Adding Context to Influence Measurement: How 9 Tools Stack Up

Businesses are using influence measurement tools for all kinds of reasons:  to prioritize customer service responses, to manage promotional campaigns, to identify relevant influencers and manage relationships with them, to understand how the conversation around their brand is being shaped. But not all influence measurement tools work the same way, and picking the right tool for the job is critical. That’s why we recently published our Guide to Influence Measurement Tools (available for $20 as a PDF download), and will be posting a series of excerpts from the Guide in the coming weeks.

The first question to ask yourself:  are you trying to score, rank or analyze large numbers of people—or are you trying to identify and understand the people who are influential in a given subject matter, topic or market? Depending on your answer to this question, the type of tool you chose might be very different. And while most users will happily focus on managing their own personal influence scores on Klout or Kred, serious business users, agencies and marketers also need to understand the range of enterprise-level tools that offer a deeper look at how online conversations are shaped.

There are two types of influence measurement tools: those that start by creating user profiles and then associate data with that user, and those that start by analyzing content and then associate authors, influencers and other data with that content.  The most commonly-used influence measurement tools, such as Klout, PeerIndex, Kred, TweetLevel or PeekAnalytics are personal influence measurement tools.  They identify online users and then create scores and profiles for each user.  Contextual influence measurement tools such as TRAACKR, mPACT or Appinions are less widely known.  These are enterprise analytic tools that carry a monthly or annual cost and typically don’t have a consumer-facing model.

Here’s how the two types of tools work:

Personal Influence Measurement Tools rely primarily on social networks, especially Twitter, as the source of their data.  They typically identify a user based on a public Twitter profile, analyze that user’s activity on Twitter and other social networks, and then assign one or more scores that measure each user’s online influence.   These personal influence measurement tools have a consumer-facing business model since they need to encourage users to create accounts and give them permission to access data from other social networks.

Most personal influence measurement tools measure a user’s ability to generate sharing or engagement actions in others.  It is also possible to measure influence in terms of the size and even the demographics of a user’s audience.  PeekYou’s PeekAnalytics creates user profiles, and then pulls data from across the web to analyze the size and demographics of a given user’s audience.

Contextual Influence Measurement Tools, on the other hand, start with the content, and then identify and analyze who is influential within the context of a given topic, conversation or set of topics.  Instead of relying on social networking data to identify users, these tools use highly sophisticated text analytics to search publicly available content from across the web, and then identify users who create, share or somehow interact with relevant content.

Contextual measurement tools do not assign a single score or profile to a user.  User scores are assigned only in the context of how influential a user is in a given topic area.  But they offer a far richer view of a user’s online activity than personal influence measurement tools do, because they look at all public activity, not just the activity on social networks.

These tools also offer insights into groups of users:  given the set of people who are talking about Topic A, what else are they talking about?  This is what makes these tools useful for managing reputations or developing brand strategies.

So while most social media users worry about their influence scores or the latest Perks, if you’re a professional agency or responsible for managing a large digital brand, you’ll want to make sure you’re paying attention to some of these enterprise-level tools, too.

Which types of tools are you using?

To learn more about influence measurement tools, check out The Realtime Report’s Guide to Influence Measurement Tools, our detailed analysis of all of the tools mentioned in this post.