Tracking Influence

One session at Blogher Business looked at how you can identify influential bloggers and track their effectiveness, RFP for Engagement Measures (link to session transcipt). There’s no agreed way yet on how to measure the ROI on social media outreach, on impact of blog mentions, on the time and effort it takes to get your story out there, but there are at least tools that allow you to find the people and track the conversations.

• There is no agreed way to measure influence, opinions vary widely. Traditional web measures are not practical – how can you use something like Pageview when the technology means that these numbers are not accurate. Pageviews in stats packages do not necessarily count spiders and bots. But these are an indication of search and reader activity, so they need to be included in the measurement.
• To find influential people in your niche, you need to do some in-depth research, either one time or ongoing. Look at who talks about the topic, map connections, understand who is being listened to, who is listening, not just who is speaking. Find your group you want to influence and work out who is influencing them. This is not a quick fix, a quick listing. You need to take some time to understand the space and what is going on in it. After you have identified some people, then see if they are open to working with you.
• Tools for finding and tracking include Technorati, Icerocket and Sphere. If you are looking at boards, then use Boardreader. They all report slightly different, so use them in parallel to identify your blogs of choice and to track mentions of your products and the key terms you are interested in.
• Those are the free tools, but there are a lot of companies that will provide tools and a service to do the monitoring, and track what is being done. Buzzmetrics, Visible Technologies are two leaders in the field. Buzzlogic may be a more affordable tool for the smaller team. But you can still track using spreadsheets, delicious, set searches. Assess what you need to do, the resources you have and plan accordingly.