Web Business by Ken Burbary

3 Tips to Improve Your Online Influencer Analysis

Identifying influencers is an important part of social marketing, and becoming big business for some companies like Klout . Yet, influencer identification and analysis isn’t well understood, or easy to optimize. That’s because no two influence analysis efforts are the same. Like fingerprints or snowflakes, an influence analysis program is unique, specific to the goals and priorities of the organization executing it.

To date, automating influence analysis has relied heavily on quantitative measures (example: like followers/friends, RTs, mentions/replies). While these metrics can be valuable inputs into determining whether or not someone is influential, they aren’t worth much at all without their counterpart, qualitative metrics. If influence is a coin, then the 2 sides are quantitative and qualitative. Focusing purely on quantitative metrics tells you if someone is popular, not influential.

A recent and fitting example of this is the news of celebrity Charlie Sheen joining Twitter. Sheen amassed 1 million followers in approximately 24 hours. An impressive feat, no? Is he popular? Definitely. Is he influential? Well, according to Klout he is. Sheen currently has a Klout score of 88 (higher than most people, including industry thought leaders like Chris Brogan (81), Jason Falls (72), and Brian Clark a.k.a Copy Blogger (73). Does this mean Sheen is more influential than any of those 3? It depends on the topic.

Enter relative influence. Relevance brings the qualitative perspective necessary to complete the influence picture. Without it, you cannot be sure that you have an actionable list of influencers. The 3 individuals mentioned above are respected, trusted voices on topics such as marketing, social media and blogging. If you were to take a simple quantitative approach, and rely on Klout’s score, you could make the argument that Sheen is the more valuable influencer to focus on. Would you take his advice on any of those topics over Brogan, Falls, Clark? Absolutely not! Relative influence should be the focus on influencer analysis. You’re looking for individuals with deep, strong ties to the community on specific topics, not individuals with weak ties to many communities. Don’t confuse popularity with influence, they aren’t the same.

In addition to using automated tools to improve the effectiveness of your quantitative influencer analysis, here are some tips to gain a more robust qualitative view and gain a balanced perspective.

Finally, if you’re interested in a rich, in-depth perspective on influencer analysis, take the time to read this eBook, authored by @chuckhemann and @radian6. It will enlighten you on the finer points of influencer analysis, including specific methods and metrics to consider in yours.

Radian6_JAN2011_Book

Social Media Listening Still Needs to Grow Up

Social Media participation continues to mature and evolve the ways in which we connect and deepen relationships with one another, and the brands we choose to let in our life and interact with. However, despite all the efforts thus far, our ability to monitor and understand what happens in social media isn’t keeping pace with usage.

eMarketer recently published findings from a InformationWeek Analytics survey of Enterprise professionals about their current Social Media Listening efforts, and the results were disappointing to me.

The most common method of monitoring is to rely on basic notifications, like Google Alerts, as a rudimentary brand monitoring solution. Despite the shortcomings of this method, 44% of respondents aren’t even doing this, the most basic form of social listening.

After this comes outsourcing to a full service vendor or using specialized social media listening tools (like Radian6, SM2, ListenLogic) with internal resources at 16% and 15% respectively. A full 40% of all respondents didn’t know what, if any, approach their company is taking when it comes to social listening. Either the survey respondents aren’t plugged into what’s happening in the company in this area (a possibility), or there is evidence of a problem within the organization (most likely in my experience).

The survey also looked at a company’s process for responding to specific types of online responses by consumers. Unsurprisingly, the number of organizations that have developed specific processes and capabilities to handle online responses like customer complaints on social networks, inappropriate employee comments, comments on official owned-media sites is also very low. Just 14% of companies have defined how to appropriately handle a negative customer comment on their Facebook page(s). Only 12% have done so for Twitter (probably something Kenneth Cole could stand to do given the uproar over their recent tweet).

What does all this mean? Several possibilities:

1. Companies still lack the necessary education and knowledge of how to leverage the wealth of listening solutions to accurately monitor and understand online customer interactions and responses
2. Companies still lack the resources required to properly staff and implement adequate listening capabilities
3. Companies are struggling with “shiny object syndrome”. There is no lack of social listening solutions/providers (full list here at the SMM Wiki). Understanding listening goals/objectives, needs and mapping them to the potential set of listening vendors requires time and effort. It’s much easier to sit through product demonstrations full of social metrics eye candy, and be wowed by their reporting and analytics capabilities rather than do the less glorious but essential planning work.

Fear not though, there is light at the end of the social listening tunnel! Creating a strategic listening plan isn’t impossible, nor difficult if the right steps are taken. Adopt a comprehensive framework to guide your social listening efforts across the company. Several options exist, like the Social Analytics Lifecycle.

The most important point I can emphasize to get social listening to mature within your organization, is to start with specific business processes that listening will support and improve. Almost every organization has sales, marketing, customer support, human resources, etc… Each of these departments can benefit from social listening, if done correctly. Want examples? Check out the 6 Areas of Your Business That Should Be Listening post by Amber Naslund over at the Brass Tack Thinking blog. It will help set you out on the right direction to  get started, but what if you’re already doing “something” and want to optimize or improve it. Then go read Six Steps to Better Social Media Listening by Chuck Hemann at the Analytics is King blog. Finally, THEN go down the tool path if you’re going to take on social listening yourself, or find a full service partner that has the diversity of experience in platforms and top notch analysts that deliver meaningful insights and information (remember data is worthless unless it is transformed into insights through analysis).

What is your organization doing in social listening? What are your most difficult obstacles to overcome?

Introducing the Social Analytics Lifecycle

For several months, social media measurement and analytics pro Chuck Hemann and I have been thinking and talking about the many benefits of social media monitoring, a.k.a. listening to the online voice of your customers. Historically, most of the discussion on this topic centers around using monitoring as a reputation/crisis management tool, but that’s just scratching the surface of the potential uses and benefits. Instead we believe that the ever growing gigabytes of data generated as a result of social media participation is a customer data goldmine, waiting to be tapped.

Strategic Listening

Companies need to start thinking about taking advantage of the tools, technologies, and data available to drive improvements across many aspects of their business. If you work in product development, strategic planning, corporate communications, marketing, advertising, customer care, sales, or any discipline that touches the customer experience, then it is imperative that you begin using the insights from the social web to better inform your strategies, improve your products/services/business operations, and improve your customer satisfaction.

Over the last month I’ve worked with Chuck to create a new graphic that helps illustrate how social analytics (discovery, collection, analysis and segmentation) of data from the social web can make its way through, and be used by the different business functions that exist in most companies.

Social Analytics Lifecycle

Click the image to download a higher res version on Flickr

This version of the Social Analytics Lifecycle is just the beginning, as we expect it to grow and change after discussions with other companies about how they should go about implementing strategic listening programs. We’re excited about the possibilities, please enjoy this visual representation and let me know how you’d like to see it evolve.