TRAACKR

We can’t believe it’s already halfway through June! Well, we know we’re a bit late, but we’re still excited to unveil our June Influencer of the Month, Beth Kanter – a serious force in the non-profit consulting community. If you’re in philanthropic or entrepreneurial endeavors, you probably want to get to know her.

Who is Beth Kanter?

Beth is the author of one of the longest running and most popular blogs for non-profits, co-author of an upcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit and the CEO of Zoetica. She was also named one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company and featured as one of BusinessWeek’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media“, so there is really no question as to why Beth earned a spot as our June Influencer of the Month.

With more than 4,000 fans on her Facebook page and more than 340,000 Twitter followers, Beth has a devoted following that is interested in and trusts what she has to say about social media, the networked non-profit world and, once-in-a-while, South by Southwest.

Beth has popped up on the Traackr radar a few times, including the SXSW 2010 Trending list, which you can take a look at here – http://lists.traackr.com/sxsw.

The unique perspective that Beth brings to non-profits is her vision of the “networked non-profit”, which takes advantage of  social media in order to make their business and cause more transparent and effective in a very simple way. Through social media, Beth believes that non-profits can get back to their roots and begin to more efficiently engage people, raise awareness of social issues and ultimately make the world a safer, fairer and healthier place to be.

Congratulations to your success Beth, it is truly deserved! We look forward to seeing what the future brings for you.

While sitting on the dentist chair last week, I received a 101 lesson on influence marketing.

My dentist looked at her file on me and congratulated me for having referred 5 patients to her over the years. I know I like my dentist and I dropped her name a few times to friends and colleagues in search of good dental care. I really had no idea some of these people ended up patients of hers.

So I asked her how she knew and she explained to me she simply asks every new patient how they heard about her practice and if this was from a patient, who that patient was. I then recalled that I first heard about her from a colleague of mine at the time so I asked how many referrals he had made. She didn’t need to look up her records to answer: over 25.

I had in front of me a very talented marketer:

1- very aware of who matters most to her business

2- skillful and subtle in her way of recognizing contributions

3- driven to set up a process to collect data and measure performance

As for my former colleague who referred over 25 new patients there, probably resulting in another over 100 new patients through people like me, my guess is that he’s as clueless as I was about how important he’s been to this small business owner.

This is a great reminder to me and the Traackr team that influencers we find online are not the product of social media, they have been around us all along. The social web has simply made it possible for them to express themselves in new and more powerful ways, and for us to find them as a result.

We are happy to announce the launch of Traackr’s Online Authority List at DemoFall09 in San Diego.

Traackr’s Authority List will the cornerstone of our business interface for marketers and PR professionals looking to locate top influencers for their brand or product.  The A-List will also be a tool which will enable the all-important relationship building between the communication pro and the influencer.

The Traackr team feels proud and privileged to have been selected by the DEMO team to launch our new product at a conference that has seen the emergence of Skype, TiVo, E-Trade, Salesforce.com, Java, Acrobat and many other groundbreaking innovations.

We are walking in the footsteps of giants and we won’t disappoint!