Mapping Influence in Social Media

Bill Rice's blog

Social media monitoring software immediately returns efficiency to your day by consolidating your monitoring destinations. However, as is the case with any great data collection, it simply generates more questions. One of those questions most recently top of mind with our clients is: Who, in all the chatter, is influential?

Here are some of the ways we look at mapping influence.

1. Understand Your Social Media Objective - You have to start here! Fundamentally influence is defined by what you want to accomplish.

For example, if you are trying to influence Michigan legislation on education getting Chris Brogan to shout your message is not necessarily going to deliver. Sure he has 100,000+ followers, but I guarantee that crowd in not following him to listen for great ideas in Michigan education.

However, I bet you can find some gems using this search for RTs of Michigan Education. Getting on the radar of smaller affinity groups like the Michigan Association of School Boards (@MASB), SOS Michigan (@SOSMI), Michigan Democrats (@MichiganDems), or Michigan Republicans( @MIGOP) can also give you reach into the right audiences.

Here are some of the things we look for in matching influence to objectives:

Topic frequency
Engagement (RTs and @Replies)
Reach (How often they’re syndicated)
Relevance of social network

What would you add to this list?

2. Look for Influence Beyond a Single Channel – The preceding example is clearly a Twitter-centric strategy, which isn’t a bad place to start. However, if you are looking for scale you need to look at influencers that cross social media channels or networks—maybe even geo-boundaries.

Here are a couple examples of my favorite power influencers:

Cindy King on social media topics. Not only does she pack a powerful punch on Twitter at 10,000+ followers, but can extend your message into Facebook (600+ Friends) or onto the powerful blog, Social Media Examiner (37,000+ unique visitors) where she is the Managing Editor.
Travis Campbell on Internet marketing. Again, he can give you power on Twitter at 28,000+ followers or take your message to his Marketing Professor blog (8,000+ unique visitors) or onto his growing YouTube channel (over 900+ subscribers).

The lesson here is look for influencers that have their own motivations to build big audiences. Then figure out how to get them excited about your objectives.

3. Engage Influencers with Genuine Intent – Know where you want to go and identifying who can take you there is only part of the battle. Now you need to figure out how to engage these influencers.

Often it’s easier than you think. Guess where I always start? The About Us (Chris Garrett) page.

Bonus Hint: The new FTC rules regarding bloggers make the Disclosure page (John Chow) a good source of pitch guidelines. Some of the more popular influencers, like Jason Falls, pull no punched and go right to the point with How to Pitch Me pages.

The point being, take a little extra time to see what motivates folks to carry forward your message.

4. Be Ready to Listen and Amplify – This is the step I see many folks miss. If you get an influencer motivated to pitch—make darn sure you are ready to amplify that message. This only makes sense, right? Unfortunately, so often people will pitch great influencers and then expect them to do all the work.

This approach is bad in so many ways. Abandoning good influencers to their own best efforts can short circuit your promotion by:

Muting the social proofing effects
Narrow the target audience
Neglect you’re own social network (probably prospects and customers)
Miss the opportunity to expand your own audience
Disappoint the influencer and minimize the value you could have return

The more you do to amplify any positive messages about your brand, especially with influencers, is only going to build your community of customers and powerful influencers.

As you boil your social media monitoring through these observations of influence you will get a more robust understanding of influencers flowing into your database. What you do to strengthen those influencers only improves your segmentation and mapping for the next social media campaign (or heaven forbid crisis).

###

Join the Kaleidico community (you don't even have to be a customer) sign-up for our RSS feed or get updates via email. I would also love to meet you on Twitter too. Follow us @kaleidico. If you want more information about our software or services call us at 866.667.5253 or visit www.kaleidico.com.