Hello Traackr – Helping Identify and Engage with Influencers

I’m shocked at how long it’s been since I posted to ExperienceCurve, but I guess a lot has been going on and it’s easy to endlessly put off updates to the blog. Anyway, here’s the update and I hope to keep this up a bit more regularly.

I recently left Nokia and joined a new company called Traackr, who have developed software that makes it easier to find and engage with influencers online. The product is primarily targeted at PR companies and brands who actually want to get in touch with and engage with the passionate experts who are really leading the dialogue in their markets. As you can imagine, this business really resonates with me, because I do believe there is tremendous value creation (co-creation) opportunities that happen outside of a companies traditional boundaries. Call it blogger outreach, community outreach, blogger relations, influencer marketing, word of mouth marketing, or social media marketing, it is happening on the outside, in the wild west of the growing social media landscape.

The challenge for most companies that want to participate in a dialogue with the community is to find the people who are leading the conversation, who are the experts, the people who’s ideas spread, the people who in Seth Godin’s terms have “clout”. An additional challenge in Social Media is to be able to differentiate popularity and real influence.

An Example Authority list

Traackr’s approach to finding influencers uses a deep search across content and 20+ social networks to find the authors of influential content. We then develop several scores for the people we find that can help characterize that persons influence.

The 3 scores we currently use are Reach, Resonance & Relevance.

One of the most interesting intersections of these metrics is between reach and resonance. In conducting our searches it has become apparent that influencers we find that have a lower Reach and higher Resonance (ie. there stories spread further), are the experts with a much more engaged audience. These are of course the people that can be missed when doing more traditional searches using google etc. that focus primarily on popularity or audience size.

So far we’re are having a great response from our clients, so if you are involved in blogger outreach or influencer marketing get in touch. You can call me directly 415.713.6763 or email at karl at traackr.com (and yes we know the name is not ideal

BTW if you’re interested in reading more here’s a great post listing many of the resources available for finding influencers.