Who are your influencers, how do you identify them?

2012-02-14 10:55:04 by Craig

Friday’s outpouring by PR agency Sorted PR – who gave a small minority of mummy bloggers a gentle poke - fuelled a healthy discussion about the merits of how to effectively interact with bloggers, and the role that we as PR professionals play in identifying those potential campaign influencers.

Putting aside the fact that this was a funny parody, aimed at a very small minority, in an otherwise very influential – and extremely vocal – group of individuals, this does highlight why it’s so important for PR professionals to research thoroughly, who the right influencers are for your campaign.

Bloggers have gone from being a very small minority, with a limited reach and audience, and emerged as a diverse media set that play an increasingly important role in the decisions we make about products and services, both as consumers and professionals.

Platforms such as Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr have contributed to the rise in community writers, and each one has a different level of influence and reach. There is an abundance of social media monitoring tools on the market, both free and paid-for. Capabilities vary considerably but here are few suggestions to take a look at:

• SEO for Chrome – there are numerous plugins available for Chrome that can provide very easy to access, simple to digest SEO data on a bloggers website. Use correctly you can some weed out the wheat from the chaff
• Klout & PeerIndex – both are social analytic platforms that can provide you with a baseline from which to assess how influential someone is. Whilst I wouldn't advise using these tools alone they do provide a good starting point
• Radian6 & Sythensio – is an automated [paid for platform] that can provide historical and real-time data covering the social web. Results are derived from a set of which in my experience you do have to take some time to refine but the results can be well worth the effort

And finally it’s important to remember that whilst the technology can do a lot of the heavy lifting, there is still a need for human analysis. The numerous tools which exist – and there are plenty - can provide varying degrees of insight, some going deeper than others. Ultimately though it has to be YOU who decides on what constitutes an influencer, and what doesn’t – the data just helps to provide a basis for the decision.