Our product is designed from the core up to work off keywords, and then scan all the voices out there in the blogsphere, online articles and social media to find those voices that match what you’re looking for. We then derive influence measurement on top of this set of data to uncover who is really important and impacting your market (and thus the name of our product – mPACT).

We also mine for upcoming opportunities – call for speakers, editorial calendars, awards, etc.

To learn more, go to http://www.mblast.com/mpact

Thanks
grl

Thanks, @heatherrast

Radian6, for example, has the Influence Viewer widget. It is tied specifically to metrics a brand can determine in advance and it brings in results based on who is talking about your product. From the widget you can even access the relevant posts those influencers have made.

Just to clarify, too: I’m neither a client nor an employee of Radian6 (now), though I did act as a Training Specialist for the company for a couple of months last year. I’m very familiar with the product as a consequence.

You ask the question “how do I find the influencers” and talk about using tools where you enter userids and see who they are influenced by. This is certainly one approach, but this does not allow you to find new influencers perhaps outside of the circle you regularly travel; it also seems pretty time-intensive to manually cross tab all the matrices; and it ignores the best way to find influence — start by looking not at the userids you know, but instead at the very topics and things your market cares about; and from that derive who the voices are that matter the most.

At the risk of blatant commercialism…check out http://www.mblast.com/mpact. We launch on Monday 10 January and have a different perspective on measuring influence than some others in the market.

First, we believe that to measure influence, you have to first listen and see if potential influencers are really saying things of relevance to your market or not. You start with keywords – not known userids. Seems obvious I know, especially to marketers, but some tools ignore this at their own peril, and seem to give somewhat generic influence scores that equate to being highly influential over a lot; but in reality not very influential at all over my market. You mention Chris Brogan here — a brilliant thinker and highly influential. But I am not sure I would listen to Chris if I was in the market for Ski Boats. I’m sure he knows something about the topic, but I’m not sure I’ve really heard him talking about the space a lot with any authority or regularity. So if I am looking for who is most influential in the boating space, Chris may not rank very high at all. He doesn’t really have the authority, or a regular voice in the discussion for this market. If I really look for who is moving the boating market, Chris may be a dud (sorry Chris. Admire your work in all other areas!)

Topical relevance matters a lot in determining influence. We handle that very well in our solution by allowing you to first find influence based on what people are saying, and how that matches up to what you are looking for.

Once you isolated the voices with topical relevancy, you can then look at their authority levels, reach and other variables that allow influence scoring / mapping to be done effectively.

What we’re describing is hard to do. But we’ve done it. And we do it across not just social media, but also the blogsphere and online publications (articles) as well.

We think in many ways, measuring influence is not a new gig for marketing professionals. It’s just a lot harder to do now with all the voices to span and listen to.

We welcome more discussion on this very important topic.

Gary Lee
CEO
mBLAST
http://www.mblast.com/mpact

By the way, my blog is also dofollow, so feel free to leave comments and reap the backlink benefits there also.

Thanks for the great work!

@LisaBarone – would be happy to give you a tour anytime – we read and Tweet your stuff often! Hit me up @Vocus

Here’s a snapshot: Vocus Offers a Comprehensive Brand and Topic Monitoring Platform for PR Professionals

What I like most about this post is that you focused on the methods and approach, without focusing on the tools (Klout aside). Too often, I’m seeing people get caught up in the tools, without regard to the processes and methods to actually accomplish influencer analysis and mapping.

Ken

Thanks for sharing!