We define an influencer as a person who, through writing and being read, affects the opinions of peers within a community around a certain topic. For example, Chris Brogan is an influencer of the Social Media Marketing community. He is influential because he writes and shares content that is widely disseminated throughout the community, and because that content largely affects or reflects the feelings of that community.

Some of our competitors have a different definition. They look at the popularity of certain sources across all industries, then try and correlate  that to their ability to drive “action”. But influence is relative. You can’t take the expert social media advice of Chris Brogan and say that his word will affect or reflect the car enthusiast community just because he happens to mention cars a lot.

Influence in eCairn Conversation™ is ranked by analyzing the connections and the level of networking between blogs over time. The primary variable which affects influence rank is the number of times other blogs within the community link back to posts from the target blog. eCairn Conversation’s algorithm then ranks the blogs and determines whether the blog’s connectivity is statistically significant enough to be considered a high, medium or low influencer or if they have no influence at all. There are a few other factors which help to determine influence level, but they don’t carry as much weight. Below you’ll see how the sources in a community tend to appear in an influence graph:

You’ll notice that the influencers found using eCairn’s method are the true nodes of communication between bloggers. These people act as the links in the community who both build and transmit a majority of the content that affects the community and drives action. It’s most apparent when you look at a map of the influencers and highlight the high influencers:

Above I’ve colored the high influencers blue in the video gaming blogger community. Notice how they act as the centralized nodes of conversations.

There are several benefits to this method:

1. It is less easy to “game” this system.
2. You’re going to be sure that the targets are both influential AND relevant.
3. There is little room for noise from irrelevant sources and bots.

Why Blogs?

Blogs provide their users the ability to broadcast original, in-depth and insightful content for their readers. When compared to the paltry character count of alternative social networks, we can see how blogging provides a better avenue for developing insight in the community. (Also, let’s face it, most of the best tweets link to a blog, right?)

But this doesn’t mean we can completely discount these other social media channels. In fact, it’s definitely a good idea to leverage these other channels to maintain your relationships in different circles. This is integral in any social media campaign, and it’s the reason why our application also supports aggregating the feeds from, and managing engagement with, these sources as well. Today, blogs are the core of the system. In the future, we’ll expand our algorithm to take inputs that also make sense of twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Why use eCairn’s method?

By not relying on factors which the blogger has control over, we make it more difficult for the blogger to game the system. Other existing methods of influence ranking use factors like follows/subscriptions which can be artificially increased through the use of bots, fake accounts and collusion with other users. Post count is another easy variable to skew as well. It’s easy to create a content bot which can constantly publish or re-publish content that can be relevant and interesting, but in no way original or worth following.

Building your influence rank by starting with the community ensures that you find influencers who are relevant. Say you’re trying to find the experts on movie production. You don’t want their interactions with the music recording community to affect your influence measurement of the movie developer community. You’re trying to find the most influential people on a specific topic, not the most influential people who happen to have an interest in that topic. Since you build the community, you control the level of noise that can come from irrelevant sources and can manage the objectivity of the ranking.

So, how do you rank influence?

CB Whittemore states that “My most valuable content marketing tech tool is eCairn Conversation™, a platform that helps to identify virtual social communities and key influencers, as well as the relevant content they create…” More on page 14 of CCO.

About Chief Content Officer

Chief Content Officer (CCO) is the quarterly print and digital magazine offered by the Content Marketing Institute.

“CCO is the first globally-distributed magazine devoted to the fast-growing, evolving field of content marketing. It is written by, for, and about the most innovative, influential global content marketers. The magazine showcases how content marketers are finding success in the field, focusing on the tools, technologies and processes they use to help marketers learn new publishing skills and apply lessons to their own organizations.”

For more about CCO visit their website. It is currently free while they are on beta, so make sure to sign up!

The top movers are: Citizen Marketer 2.1, CK’s Blog, and Jeff Bulla’s Blog; each moving 50+ positions!

• Citizen Marketer 2.1 experienced a spike of traffic in mid November for his Brand Haiku blog post.  A band of bloggers and companies (including Apple) participated in describing a brand experience in a form of a haiku.

*New means they were not in the Sept post, or recently added to our database.

To learn more about our tool and how it can help your company, join a customized demo.

Please feel free to connect with us through twitter: @ecairn or email us at conversation@ecairn.com

The team here at eCairn always appreciates any feedback!

With this new release, you get:

• Community Tab
  • Now, Influencers can be viewed in 3 modes:
    • Community List View (already there and default one)
    • Network View (see connections, color influencers with topics)
    • *New* Geo-location View (see influencers on a world wide map)
• Improved Twitter and Facebook profile detection
• Added list of communities on Heathcare
  you can now import lists from a wide range of Healthcare topics – see our big list of lists here.
  
• Fixed a bug affecting the importing of large lists
  

Learn more and register for a demo:

Watch those features in action in the video below:

Often, another critical dimension stays unnoticed: Social media is a network of virtual communities.

By communities, understand a large group of like-minded people, highly passionate, highly interconnected (through Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).

High Tech Communities
(Cloud in Red, Virtualization in Blue, Security in Orange)

The example above is from a set of 4 closely related communities:

• High Tech: Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Security and Storage

We took the top 500 influencers (english language) for each of the above community, except for storage which has a bit more than 100. The aggregate number of conversations from them is close to a million over a 6 months period. Next, we processed them through our social network analysis algorithm to create this map.

(By the way, there’s a full study available for those who want more details about the analysis).

Notice that the 4 communities:
- stay generally very distinct. The exceptions is for storage  because it’s a smaller community. Indeed, influencers from Storage can be found in the Virtualization community, leading to the conclusion that storage conversations are happening often in the context of virtualization.
- display affinities: Security and Cloud Computing are closer to Virtualization than Cloud Computing is to Security.

In this network of virtual communities, 5 important factors are to be considered:

1. Relevance: Virtual communities focus on specific and well-defined scopes.
   Think high tech is a community? Think twice. High Tech is merely a broad category.
   Indeed, we mapped more than 50 separate communities within High Tech (i.e. cloud computing, security, open source, b2b marketing … just to name a few)
2. Separation: Virtual communities that focus on different scope don’t overlap much.
   The world has become one of “specialists”. Nowadays you can be expert on one matter, may be two.
   In the experiment above, we found an overlap of less than 5% between those closely related communities.
3. Shape and Size: Virtual communities can be very large.
   There are many “specialists” and some have decided to become leading voices in their respective communities.
   Its’ possible to find 100s or 1000s of those voices in any given communities. Millions of like-minded people listen to them.
4. Interconnectedness: Virtual communities are powered by a network of relevance.
   Some communities are very tightly interconnected. Understanding the network topology can provide clues to plan the optimum engagement strategy.
5. Influence: Communities are the place where influence happens.
   One can only be influential on something to someone if they have that something in common.
   In the context of communities, something is content. It’s social media currencies and the stepping stone to weave relationships with one’s ecosystem.

Join one of our webinars if you want to know more about our technology:

Here’s the list of the Top 20 for the 4 communities used for this analysis:

So far, it generated a significant level of buzz for Kleiner Perkins: 5% of the daily conversations in that community, that represent a 5X comparing to the average level for Kleiner Perkins and 2X what they get when announcing the Flipboard investment back in July 21th.

However, talking social graphs , very few of the top 100 did actually mention the news as of Oct 22nd.

In dark brown, the top VCs that mentioned the sFund, in teal blue the one that did not.

Here is the top 3 by influence in VC community talking about sFund:

This major release comes with a brand new User Interface and some amazing new features. We worked closely with customers for months to integrate their requests. We are very proud of our product.

This new release will change how you access the application features, making them easier to discover and use. The new navigation will allow you to:

• Add and manage sources in your project – In particular, you will see the ‘Blog’ tab renamed as ‘Community’. This is to illustrate the fact that many different kind of sources can now be added to your project besides blogs.
• Access and manage conversations – In particular, you will see the ‘Posts’ tab renamed as ‘Conversations’. Again this change is to illustrate that you can aggregate posts, tweets, facebook updates, linkedin Q&A, mainstream media content and so on in one single place.
• Filter conversations to zoom on what you’re interested in – This functionality ‘Filter’ is now called ‘Topic’. Both the list in the Community tab and the Conversations tab can be filtered by topic.
• Find ‘network’ information – The functionality within the current ‘Networks’ tab will then be available under the ‘Community’ tab.

Other improvements are:

- Navigation:

1. Action buttons at the top of each tab to access critical functionalities.
2. Filter pane on the right side to narrow the list against a wide range of critical criteria.
3. Navigation between projects in one single click.

- Overall look n feel: New fonts, color, styling, improved dashboard.

- New Self-Help Center with plenty of FAQs, User Guide, tutorials and videos.

- Other enhancements specifically requested by our customers:

1. View trends on Search and Topics (previously available topic only)
2. RSS on Search and Topic
3. Date range for search (in addition to all time, day, week, last login)
4. Export up to 5000 conversations at once.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new release and our team look forward in working with you! Please, join us to a 45 minutes product demonstration on Wednesday March 10th at 9:30am PST: Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/278917336

Below are screenshots of the 3 main tabs:

1 – Dashboard

2 – Community

3 - Conversations

So, we’ve witnessed “lists of influential people” (including our list of Top 150 Social Media Marketers) popping up all over the place as if the world could be drawn with a bunch of influential graphs.

Not that easy… and here is a couple of things marketers should think about when approaching influence.

Let’s pick a practical example. You’re launching a new designer shoe and you’re planning to do a blogger outreach campaign to spread the word about the cool features this new “social shoe” has.

Obviously  you would start by identifying the top blogs in your target.
First problem you’ll experience is that most of so called “blog search” are actually post search engines. Techcrunch, for instance, may have covered the Zappos web site recently; it is certainly a very influential blog in Technology and Business but its influence is very low when it comes to fashion or shoes.

# 1: Unless you can address relevance, influence is pointless.

Let’s say then that you’ve been able to identify all the relevant people in fashion, i.e your target community. What we have measured is that some influencers tend to be more influential on the long tail (should be that called popularity ?) , other looked more influential on their peers.

# 2: Influence means influence over a group of people, not only on a topic

Some also seem to reach out more people in the community with “light” binding, whereas others will be the center of small cohesive sub nets.

# 3: Influence is a multi-dimensional variable with at a minimum “reach” and “depth” attributes

At this point you may have a pretty good view of what your target is and for instance, which blogger you can send samples to get reviews.

You still have to maximize your chances of the free pair of shoes not to be thrown in the trash! The thing is you may be completely unknown in that market and sending just another sample to people on the top of the list may be… useless.

So you decide to start influencing the magic middle and to build your way up to key influencers over time. That way, you have a pretty good chance to get coverage within 3 months. More on this from Dave Fleet.

# 4: Influence is a strategy and a process, what works for Zappos may not work for yetanothernewbrandintown.

OK. You’re still with me and are not giving up that easily. Let’s end with a positive note. Chances are high you’re already a member of that same community you want to influence (if not: start blogging now). Why don’t you leverage your existing trust and relationship and start reaching out your immediate network?

# 5: Influence is a process you’re a part of. That’s what we call actionable influence ™.

Have fun !

I stumble on these two posts during my daily musing of our list of  ~1000 social media marketing blog.

First, a piece of psycho-analysis on twittering, which was brought to my attention by Andy:
From the clinical psychologist Oliver James:“Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”
Me: Is it possible we wouldn’t say anything to anybody if we had a strong sense of identity?

Second, a risk to your health of too much social networking, which was brought to my attention by Matt:
Based on a paper by Dr Aric Sigman: “social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems”.  Apparently it’s to do with spending less time socialising with people face-to-face and could lead to a rise in illnesses including cancer.
Me: Will that be a virtual cancer?

Ever heard of the blackberry thumb?

And this is interesting…talks about how social influence spread in social networks.

Joke apart, technology is so pervasive that it’s really easy nowadays to abuse it and when you cross an invisible limit, different for each of us, you may suffer.
It’s clear that we have to be able to disconnect. We have to accept that there’s way too much to read, way too much to share with others….and we can’t know it all. And that it’s ok. May be we should spend more time in our circle of influence!