at the heart of any work within social media.  It is a key task – maybe THE key task for most people working on the marketing/PR side of social.  There are two real reasons for this:

1.  THE VOLUME OF SOCIAL MEDIA DATA IS STAGGERING

Part of the issue is the sheer volume of content created and shared on social media.  It absolutely dwarfs the media activity of the pre-SM world (yes, young Traackr employees, there was a time when Facebook didn’t exist).   I remember when a HUGE weekly clip book contained a couple hundred articles.  Today, 10,000 social media mentions would be a slow week for some of the bigger brands (for some, this would be a slow DAY).  So, naturally, the amount of time and effort needed to monitor the vast activity on the social web is much greater than that which was needed in the pre-SM world.  At the same time…

2.  UNTIL RECENTLY, SM TOOLS HAVE FOCUSED EXCLUSIVELY ON MONITORING

The first wave of tools to address this social media market were built to solve this first, basic need – MONITORING the content of the social web.  The tools were essentially built as ‘Clipping Services 2.0.’ built to help PR/Marketers more efficiently access mentions of their products/brands across the social web.  Fair enough.  And not for nothing – these companies also did a very nice job of inciting fear among their potential clients  - “Missing a single post can destroy your business!” they SHOUTED, leading communication pros to believe that they had to track/pay attention to every, single piece of content on the web.

These two factors, together, helped to put MONITORING at the center of social media work.

The problem is that MONITORING only tells you about the things that have happened in the past.  It gives you great  access to YESTERDAY’S news, but the value of yesterday’s news is fairly limited.  The only thing you can really do with yesterday’s news is to…react to it.  Which puts you on defense.

So….like our client from earlier said, the more time you spend MONITORING (and with general monitoring tools), the more time you will spend playing defense.

IN PR, YOU WANT TO BE ON THE OFFENSIVE

I know what you’re going to say…What’s wrong with defense?  Doesn’t defense win championships??  Maybe in the NFL, but not in PR.  In PR, you want to be on the offensive.

This has been true since the beginning of PR.  In fact, one would argue that this is why PR was created.  PR was created to give you full control of your (or your client’s) message.  What it is, how it’s said, who hears it and when…basically everything.  In PR, the goal is to always be on the offensive.

WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?

So…the issue remains.  If MONITORING social media is the key activity for any social media initiative, but this activity forces you to spend most of your time on defense….how do you get back on offense?

In my humble (and completely biased) opinion, the key is stepping away from general monitoring (not completely, per say, but definitely a few steps away) and finding a solution that delivers the useful, actionable data.  To us at Traackr, the most important and most actionable piece of data you can derive from social media is WHO.  Information about people – the right people – is incredibly actionable.  With this information, you can do what our clients are doing every day – creating the right messaging & engagement strategies, engaging, inviting, collaborating, tracking, measuring, reporting, and succeeding.

In short — general social monitoring gives you access to YESTERDAY’s news.  Knowing the right people offers you the opportunity to become TOMORROW’s news.

Getting back on Offense.  Because, that’s what wins championships in this game  :)

DS

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been fortunate enough to spend time with some of PR’s top measurement minds – the likes of @kdpaine, @shonali, @webmetricsguru, and @tmarklein to name a few.  As a homage to these great measurement leaders, I thought I would share some of our own internal monitoring & measurement practices.

First of all, a little background on our PR/marketing efforts.  We’re a start-up. We’re small and nimble and have been bootstrapping for a while.  This means that our marketing/PR budget, while not $0, is certainly NOT high.  We don’t have an agency and don’t partake in any paid media efforts (partly due to budget reasons, but mostly by choice – we don’t really believe in paid media). Everything we do is focused on “earned media” and is handled in-house (mostly by the force known as @courtv).

As you can imagine, our marketing/PR efforts are centered around influencers.  From a very early stage, our strategy has been to identify the top influencers in the PR space (more specifically, those influencing conversations around PR & social media measurement) & develop relationships from which we all might benefit.

Many moons ago, we generated a dynamic list of the top influencers in our space.  Over time, we have added to this list, refined it, and customized it to make it our go-to list of influencers.  All of our marcomm efforts start with the people on this list.

WHAT WE MONITOR

Again, as a start-up, we don’t really have the resources for big, “general” monitoring efforts.  And even if we did, we probably wouldn’t prioritize it.  We’ve come to believe that general monitoring isn’t very valuable – especially for us.  We know that 70-80% of the content on the social web is junk (either literally junk/spam/spiders; or false positives; or simply unimportant) – so we don’t place a lot of value on scouring the web for every mention of certain keywords.

We, in part, built our Influencer Monitors to help with our own monitoring efforts.  We figured that if we had a targeted list of people that we cared about, it’d be valuable to know if and when they posted about us and/or our competitors.  And this is the foundation of our monitoring efforts.  With our Monitors, we get daily updates of any posts, from our influencers, in which they mention ‘Traackr’ or our competitors.  Between several of us on the team, we check in on this monitor every day.  Some posts require action, some are just informational.  But all are important.

Beyond this, we don’t do much else in the way of  monitoring.  Yes, we monitor Twitter for anyone mentioning Traackr (using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck) and @courtv still looks at Google alerts…but with much less frequency than she used to.  We have just found our Influencer Monitors to be much more powerful/efficient for us.

WHAT WE MEASURE

In terms of what we measure, we try to practice what the great Katie Paine preaches and focus on the things that matter most.  We focus on just a few things because, with our limited resources, we really need to limit our scope to what we consider either (a) actionable; or (b) correlated with the ultimate goal of our marcomm efforts – Incoming Sales Leads.

By far, the Number of Incoming Sales Leads is our most important metric and we measure it on a weekly basis.  The other things we measure include:

• Strength of our relationships with our key influencers
• Online mentions of our brand generated from our influencers
• Traffic to our dot-com site

We consider these things “building blocks.”  They represent things that are highly correlated with the number of incoming sales leads we get. They also are things on which we can have a fairly direct impact. Let’s take a closer look:

Thanks again to all the measurement minds that motivated this post and continue to help us refine our monitoring & measurement practice  

Just in time for our big splash at the PRSA International conference in Orlando, we are happy to release yet another significant enhancement to our A-List Influencer Platform – ANALYTICS.

As of today, all Traackr users (this means you — and if it doesn’t, it should )  can now access the Analytics Suite for every active campaign running in their account.  The Suite offers:

• Deeper insights into the people and data generated from your A-List(s)
• Even more information to use when designing and executing your influencer campaigns
• Four different insight categories; location, keywords, scores, sentiment

This release represents yet another step for our A-List platform, further securing its position as the most robust influencer platform for PR & Marketing professionals. With the introduction of analytics, all Traackr Campaigns now consist of three major elements: The A-List, Influencer Monitors and Analytics.  Pretty cool.

FOUR CATEGORIES OF ANALYTICS

In this version of the analytics section, we have focused on four “categories”:

1. LOCATION

In the Location tab, you can see the location of all your influencers displayed on a US map. Clicking on any state (on the map or on the list to the right) will allow you to quickly filter your list by the influencer in that location.

2. KEYWORDS

This powerful chart offers insights into the relative usage of each of the keywords in your search query. There are some very interesting insights offered by this chart. For example, you can now see if there is one keyword that is dominating the search; or if any keywords you thought would be very popular actually aren’t being used that often by your influencers.  Most powerfully, by clicking on any of the keywords (or slices of the pie), you can filter the posts in your A-List by that keyword. Interested in all the posts mentioning “energy standards”? Simply click the keyword here and you can see all the posts, broken out by influencer.

3. SCORES

This tab offers insights into the make-up of the Traackr scores for the people on your list.  The 2×2 chart on the left allows you to visualize and select influencers plotted by a combination of Reach & Resonance vs Relevance scores.  Selecting any quadrant will allow you to view the influencers fitting in that quadrant. The bar charts on the right allow offer an overview of the scoring profiles of your list for each of our three scores (Reach, Resonance, Relevance). Clicking on any of the bars will display the influencers fitting into that percentile.

4. SENTIMENT

The Sentiment tab offers more views and insights into the data produced by your Sentiment tagging. The chart on the left offers a view of the past 8 weeks of Sentiment data week-by-week. Clicking on any line in the chart will display the posts for that week, sorted by Sentiment. The pie chart on the right display the last 8-weeks of Sentiment as an aggregate. Again, clicking on any slice of the pie will display the posts tagged with that Sentiment.

On the second page of the Sentiment tab, you can see your Most Positive and Most Negative influencers. You can also see those influencers who have “shifted” (either from Positive to Negative or from Negative to Positive) most over the past 8 weeks.

This is only the beginning…your feedback is important

This is our first iteration of the Analytics Suite and there is definitely more to come. The vision for this section is grand. We would like this suite to provide our users with the most insightful, actionable, influencer-centric information possible. To this end, your input is very important. If there are pieces of data, or different ways to visualize the data which would help make your lives easier or further enhance your influencer outreach work, please let us know. We’re counting on it…

Enjoy this first version of the Analytics Suite.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Bobby Llew in action

Traackr was born out of a passion for finding the people who were making a difference online.  We were very excited by the notion that “regular”, everyday people, in all walks of life, had a ubiquitous platform (ie – social media) for affecting change.  And we wanted to find them.

In our early work, we were always amazed by the great people that would show up in the searches run by our clients.  Not journalists, not celebrities, just seemingly regular folks with a very unique point of view and a talent for generating a loyal audience.  Some really great people.

One of our favorites was Bobby Llewellyn.  We found Bobby in a search for Honda UK, looking for hybrid car influencers to help promote their new hybrid Insight (case study from the Honda project here).

The Traackr search for this project yielded a lot of great, highly targeted people.  Most belonging to two distinct groups — ‘car’ influencers and ‘alternative energy’ influencers.  And then there was Bobby Llew.  At the time, no one involved had ever heard about Bobby.  He had a YouTube show in which he would interview B/C-level, British celebrities in his car while driving around London.  He literally set up a small camera (might have been a Flipcam) on his rearview mirror and record 20 minute interviews while cruising through the city.  He recorded ~one show per week.  It was simple, but really entertaining.  He gained a big following and millions of views.  He was also, at the time, the most retweeted person we had ever seen.  He was driving action.

But when he showed up on a list of top influencers for Hybrid cars, Honda was very confused.  How could this guy influence purchasing decisions around hybrid cars?!?  He’s not a ‘car guy’ or a ‘green tech’ guy.  He didn’t make any sense for this list.  They thought our technology was flawed.

Admittedly, we were a bit dumfounded as well, until we took a closer look at Bobby’s profile and content.  As it turned out, Bobby drove a Prius.  And he loved his Prius.  He featured it in all his YouTube shows and talked about it a lot on Twitter (and his blog).  He was a big advocate of hybrid technology and the environmental impact of cars – in his own way.  The point being…as we looked into Bobby more, we realized that he was definitely an influential, and potentially very powerful, voice in driving awareness and sales of any hybrid car.

Honda (and their PR agency) were still very confused.  They understood what to do with traditional journalists, but they had no idea what to do with Bobby.  We told them…um….”He produces a popular YouTube show — from his car.  Send him a car!”  Eventually…this is what they did.  They sent him an Insight and sponsored his show for two weeks.  Bobby ended up using the Insight in his show and talking about it through all his channels – generating a ton of awareness and, no doubt, sales.

Ultimately, this particular influencer campaign was a huge success…and Bobby played a big part.  He quickly became everyone’s favorite influencer.

SO, WHY AM I TELLING THIS STORY NOW??

Because I recently checked in on Bobby.  For some random, unknown reason, I tapped in his video blog site, llewtube.com, a couple of weeks ago.  And I was so happy with what I found.  As you can see (below) — he not only still has his traditional show (now called Carpool)…sponsored by the Prius, but he also started another show, Fully Charged, dedicated to test drives and reviews of all new hybrid, electric, clean fuel vehicles.  Do you think Bobby Llew is an influencer for hybrid cars now??  I would say so…

When I saw Bobby’s new site and all the progress he’d made, I couldn’t help but smile.  Bobby Llew done good.  These kinds of stories are still exciting to me…

DS

Next month, we will be presenting at the PRSA International Conference in Orlando.  Our topic will obviously be around influence and how to move beyond the hype to produce real business results.  It’s a great topic and we love talking about it.

During our presentation, we will be sharing the results from a survey we have conducted with our clients which will offer their insights on the discovery, engagement and measurement of their day-to-day influencer work.  Given that our clients are on the forefront of influencer work, the results of this survey will surely be very valuable — for those attending PRSA & for those who don’t make it.

While our clients are among the leaders and most advanced practitioners in the influencer space, we do realize that there are advanced practitioners out there who are not TRAACKR clients (yet ).  So, in an effort to make the results of this survey as rich as possible for the people at PRSA, we’d like to invite any PR pro out there who has done a significant amount of “influencer” work to take part in this survey.

What’s in it for you?

• You’ll be featured at the PRSA International Conference in our session as one of the experts in the best-of-breed survey;
• Get access to the findings of our research ahead of public release;
• Gain additional insight from the research only shared with participants;
• Gain the satisfaction of knowing that you contributed to the advancement of your profession;
• …and most importantly you will get a big “thank you” from the TRAACKR team!

SO…If you are a PR pro leading the practice of online influencer engagement, simply click on the link below to participate in the survey.

Thanks in advance!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/beyondthehype

DS

Earlier today we launched Sentiment Analysis in our A-List Platform — further enhancing the A-List as the most robust & actionable influencer platform out there.  We are very excited for this particular release.  We feel that Sentiment tracking will help our clients gain additional, important, strategic insights that will guide both the development and ongoing execution of their campaign work.

HOWEVER…I want to be very clear about the Sentiment Analysis feature we released.  We DID NOT release an automated sentiment engine. We apologize to those who were hoping otherwise, but the sentiment feature we released is based on MANUAL input provided by our users. We have built a system that gives our users the ability to tag the sentiment of specific posts produced by the influencers tracked on any list.

That’s right.  MANUAL tagging.

We didn’t do this because we want to make life harder on our users or because we wanted to make more work for those managing influencer work.  We did it because we, fundamentally, don’t believe in the effectiveness/accuracy of automated sentiment engines or the actionability of the data they provide.

First of all, automated sentiment analysis is a HUGE technical challenge which….has NOT been solved.  At least not yet.  Or for the foreseeable future.  From a technical perspective, it involves all the data processing sophistication involved with any big data problem along with the added complexity of NLP (natural language processing) which has to account for and adapt to the ways humans use language.  [For example, how does a computer account for posts like:  That is one bad ass motorcycle.  OR Blue screen of death again...Love you Microsoft!]  Ultimately, we don’t feel like this is possible in any sort of automated way.  We’ve looked at several tools and have spoken to several experts about the subject and are not convinced that anyone is even close.

In fact, I recently spoke to a representative from one of the biggest general monitoring companies who proudly claimed that their sentiment engine boasted a 74% accuracy rate – compared to the 50-55% accuracy of the other big monitoring tools.  So, that means the “best” tool on the market still has a 26% margin of error.  I’m not sure of any other statistical model where this would be considered a ‘success’ (maybe someone can point me to a good example, but I won’t hold my breath).  Not only is this margin of error far too large for any serious analyst to trust, but I can’t see how anything with that kind of margin is actionable in the least.

With manual sentiment, you have 100% accuracy.  We like that number.

SENTIMENT, LIKE INFLUENCE, IS CONTEXTUAL

The second, and most important, reason why we wouldn’t consider an automated sentiment engine for our product is that sentiment, like influence, is highly contextual.  The sentiment of a statement (or post) is highly dependent on the perspective of the reader.  Yes, there are certainly cases where sentiment is very clear and not debatable (BMW sucks! is clearly negative), but these instances are far-and-few between.  In most cases, sentiment is not clear-cut.

Automated sentiment engines assume that any given post has a set sentiment that never changes.  A negative post is a negative post in any situation, at any time.  We don’t think this is the case.  At all.  We think the sentiment of a single post can change drastically depending on the perspecitve of the reader.  Take a post like:

Those new Microsoft commercials are ok, but I liked them better when Apple did them  btw – what is Jerry Seinfeld thinking?!   So stupid.  

What would an automated sentiment engine do with this?  Probably neutral.  Maybe positive because of the smiley face.  Or maybe negative because of the mention of “stupid.”  Who knows.  In any case, the automated engine can’t account for the most important part – context.

What if you were Microsoft’s brand manager, hoping to create a campaign that would help people to forget about Apple?  You’d probably consider this post pretty negative (doh!  Damn you Apple!!).  But what if you were Apple’s ad agency?  Pretty positive for you (awesome, people think of our commercials even when they watch a Microsoft ad!).  And what if you were Jerry Seinfeld?  Not great.  Negative sentiment (what’s the deal with this twitter thing anyway??).

This is just a quick, silly example, but I think you can see the issue.  Same exact post, 3 different sentiments — all accurate.  All based on the context of the beholder.  This is why, fundamentally, we don’t believe in automated sentiment analysis.  Even if the technology worked, it just doesn’t make any sense.

WITH TRAACKR, MANUAL SENTIMENT IS TOTALLY MANAGEABLE   

Don’t get me wrong – we totally understand the “value proposition” for automated sentiment as well as the need for it.  Automated sentiment was designed to help researchers make sense of an enormous amount of data.  Automated sentiment is necessary when you are trying to analyze the general web – thousands, even millions, of posts.  We get that.  It’s a task that can’t be done manually.  Here’s the problem.  The web is an ENORMOUS OCEAN OF DIRTY WATER.  Honestly, the web makes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch look like a well manicured lawn.  So, yes, there may be a million posts mentioning your brand that you want analyzed for sentiment, but 70-80% of them (unscientific estimation) are junk and not worth any attention.  So, if 70% of the posts in a given sample are junk and the sentiment engine has a 30-50% margin of error….honestly, what’s the point?

But with TRAACKR, you are able to filter the web by the people who matter most to you at any given time.  By focusing on the content from the RIGHT PEOPLE, you eliminate the problem of junk, random, non-important posts and you make the process of manually sentiment tagging completely manageable and realistic.

And this gets you real, accurate, ACTIONABLE data.  You don’t deserve anything less…do you?

DS

Much propz go out to the hard-working TRAACKR tech crew for what might be the most important feature released in our A-List Platform this year – SENTIMENT ANALYSIS.

As of today, TRAACKR subscribers can apply and track sentiment at the post- and influencer-level for all the activity captured by each Influencer Monitor. With the sentiment analysis feature, you can:

• Gauge sentiment on a post-level based on the entire campaign or on the influencer-level based on one person
• Monitor how feelings of your (client’s) brand and its competitors change over time from the people that matter most
• Track sentiment over time for a select group of influencers — like the ones you targeted with a specific outreach campaign
• Give your clients a monthly report on the sentiment shown for their product line(s) from the people they care about most

All of this is now possible with our new Sentiment Analysis feature. Interested in finding out more? E-mail info@traackr.com. TRAACKR subscribers can read the rest of this post to find out how to use this new feature.

HOW TO APPLY SENTIMENT TO A POST

Applying and reporting on sentiment in TRAACKR is very easy.  To apply sentiment to posts (you can only apply sentiment to posts generated in your Monitors), simply (a) roll over a post; and (b) click on the little heart next to the post.  Click the heart until it registers the sentiment you wish to apply.

• Red = Positive
• Black = Negative
• Grey = Neutral
• Open heart = no sentiment (not counted toward sentiment totals)

WHERE TO APPLY SENTIMENT

You can apply sentiment in TRAACKR in two places:

1. On the Monitor page:  You can apply sentiment to any post in the monitor.  While in the Monitor, you can navigate from week-to-week and apply sentiment to each week’s posts.
2. On each Influencer Profile:  You can also apply sentiment to the Monitor posts found on each Influencer Profile.  By checking the Monitor button on an Influencer Profile (see below), you will find all the posts from that influencer using the keywords in your Monitor.  You can apply sentiment to any of these posts.  This is a very convenient way to apply sentiment to all your important posts based on a single influencer’s contribution.

SENTIMENT REPORTING

Once you have applied sentiment to the posts from your influencers, you can view a new Sentiment report in each of your Monitors.  While in the Monitor, simply select SENTIMENT from the View pull-down menu and you will be able to view a comparative report of your positive-negative-neutral posts…over time.  This is the perfect report for tracking Sentiment over a longer period of time.

Also, on each Influencer Profile, you can see a Sentiment breakdown of that specific influencer’s posts (see below).  This is a great way to determine the sentiment of each influencer. If you want to filter the content on each influencer profile by a sentiment rating, simply click on the sentiment (Positive, Negative, Neutral) and you can hone in on all the posts tagged with that sentiment.

MANUAL SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

As you have probably realized, our sentiment analysis feature gives our users the ability to MANUALLY apply sentiment to posts. I’m sorry if you were looking for an automated sentiment analysis engine from TRAACKR– but this is something you will never see from us (never is a tough word, but I’m comfortable using it here).  Yes, it does take a little work to manually apply sentiment to posts in any monitoring tool, but with TRAACKR your monitoring efforts are focused and filtered by the people you care about, making this work totally manageable and efficient. And after putting in a small amount of effort, your sentiment results will be 100% accurate (as opposed to 50-60% that leading, automated sentiment analysis engines boast).

You can read more about our take on automated vs manual sentiment analysis here.

Overall, we are incredibly excited to add Sentiment Analysis to the A-List Platform.  Our goal has always been to design the most robust and ACTIONABLE influencer platform out there…and we think this new feature is helping us to do just that. Being able to track sentiment for the people that matter most is a powerful thing. It offers further insight which can be instrumental in designing marketing strategies as well as a way to track the success/failure of your outreach efforts.  Wouldn’t it be great to say to a client that because of your brilliant work, you were able to drive positive sentiment about their products, among the top influencers, from a dismal 22% to a staggering 77% over 6 months? Would being able to show it be even better? Well now you can…

Enjoy this new feature.  And as always, let us know if you have any questions/suggestions after playing with the Sentiment feature.

DS

Over the weekend, we unveiled a brand new section of the TRAACKR A-List Platform — one we’re very excited about.

We call it the A-LIST STORE.

So what exactly is it? Well, it’s a new area of our platform which houses a selection of specific and targeted pre-defined A-Lists in a wide variety of topics. Basically, all the work’s done for you – you just have to shop for your topic, bookmark it and voila, you have a completed A-list to follow.

So what’s in it for you? It’s pretty simple:

• Access to an entire store at no additional cost  – all Traackr subscribers can access the A-List Store from their Dashboard
• A-lists from the A-List Store do not count against your subscription quota*
• A stocked selection of A-Lists covering a variety of interesting topics that’s always growing
• A much more robust Influencer Platform and loads of helpful content at your fingertips

Interested in finding out more? Read on for more details!

THE A-LIST STORE

The A-List Store is a new area of our platform which houses a selection of specific, targeted, pre-defined A-Lists in a wide variety of topics.  These A-Lists are just like any A-List you would create in TRAACKR…except the keywords have been generated for you by members of the TRAACKR team and searches already run.

TRAACKR subscribers can browse the A-List store at anytime – for any reason.  You may be looking for a specific list to help one of your clients/campaigns or you may be interested in finding a list of influencers on a topic of your personal interest.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE LISTS IN THE STORE?

There are three things users can do to lists from the A-List Store — View, Bookmark and Customize.

Viewing an A-List from the A-List Store

By clicking on the title of any list within the store, you can view a full copy of the list.  You can browse the full list of influencers, explore the detailed profiles, as well as the content, scores, etc.

Bookmarking an A-List from the A-List Store

By bookmarking a list within the store, you’ll be able to follow anything of interest and access each A-list more conveniently.  When you bookmark a list from the A-List Store, it will be added to your Dashboard, giving you convenient access to it whenever you log-in. You will also be able to view that list at any time and follow it’s progress as it refreshes and updates.

The best news is that viewing or bookmarking a list from the A-List Store DOES NOT count against your subscription quota.  Bookmarked lists can be used at no cost to our subscribers.  So go for it. Bookmark away!

Customizing an A-List from the A-List Store

Sometimes bookmarking a list from the A-List Store will not be enough.  There will be times when you find a list that is very close to what you’re looking to build yourself. In this case, you may want to have edit access to this list and the freedom to customize it to your liking. By customizing a list from the A-List Store, you have full access to edit the list. You can edit the keywords, add/exclude influencers, create an Influencer Monitor, etc. By clicking ‘Customize’, you will essentially create a fully editable copy of this list for your account.

*NOTE:  Customizing a list from the A-List Store will count toward your account’s Active list quota.

NAVIGATING THE A-LIST STORE

The A-Lists in the A-List Store are organized by categories.  The easiest way to navigate through the lists in the store is to select a category of interest from the drop-down menu on main store page.

ENJOY THE A-LIST STORE!

This first version of our A-List Store is stocked with a good selection of A-Lists covering a variety of interesting topics. This selection will continue to grow over time as we will be releasing new lists into the A-List Store on a regular basis, so check back often.

With this release, it not only gives our users a much more robust Influencer Platform, but it will also enable us to continue to design more creative offerings for our users, as well as allow people outside of TRAACKR to contribute to the Platform.

It’s an exciting release for us. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.  Enjoy!

DS