We are very excited and honored today for Pierre-Loic (Traackr CEO) to be featured as a guest blogger on Shonali Burke’s blog, Waxing UnLyrical. She’s a friend and a great example of the hard-working influencers we uncover everyday in our work. President of Shonali Burke Consulting, referred to as the “measurement maven” by the likes of Katie Paine and founder of #measurepr, she’s a great person to get to know both on and offline. We’ve included a short summary of the guest post below, but to view the entire post you can click here!

Summary of Waxing UnLyrical guest post.

Many people may not know that the idea behind Traackr originally began as a consumer app aimed to help power users (aka influencers) measure their success and gain insight on their contribution, peer network, etc. Sound familiar? (hint: what’s your Klout score?)

Obviously, this wasn’t what became of Traackr. Because of an early conversation with an investor, a deeper look into the notion of a “social credit score” and all the reasons this could never actually be represented in an authentic way, Traackr evolved into what it is today – a search engine for people.

After having received a sort of challenge to a battle of egos on Twitter letting him know his Klout was getting low, Pierre-Loic felt it was appropriate to write on this topic for his guest appearance on Shonali’s blog (she is, afterall, the Klout resident expert on all things bacon and Kim Kardashian.)

To read the post, click here.

This is a guest post by Adam Turinas, Global Director, Digital at Emanate PR. Adam is a Digital Marketing veteran and Social Media junkie. You can check out his sailor musings on his personal blog or his company at the Emanate PR blog.

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“Play the man not the ball.”

This is an expression I used to hear in my soccer playing days. Actually, what they really said was, “don’t play the man, play the ball”. When it comes to social media, it works better the other way round.

Social media listening is an important part of what we do. Whether it’s ongoing monitoring with Radian6 or conducting quick and dirty searches using free tools like socialmention.com, we spend a lot of time listening, analyzing and mining for insights.

As a PR firm, who is saying what is as important as what is being said. A core part of what we do for our clients is identifying influencers and reaching out to them with relevant information with the aim of developing long-term relationships that will benefit our clients as well as the influencer. Social listening tools like Radian6 and SM2 are great for most things, but frankly for identifying and tracking influencers, they are a bit of a pain.

You have to do a lot of manual analysis to pull out a useful and ranked list of influencers. It’s then a bit of a pig of job keeping track of these influencers over time. Social Media is so dynamic that influencer rankings change constantly. You can spend a lot of time on a blogger who was influential for a few weeks. A month or two later they might not be that as influential as they were. You can waste time with the wrong influencers if you don’t stay on top of it.

That’s why I love TRAACKR. They really aren’t paying me to say this, Honest! It makes the process of finding, ranking and tracking influencers so simple. It doesn’t do everything that the other tools do, but it’s excellent as a complementary tool – especially for influencer work.  Why? Because the premise of their model is that it’s about the person, not the post.

The Top 25 influencer lists make it easy to figure who we should be talking to so we can spend more time reaching out and less time digging.

At Traackr, they play the man not the ball. “Don’t let the ref catch you guys.”