Let me start by saying that the word “influencer” has become a bit of a Holy Grail in social media speak. I don’t necessarily agree with how it is often used. Thus, the mere fact that I put the word influencer in the title of this post shows that my hypocrisy knows no bounds.
All kidding aside, I tend to think that there is a difference between somebody with a large audience, and somebody with a large audience of people with small to large of their own. In other words, I’m far more interested in visualizing how news spreads among networks of people on-line, than I am in just finding the large nodes.
It’s kind of like the difference between velocity and acceleration, in my mind. Both are great things to know, but one is definitely cooler than the other.
The Better Process
I had another demo with Social Radar this week that has led me to believe that I can map out on-line networks of people around the keywords that I care about. And it doesn’t start with monitoring the entire internets. The technique that we used, and are experimenting with is:
site descriptions and tags Searching all the content on-line returns a lot of SPAM. Social Radar has a function that crawls site descriptions and tags, and it seemed to drastically reduce the amount of SPAM returned.
start broad We used a broad keyword, health, and that returned 14,000 sites… which was around the number I had in my mind. Between 10,000 and 20,000 sites just seems right to me for now.
then search specific Once we had our list of “trusted” sites on health, we could query them with specific search terms, like exergaming and healthy games. Low and behold, the results that were returned were all quality and social radar provides a visualization of the sites that are linked to one another.
now make friends So the connected sites around your keywords have been identified, now it’s just a matter of importing them into your reader and following the bloggers on Twitter to find the ones that you can actually start building relationships with on-line.
Ready For Action
This is the theory I’ve been working on for the last month, and now that I’ve figured out how to do it in a semi-automated way I’m really excited to get going with it. I’m convinced that the way for organizations to spread information on-line in the future, is for their individual employees to connect with other individuals on-line who have the desire and ability to help spread messages.
The process I outlined above helps the organization identify the right people to try to connect with upfront, with the understanding that there is not yet a science to building real and lasting relationships with people. I’m also assuming that the organization truly wants to build relationships with these people for mutual benefit, as opposed to only being out to make a buck.
A Word On Ben
I think that it’s necessary to give a shout out to Ben Hagedorn for being a great salesman throughout this process. I started out by digging through Kevin Palmer’s extensive list of monitoring tools, to get to six that looked like they could help me find networked influencers. From that list I reached out to three companies, Infegy being one of them…
Two things that stood out about Ben were that:
A. Ben actually looked at my LinkedIn profile before our first call. That is such an easy thing to do, and nobody does it when they’re trying to sell me something. It made an impression.
B. Ben never gave up on the sale. I told him point blank last week that I didn’t think his tool had it. But because we’d been working together on my needs (he knew that I was blogging about them and actually followed along at home) he went back to his development team and found a feature that is currently hardly used, but that COMPLETELY SOLVED MY PROBLEM!
He then demoed it to me, and we walked through a couple scenarios and I was sold. Talk about going the extra mile to make the sale. Kudos, Ben… Now we just have to get through the contracting process on our end and we’re home free. ;)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about visualizing relationships between blog posts / web pages vs. visualizing relationships between blogs / web sites.
Sites
If you have a site and you link to another site from your homepage that tells me that you have a relationship with that other site. Whether it’s reciprocal or not, you have identified that, at the very least, you endorse the content on that other site. One sided relationships are still relationships to visualize in this case.
However, inferring that you have a connection with everything on that other site may be a stretch. Thinking of my own site, the topics that I write about have varied over the past year and a half. So if some third party marketer assumed that I would spread a message because a site I linked to on my homepage wrote about it, that may or may not be the case.
Posts
Whereas, if you have a site and you write a post about a specific keyword, and you link that post to another post on-line with the same or similar keywords, that tells me that you have a relationship with that other site, as well. Only it tells me that you’re connecting on a specific topic that I, or some other third party marketer, may care about.
If we could map out all of those connections around specific topics, from post to post, then we may be able to track down some good old fashioned influencers.
Building It
I spoke with Carol Leaman at PostRank last Friday and it sounds like they may have something like that in the works. But if they don’t, (or even if they do), I think that I need to introduce myself to Marc Smith because I can’t shake the feeling that our dev team could somehow combine PostRank data with NodeXL to get me the well-being influencer sociograms that I covet.
So that I can truly help my colleagues with their relationship marketing efforts…
Last month I wrote a post called, Three Questions Your Social Media Pitch Should Answer, and it’s doing pretty well for itself relatively speaking… Yesterday I spoke at a Kentucky IABC luncheon about the internal social media pitch, so I guess it’s becoming a trending topic with me lately.
Social Media Projects Aren’t Different
The main point that I tried to drive home in the presentation was that social media projects aren’t any different than any other type of project that you have to pitch internally. There are three things that you need to understand about your boss, your department, or your enterprise, before putting your pitch together and they happen to be:
fears Figuring out what scares the decision makers is easy when you ask them. It could be a fear of idle time if you let employees onto Facebook at work. It could be the fear of more communications from your customers than your organization can handle. It could be the fear of losing a perceived amount of control over associates. Whatever the case, you need to understand what the fears are so that you can develop answers for them.
language You need to know which buzz-word bingo terms your leadership cares about the most, so that you can address them in your social media pitch. Is it customer acquisition, customer retention, synergy or even the infamous ROI? Whatever the case may be, figure out what the boss cares about and then tailor your pitch to address it. Speak the same language and improve your chances of a successful pitch.
planning Every organization plans for things, so plan for your social media initiative the same way that you would for any other project. If it needs a charter and a sponsor, then make one and find one. If it needs a crisis response action plan, then get with the right people and make one. If it needs resources and milestones, then throw them in the plan. That being said, keep in mind that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.
Putting It All Together
Those are just the things that you need to understand: fears, language and strategy. Once you understand them, you can put them into a presentation and make the pitch. Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that you’ll probably have to do a fair amount of hand holding at first to get a yes. That’s normal, so the least you can do is have fun with it.
Go get em.
If you’ve ever wondered what products people also buy when they buy a particular product, Amazon has had your back for some time now. But I thought it would be interesting to see the data in a sociogram. So my main man Ramtin hacked a super sizzlin’ Amazon Tracker tool together for a project we’re working on in Humana’s Innovation Center.
link to QA site
[Note: These words represent my thoughts, not Humana's]
Why Does It Matter?
If you’re trying to build a system that incentivizes people to care about their own well-being, it helps to start with well being product purchase data. We could guess what people do to engage in their own wellness and how those things are connected, or we could build a tool that looks it up and tells us. That would be the primary mission of this tool, as it evolves.
One cool secondary mission that I’m excited about is people discovery. With books in particular, it’s safe to say that some authors also maintain a presence on the social web. If they happened to write a book about any aspect of well-being, like say the Atkins Diet as an example, and have developed a community on/off-line around that specific topic, then I may be interested in building a relationship with them and their community. The Amazon Tracker helps me discover them.
Rough Around The Edges
I have medium sized plans for the Amazon Tracker, currently codenamed: Shopensteinr. So look for some layout / UI changes in the next week or two. The plan is to get it presentable by DC Week. [fingers crossed]
Also wanted to give shouts out to Similarity Web and Twitterzon for some inspiration. And if you have any ideas for the Shopensteinr, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
- Image by Ian-S via Flickr
I’ve been talking about this function on Amazon for a while now, to anybody and everybody who will listen. And I was lucky enough to have telephone conversations with two people I admire fairly recently, Valdis Krebs and Bernardo Huberman, to talk a bit about the subject.
It feels like an argument needs to be made that what people actually do is at least as important, if not more important, than what they talk about doing. Amazon.com gives you that information in the form of “people who bought this item also bought item X.”
The team that brought you myTPSreport.com is working on another prototype right now that will initially allow you to input a group of product SSIN ID numbers into it to map out what is also purchased when that item is purchased.
Not looked at…
Not queried on…
Purchased.
Where’s The Overlap
The ideal future for a tool like this would be to allow a user to type in a keyword, search any/all categories on Amazon and come back with the products that overlap most of the products within that given segment. What also gets bought?
That will go into the next iteration.
I really think that a tool like this could have a lot of application in general, but for the world of well-being in particular, as products from each wellness vertical can be looked up and understood in a new context. It could also give us some good leads on potentially influential people to follow and get to know in those given segments.
Questions on my mind right now are: What do people buy, in general, when they buy a book on the Atkins diet? Or when they buy a new pedometer?
But not just the most popular of these items. We’re talking, what do people buy when they buy every one of the products in a given product segment.
There are many Chris Hall's in this world. This one blogs and tweets under the code name: hallicious.
