TRAACKR Interface
This page serves as an overview of the TRAACKR A-List interface. If this is your first time using the TRAACKR interface, it might help to read through the entire document. If you would like to skip directly to a specific section of these instructions, you can click on one of the links below:
Sample Keyword Expression Lists
Dashboard
The Account Dashboard page is the first page you see upon logging into your TRAACKR account. On the dashboard you will see a list of your five most recent campaigns and monitors and on the right hand side you’ll see a list of new influencers that recently joined your lists.
You can also add a campaign or add a monitor directly from the dashboard page. Clicking on Add Campaign will take you to the Keywords page where you can test and save keywords for your A-List. This is described in more detail below under “Creating a New Campaign.”
Campaign Page
The Campaign page displays all ‘Active’ or ‘Draft’ campaigns in addition to the top three influencers for each A-List. On the Campaign page you can view and manage some of the higher-level elements of the campaign. You can:
- Edit Keywords (Draft only)
- Add a Monitor to a campaign
- Edit the settings for a specific campaign
- Delete a campaign
- View the Audit Trail for a campaign
To view an A-List, click the campaign name or View A-List link.
A-List Page
On the A-List page you can view the entire A-List for a specific campaign. At the top of your list you will find several ways to filter your list. You can:
- Sort by Influencer Rank, Reach, Resonance, or Relevance
- Sort by your Influencer Tags
- Search the influencers and their profiles
There is also a new keyword tab where you can view the list of keywords used for the search.
A-List Trending
Because TRAACKR A-Lists are run on a weekly basis, your A-List will change and evolve over time. After each refresh of the list (run over the weekend), you will see trending information next to each influencer’s name indicating any movement from the prior week. A ‘New’ indicator highlights an influencer who was not on the list the previous week.
Starred Influencers
This feature allows you to star your favorite influencers and save them from ever dropping from a list or monitor. Once you click the star next to an influencer, they will show up every week, regardless of their score.
Saved Influencers
This new section displays the influencers who did not score high enough to make you’re A-List for the current week. These individuals will be saved in this section for one week. If you would like to keep any of these people on your list, you should Star him or her.
Detailed Profiles
To view each influencer’s Detailed Profile page, simply click on an influencer’s name. This will give you access to their demographic data, descriptions, activity and footprint. You also have the ability to star an influencer from this page. On the Footprint tab you can see all of the social platforms that influencer belongs to. The majority of content on the profile is clickable, allowing you to link to each of the influencer’s accounts and his/her recent posts. Also, the posts on the Activity tab will be sortable by keyword. This way you’ll have a better understanding of what keywords this influencer matched on.
Campaign Management Functions
Influencer Tagging: You will notice on the left column of each detailed profile page a place to create tags for each influencer. This is an open field allowing you to create your own tags. You can add one tag at a time or add multiple tags at once by simply separating them with commas.
Filter A-List by Tags: Once you add tags to each influencer, you will be able to filter your A-List page by each tag. Simply click on one of the tags in the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
Notes: The notes feature is available on each influencer profile. These are editable and easily manageable and can be used to communicate with team members, add notes for yourself, or for any other reason.
Stars: This feature allows you to star your favorite influencers and save them from ever dropping from a list or monitor, regardless of their score.
User Access Levels
Account Admin
Account Admins have the highest levels of access to the system. They have the ability to:
- Add/remove users to the account (to learn how to add and remove users, see below);
- Map users to campaigns;
- Change your password;
- Edit campaign-level information (i.e. campaign name);
- Start new A-List;
- Access to all features within all the campaigns attached to the account (tasks, notes, etc.).
Who is the typical candidate for having such a user level? Those in charge of the account and those who will be creating new campaigns.
Adding users to an account
- Click on “Account Settings” on the top right hand corner of the screen
- Input the user’s e-mail address, name and a designated password
- Check the lists you want them to be able to view
- Click “Create”
- *Note – if you’re creating a team member or viewer, you can determine which campaigns they see by clicking in the box next to each campaign name at the bottom of the screen
Removing users from an account
- Click on “Account Settings” on the top right-hand corner of the screen
- Click on the pencil icon next to the user’s name (it will show up when you put your mouse over their name)
- At the bottom of the user’s information, hit “suspend”
To view a short intro video of the admin features, check out our YouTube video.
Team Member
Team Member users were designed for people who will be working on campaigns, but will not be creating new campaigns. Team Members can do everything an Admin user can, except:
- Create new campaigns
- Create/edit users
- Apply a logo to the account
Who is the typical candidate for having such a user level? Fellow team members and possibly clients.
Viewer
Viewers have the least amount of access to any campaign. These users were designed for clients who may be interested in seeing the results of an A-List and/or Monitor, but without any reason for creating or editing anything. Think of these as “read-only” users.
- View campaign;
- Notes & tags are not shown.
Who is the typical candidate for having such a user level? The client and those who should have read-only access where no task, notes and tags are displayed.
Create New Campaign
Upon clicking ADD CAMPAIGN you will be directed to the keyword submittal page, where you can test, save, prioritize and submit keywords. You can see the New Campaign page below:
Step 1: Test keywords for relevance
Good keywords lead to good results (and vice-versa). Therefore, it’s very important to test your keywords before saving them to your search. The goal in this process is to create a list of keywords that are very relevant to the influencers for which you are searching. We allow users to create searches based on up to 50 keyword expressions (see “Using Keyword Expressions” for more information). The more and the better the keywords you use, the more refined and specific your search will be.
To test a keyword (or keyword expression), enter the keyword (or expression) in the search box and select TEST. In the TRAACKR interface, you can test your keywords on Blogs, Twitter, YouTube (Videos), or Flickr (Photos).
When you test a keyword in TRAACKR, you will be shown specific pieces of content from the web (a blog post, tweet, video, or photo). You need to review these posts to determine whether or not they are relevant to the search you are running. (Are these posts the types of posts you would want to ultimately see from the influencers on your list?) If the majority of the posts generated from your test are relevant to your search, then you have selected a good keyword expression.
When you are happy with a keyword expression, click SAVE to add it to the keyword list on the right for your A-List. Repeat this process for each of your keywords.
Read our post about keywords for tips on generating good keywords.
Step 2: Tune keywords
If the test results are not relevant, you can refine the keyword expressions by:
- Using quotes to search exact wording – e.g. “Google Wave” (again, see “Using Keyword Expressions” for more details)
- Further qualifying the keyword by adding other words to the expression – e.g. “iPhone apps” kids
- Using a minus sign to remove unwanted words from your search – e.g. “cancer risk” -cellphone. Be aware that excluding keywords will remove all posts containing this keyword from your test results.
Once you’re satisfied with your selection, click SAVE to save to the keyword list for your A-List.
Step 3: Prioritize keywords
The relevance scores on your list will be impacted by how you input your keywords. The top keywords will drive most of the scoring and the keywords that are closer to the bottom will have the least impact on the overall list results. You can drag and drop keywords to move them up (more relevant) or down (less relevant) in the list.
Step 4: Submit keywords
Once you’re satisfied with your prioritized keyword list click SUBMIT. You will then have two options. You can either click SUBMIT FOR REVIEW or CREATE A-LIST.
By selecting SUBMIT FOR REVIEW, you will submit your keyword list to one of our internal support staff that will review your keywords and insure that you have created a good list before launching the search. Our support team will be able to communicate to you, via the interface, with any suggestions or tips related to your keyword list. Please note that it is extremely helpful to the support staff to include a brief explanation of the goal of your campaign, as well as any concerns you may have or known influencers.
Once the keywords have been reviewed by a TRAACKR team member and you are satisfied with the them, click SUBMIT at the top right corner of the page again, and this time click CREATE A-LIST.
By selecting CREATE A-LIST, you will launch a search based on your keywords. An initial list will be generated immediately in your dashboard and the results from the web-search will be added to this list 24-72 hours later. *The Preview A-List is made up of real-time results directly from the TRAACKR database that still need to vetted and reviewed. This means that these results are not guaranteed to show up on your final A-List. (If you like an influencer on your Preview A-List and don’t want them to drop from the list, be sure to ‘star’ him or her!)
An Audit Trail is also available to keep track of commentary between TRAACKR and our clients as keywords are reviewed and finalized (the link is to the right of the date).
Using Keyword Expressions
The term “keyword” often refers to a single word. In order to generate a great TRAACKR A-List, it is much better to use a series of Keyword Expressions (you can use up to 50 keyword expressions for any search). Keyword Expressions are a series of words used together that better define the context of the topic for which you are looking.
For example, if you are looking for influencers who offer advice in personal finance, you will need to use keyword expressions that represent words/phrases that these people use in their posts. For example, one thing they may talk about is paying off credit card debt. In this case, the term “credit card” would not make a good keyword because the TRAACKR search would consider every piece of content in the social web mentioning “credit card” to be relevant to your project. Obviously, most of this content will not mention credit cards in the context of personal finance advice. A better way to locate the most relevant content would be to use keyword expressions such as:
“credit card” “personal debt”
“credit card” “pay off”
“credit card” “paying off”
“credit card” “personal finance”
“credit card” “family budget”
Using these expressions will help you insure that the content considered “relevant” will in fact, relate to credit cards and personal finance.
Keyword Expression Format
The TRAACKR campaign interface uses the same syntax as a basic Google search. Some things you need to know when entering keyword expressions in TRAACKR:
Phrase search (“”): By putting double quotes around a set of words, you will search the exact words in the exact order as they appear in the quotes. So, if you are searching for mentions of the exact phrase [credit cards], you should enter [“credit cards”] (with quotes) in the search box. By entering [credit cards] (without quotes) will pull any post mentioning the word credit and the word card in the same post, however they could completely unrelated to credit cards (for example, this search would find a post in which someone says “I give her credit for sending him a sympathy card”). Understand, however, when you use quotes, you may also be missing relevant pieces of content. For example, a search for [“Alexander Bell”] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
AND ( ): You may be used to using the term AND in a search box. However, in the TRAACKR interface, a space represents an “AND” in a keyword expression. This means that when you enter words separated by a space, the TRAACKR search will look for pieces of content which contain both of those terms in the same post, but not necessarily next to each other. For example, if you search for [Nike sneakers], you will pull content such as “I love my new sneakers. They are way better than the Nike pair I bought last year.”
OR (,): The TRAACKR interface does not recognize OR in a search. In TRAACKR, you can only TEST one keyword expression at a time. However, if you would like to save multiple keyword expressions at one time, you can use a comma (,). For example, if you want to add the keyword expressions [“Nike sneakers”] and [Nike “running shoes”] to your keyword list, you can enter [“Nike sneakers”, Nike “running shoes”] (separated by commas) into the search box and click SAVE. This will add each expression to your keyword list separately.
Exclude (-): The TRAACKR search interface allows you to exclude keywords very easily. If there is a specific word or expression you would like to exclude from your TRAACKR search, simply add it to the search box with a “-“ in front of it (either by itself, or with another keyword expression). For example, if you wanted to find people talking about credit cards in the context of offering advice on personal finance, you may want to exclude the term [offer] from your search to insure that you don’t include people selling or offering credit cards. You could exclude this term by simply entering [-offer] in the search box or adding it to any of my other search terms [“credit card” debt –offer]. All excluded terms will be excluded from the entire TRAACKR search for your campaign. This means that you only have to exclude a keyword once – not every time you enter another keyword expression.
Finding Good Keyword Expressions
The best way to insure that irrelevant people don’t make it to your A-List is to find relevant keyword expressions to drive the search. When selecting keyword expressions, it is important to find words/expressions that people are using in their posts.
The first step in finding good keywords for your TRAACKR search is to find relevant posts (blog posts, tweets, videos, etc) and pull out the keywords that make that post relevant – the words which were used that make this particular post special and different. For example, if you are looking for someone talking about credit cards in the context of offering advice on personal finance, you should find a few very relevant posts and pull keywords from it. Find the keyword expressions that make that post relevant, such as “credit card” “debt percentage” found in this article.
Using Influencer Preview
When creating a New Campaign, you have the option of “Previewing” your A-List before submitting your keywords. This Preview option is a designed to help you refine your keyword list before committing. The influencers shown on the Preview pane represent a sample of type of influencers that will make up your A-List. If the majority of the people in your Preview are highly relevant to your search, you have done a good job with your keyword selection and can SUBMIT your search. If, however, the majority of the people in your Preview are not representative of the type of influencers for which you are looking, you should refine your keywords and run another Preview.
To generate a Preview
Generating a Preview is simple. After you have tested and saved several keyword expressions (minimum of 3 keyword expressions are required), simply click PREVIEW and a Preview list will be generated. Depending on the number of keyword expressions you have used, this process could take anywhere between a few seconds and one minute.
Using the Preview Pane
Using the Preview is very easy. You will see each influencer’s name and primary affiliation in the first column, next to his or her respective scores. In the far right column, you will find the keywords used by each influencer. By clicking on any of the keyword expressions, you can link directly to the posts that contain those words.
Each Preview will display 10 influencers. You can scroll between the first and second 5 using the 1|2 button at the bottom right of the pane
Using Preview information to refine keywords
The real purpose of the Preview list is help inform your keyword generation process so that you can generate the most relevant and useful A-List possible. It is likely that the first time you Preview the results of your keyword list, you will see some influencers who are good representatives of the types of people you want to see on your A-List as well as some who are not. It is important that you study the keyword matches for both groups of people. Knowing what keywords brought someone to the list will allow you to make decisions about the keywords you used.
The easiest decision you can make is to reprioritize the keywords based on who was using them. For example, you can increase the priority of the keywords most used by the “good” people on the Preview list and lower the priority of the keywords used by the “bad” people. You may also want to delete the keywords common to the “bad” people – or better qualify them by adding additional words to the expression (ie – change “landscape design” to “landscape design” urban if you are more interested in city landscaping). We also strongly encourage you to look at the posts from the “good” influencers and look for either additional keyword expressions to add to your keyword list or ways to improve the existing keyword expressions that you already have.
Once you are happy with the Preview results from your keyword expression list click SUBMIT, and then either click SUBMIT FOR REVIEW or CREATE A-LIST.
Influencer Monitors
The Monitors page displays all of your active monitors including updates on whether there was any new posts added this week. The Monitor page also allows you to set-up a new monitor for any campaign. Influencer Monitors allow you to set up ‘monitors’ which track when the influencers on your A-Lists mention certain, specific keywords. Think of these monitors as targeted ‘buzz reports’ which track only the individuals on your A-List.
Influencer Monitors can help track the results of your own PR or marketing efforts. For example, if you generate an A-List with the goal of building awareness for your product or brand by engaging the top influencers, you can track their performance with the Influencer Monitors. Are you trying to get the top 20 influencers to talk about your brand? TRAACKR’s Influencer Monitor will let you know if they did.
You can setup your Influencer Monitor a few ways: click the “ADD MONITOR” button on your Dashboard or Monitor page or the “ADD MONITOR” link on the Campaign page. Enter keywords the same way you did for the campaign keywords. We suggest using no more than 10 keywords for your monitor. Note that the keyword testing functionality is not active on this page because we are only tracking the use of those keywords by your influencers. Once you are finished adding keywords, click the “CREATE MONITOR” button.
To begin with, your monitor will find the last eight weeks of relevant data, (which can take up to an hour to load). After that you will be able to see if the influencers on your list mentioned any of your monitor keywords in the past eight weeks and in the future weeks. Influencer Monitors are run on Sunday evenings, so you will see new results for your Monitor on a weekly basis, Monday morning.
Sample Keyword Expression Lists
The following list of keyword expressions was used to generate an A-List of top Bone Cancer Influencers:
cancer bone “Late-stage”
cancer bone “Late stage”
cancer “Skeletal complications”
cancer “Bone loss”
cancer “Bone fractures”
cancer “Bone cells”
cancer “Bone breakdown”
bone “Stage IV”
Osteopenia cancer
Osteoclasts cancer
Osteoclastogenesis cancer
Metastatic “bone lesions”
Infusions bone cancer
Hypercalcemia cancer
“Bone tumors”
“Bone mets”
“Bone metastasis”
“Bone metastases”
myeloma “Protein serum”
myeloma “Protein level”
myeloma “Plasma transplant”
myeloma “Bone marrow biopsy”
cancer “Plasma cells”
Plasmacytoma
MMRF “multiple myeloma”
Lesions myeloma
IgG “multiple myeloma”
IMF “multiple myeloma”
Electrophoresis myeloma
Dyoflucen myeloma
BMT “multiple myeloma”
Adriamycin myeloma
“Multiple myeloma”
“Bone marrow aspirate”
multiple myeloma survivor
bone cancer survivor
“multiple myeloma” treatment my
“multiple myeloma” diagnosed
“multiple myeloma” “living with”
“living with” multiple myeloma
“living with” bone cancer
“have multiple myeloma”
“have bone cancer”
“bone cancer” treatment my
“bone cancer” diagnosed
“bone cancer” “living with”
The following list of keyword expressions was used to generate an A-List of top 3rd World Maternal Mortality Influencers:
kenya “Maternal Mortality”
Indonesia “Maternal Mortality”
Asia “Maternal Mortality”
Africa “Maternal Mortality”
“third world” “Maternal Mortality”
“south america” “Maternal Mortality”
“poor country” “Maternal Mortality”
“poor countries” “Maternal Mortality”
“millennium development goals” “Maternal Mortality”
“middle east” “Maternal Mortality”
“maternal death” Kenya
“maternal death” Indonesia
“maternal death” Asia
“maternal death” Africa
“maternal death” “third world”
“maternal death” “south america”
“maternal death” “poor country”
“maternal death” “poor countries”
“maternal death” “millennium development goals”
“maternal death” “middle east”
“maternal death” “developing world”
“maternal death” “developing nations”
“maternal death” “developing country”
“maternal death” “developing countries”
“maternal death” “3rd world”
“developing world” “Maternal Mortality”
“developing nations” “Maternal Mortality”
“developing country” “maternal mortality”
“developing countries” “Maternal Mortality”
“Reproductive health” Kenya
“Reproductive health” Indonesia
“Reproductive health” Asia
“Reproductive health” Africa
“Reproductive health” “third world”
“Reproductive health” “south america”
“Reproductive health” “poor country”
“Reproductive health” “poor countries”
“Reproductive health” “millennium development goals”
“Reproductive health” “middle east”
“Reproductive health” “developing world”
“Reproductive health” “developing nations”
“Reproductive health” “developing country”
“Reproductive health” “developing countries”
“Reproductive health” “3rd world”
“Millennium development goals” “Goal 5″
“Dr. Christopher Murray”
“3rd world” “Maternal Mortality”
midwife “maternal health” Kenya
midwife “maternal health” Indonesia
The following list of keyword expressions was used to generate an A-List of top Smart Grid Influencers:
Energy “Demand management”
Peaking “power plants”
“Grid-scale energy storage”
“grid scale”
“energy storage”
Microgrids
“micro-grids”
“Advanced metering infrastructure”
AMI Energy
“Distributed energy generation”
Energy “Demand response”
Photovoltaics
“Pv solar”
“Home energy control”
“Home area network” + Energy
“Backhaul network” + Energy
Phev
“Smart energy”
“Smart grid”
“Smart meter”
Substations
“energy standards”
“Alternative energy”
“Renewable energy”
“Energy dashboard”
“Home energy monitor”
“Home energy management”
“Energy storage”
“Clean tech”
“Green tech”
Cleantech
“Clean energy”
“The grid”
“Plug-in hybrid”
“electric vehicle”
“electric vehicles”
“Rf mesh networks” Energy
“Wimax networks” Energy
“Home area network” Energy
“Backhaul network” Energy
“IP networks” Energy
“Wireless mesh networks” Energy
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please e-mail the TRAACKR client team, courtney [at] traackr [dot] com or liane [at] traackr [dot] com
