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!

The presence of social media is not something that big developers and publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision have ignored. Just last week, developers of the highly anticipated Starcraft 2 announced that they will be adding Facebook integration into their upcoming title. Big players in the video game industry always play on the bleeding edge of developments in technology, marketing and business models; social media is no exception. So, if social media is the new marketing frontier, where do game developers stand?

Let’s take a step back first; before the social media boom, publishers were already creating online forums and moderating feedback from users. You would easily find feedback from users on what features they liked the most, and what features they hated. Sentiment was as simple as collecting and organizing feedback from magazines and website reviews. Marketers and producers who were tech savvy enough would post forum polls and track discussions from commercial and independent forums. User feedback on the internet was manageable, and located in pockets of communities that the astute marketer would easily find.

Today, the widespread presence of syndicated, published and independent blogs, news about upcoming titles spreads faster than publishers plan for. Biased news leaks and raw speculation leave poor impressions in the minds of discerning gamers. It is difficult to predict and find key community influencers who spark the strongest opinions. This puts developers in a position where they have little to no control of community sentiment before the release date. There are so many different influencers and communities that affect sentiment about a product; it is beyond the control of marketing directors and community managers to find the right one.

The video game blog community is large and extremely active.

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

SMM Rolodex

From a 2000 feet prospective,  social media solutions are all the same. They more or less enable brands to listen and engage with communities.

In practice, it’s way more subtle and one analogy I’d like to propose is that you’ve providers that build Yellow Pages and others that build Rolodex (we fall into this category).

Both are useful and there are differentiated benefits from both type of solutions. What is critical however is for brands and agencies to clearly articulate their business needs and select the appropriate tool-set for the task at hand. It’s also very important to think beyond the first use of the solution selected.

Social Media Monitoring Solutions tend to be easier to setup and to operate. You just plug in your brand keywords and bingo.  (This, provided of course,  one can find the appropriate set of queries to search the Social Yellow pages).

Rolodex approach requires more work, more thinking around how a brand wants to organize its Social Rolodex and how it wants to structure its listening and engagement in different communities.  This is even more important if the Rolodex is a shared Rolodex within a mid-size/large company.

Again the analogy works very well. It takes minutes to open the Yellow Pages whereas one may spend several hours a week organizing and maintaining its Rolodex.

What’s key with Rolodex is that it enable people to build a differentiated asset that will deliver value over multiple enterprises functions and systems.

Let’s take a not-so-fictive example of an IT company that’s delivering services & product for Cloud Computing.

Using a Yellow Pages approach, it can get some pretty solid indicator relative to share of voice and (with rating) sentiment. However, without any qualification of the sources of the information (expert, influencer, audience, position in the community, analysis of what this person says over time, level of connection with the company or with competitors), it ‘ll be very difficult to transform this into actionable knowledge.

Using a Rolodex approach – and spending the time to built it-, this company will be able to:

• Build a common repository of people that constitute the community of  “Cloud Computing”  & listen to them wherever they  write, tweet and comment (blog, twitter…),
• Perform targeted sentiment analysis on these key stakeholders.
• Spot whether any of these stakeholder are over time more positive or negative about them. Build action plans to change perspective.
• Influence specific clusters through outreach, buzz and content development.
• Thru regular participation in the conversations,  build up trust.
  
• Prevent crisis, making these influencers  more careful propagating rumors or false information about the brand i.e people that they know and trust.
• Perform deep qualitative analytics. Since the “river of news” is built from similar sources and is noise free, it can be mined with greater results.
• Spot candidates for virtual focus group, crowd sourcing of new ideas (btw, I’m amazed that people embark in crowdsourcing without targeting. If a brand makes a strategic decision to focus its solution for small business, wouldn’t that make sense that it restrict s the crowdsourcing of new ideas from the specific small business community ?).
• Develop communication strategies that leverage community and influencers
• Socialize their corporate web site with the voices of these trustable sources and their audience.

and so on…

From a strategy standpoint, these approaches also differ widely:

On the Yellow pages one: the goal is to spend as less time as possible in social media, while grabbing as much as what can be learned with a Google Search like interaction. But there is no social engagement. People even dream of automating sentiment and are totally adverse to the idea of reading conversations.

One can even say that here, brand uses technology to mitigate the risk of not participating in the conversations.

On the Rolodex one: the goal is to capitalize every minute spent in social media and putting this capitalized knowledge at work for maximum benefits.

Here, listening and engagement is view as an asset and an opportunity, not as a liability.

Two paradigms, Two solutions … and so many opportunities.

We really like the idea of social media becoming an integral part of marketing activities cross the board: from market research to crowd sourcing or testing ideas to branding, pr and seo.

So, here is Frédéric’s article (original post in French is here).

Until now, when a brand wishes to assess reputation, it should have recourse to the polling that was carried down the street and in stores to meet consumers. Now it has a formidable media: social media (blogs, forums, social networks, microblogs …). Not only are they freely accessible, but they are “delivered” with all the necessary tools (search engines, rankings …). It looks like nothing, but it is a major change in how brands can understand their relationship with customers / prospects.

No, I’m not talking to you about a new marketing practice (some call it social marketing or pinko marketing) but really only about marketing.

I’d like to remove immediately ambiguity that may exist with practices such as emailing: when I speak of marketing, I refer to the substantive work (study of the needs / constraints / reasons / concerns of customers and prospects, analysis of the perceived value, collecting feedback from users …) that will feed a future strategy, not tactics to boost sales in a timely manner (emailing, buying keywords …).

I am not saying that these practices are not effective, they just respond to a logical short-term and they too tend to bridge a gap in brand strategy (positioning, promise …) that is very expensive  in social media as dissatisfied customers rarely mince their words when they speak.

Similar to  visits to point of sale or on the floor of call-centers, presence  on social media is a very effective way for brands to be present on the field to:

• Analyze market responses to a product / offer
• Check the positioning of the product vis-a-vis the world of competition or the perceived value of a brand
• Study the flow of prospects looking for information or advice prior to the act of purchase (search for alternative)
• Listen to customers in their phase of ownership of a product or operation of a service (post-purchase sentiment)
• Anticipate renewal phase

In short, social media represents a unique opportunity for brands to collect quality raw data (no filter nor interpretation) on their brand, their products, customers… This is a genuine gold mine freely accessible.  Obviously there is important work to be done to collect and analyze all this but I always find it very deceiving to outsource this task. While a buzz campaign (and other one time operation) may be outsourced to an agency for various reasons (lack of time, knowledge …), it is really a wrong move to lose this direct link with the market.

That is why I consider that the research and analysis of conversations on social media should be treated as field work and be recognized as such, not like the latest fashion of the moment (“what ?! you do not tweet for refurbishing”).

I know that this work can be converted into human cost (the famous FTE or Full Time Equivalent), but what is more important than being in direct contact with customers / prospects ?

Using Lee’s example of  hybrid car, let’s start building a fictive business case: you’re Toyota and you want to use social media to market a new hyper efficient car.

Lee provides us with the a sound social media roadmap:

audience => objective => strategy

and using Radian6, a well-known social monitoring platform, and a series of keywords, Lee comes back with the list below as the target audience, ranked by influence.

The problem is that these blogs may be both very influential on one end and blogs having recently talked about hybrid cars on the other end. But in no way do they define a community. They are therefore of very limited help for social marketing.

Looking closer, it’s  a patchwork of green blogs, auto blogs or blogs that come from the Personal Finance community like GetRichSlowly. We also have sites like Engadget, Digg, Youtube, Autopia and AOL.

What would a real social marketing program for the Highly efficient cars be then ?

1) First, Toyota should define the communities it wants to market to.

They could be the:

• green community
• community of car addicts
• the one of people in market for cars
• the frugal community

2) Next, Toyota should characterize these communities in terms of:

• influencers
• people positive/aware about high efficiency cars
• people that are negative about high efficiency cars
• people with existing ties with its competitors
• and so on

3) Last, Toyota should develop unique strategies for each segment.

Strategies may be just listening, monitoring interest, crowd sourcing ideas or explaining the key benefits of its new offer by participating in the communities (and again, there are tons of ways to do that from buzz to outreach to advertising).

But it’s not a one size fits all:

- for the green community as an example, the challenge for Toyota may be to convince people there is more environmental return in investing in a fuel efficient car than improving one’s house or commuting with other people.

- for the auto community, it could be to demonstrate that it has solved some issues like autonomy on electric cars… or that a car can be fuel efficient and fun, featuring an hybrid nascar car youtube video.

- for the frugal community, it could be providing templates so that the reader can evaluate the ROI of making the move, or advertising financial services that ease the initial purchase.

I’m not a car marketer so this is way oversimplified. The point I want to make is that social/community marketing is mainly executing marketing strategies while leveraging communities and the social web.

It’s not a one click affair and requires a different approach than “conversation monitoring”. It requires a top down approach strongly aligned with a company marketing strategy (that can be fueled by monitoring) and cannot be implemented keywords up.

It takes time.  Most of the benefits come when every marketer in an organization is able to leverage communities and the social web to increase its productivity, maximize the relevance and impact of its action… and measure it … thru monitoring .

]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/04/24/the-limits-of-social-media-monitoring/feed/ 2 domlah hydrogen-cars-toyotafchv radian6-influence http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/ http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:51:19 +0000 eCairn http://ecairn.wordpress.com/?p=225 ]]> =================================================================

If you want to know more on how we map communities and how to market to industry influencers,  we’re organizing a  FREE webinar next week and would be very happy to have you with us, click here to register:  Webinar

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We just implemented our “influence ranking algorithm“.

So we ran it against the ~1000 ‘social media marketing’ blogs we monitor on an ongoing basis (along with tweets, forums, Q&As…).

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice). Here is the last September 2010 version.

Below is the top 150 list, you can also find it at http://tops.ecairn.com/ along with other top 150 lists covering other areas of marketing.
( When compared to the Adage Power 150 reference, remember we zoomed particularly on social media marketing. Plus the list contains only blogs written in English).

Here is an OPML Link, from Matt Shaulis, to the list if you want to import in your reader.