When I first started writing about contextual influence measurement tools, the key advantage they had over personal influence measurement tools like Klout is that they measured influence in the context of a specific topic. Today we’re seeing a whole new generation of tools and platforms that take it even further by letting marketers see not just the individuals who are influential in a given topic, but to understand the whole community of relationships around that topic.
Today, Traackr, one of the most mature contextual influence measurement platforms, introduces something it calls Influencer Network Analysis (INA), a new capability that allows marketers to see how influence travels to and from an individual influencer.
Step one is to identify influencers by entering keywords to find the people who produce relevant content based on those terms. The tool then shows the size of their audience and how engaged their audience is with their content. To do this, Traackr uses all available public online content.
With the new feature, the tool then uses Twitter specifically to analyze the influencers’ Twitter content to find all of the people they are retweeting and mentioning, looking for highly engaged people in either direction–who is the influencer engaged with and who is engaged with an influencer–and taking into consideration both the frequency of interactions and the duration of interactions to map out the relationships among influencers.
“We’ve always been great at finding the key nodes in influencer networks. With this release, Traackr is expanding to help our customers understand how the nodes connect and how information is shared,” says Pierre-Loic Assayag, CEO of Traackr. The company says it expects customers to use the new feature to get a more nuanced understanding of how online conversations are shaped, and to expand their outreach programs one level out to include people who influence their influencers.
All this fun analytics is not free: Traackr subscriptions start at $1,795 a month. Still, if you’re a large marketer, it’s can be a good investment: more than 140 brands, including EMC, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Thomson Reuters and half of the top 50 communications agencies use Traackr to drive social programs.
To showcase its new Influencer Network Analysis feature, the company has created an interactive influence map around the topic of Women & Leadership, using terms like leadership, women, careers, mentors, women executives, and parenting and working to identify a group of influencers. Click on any of the individual influencers in this interactive influence map, and you’ll not only see information on that individual, you’ll also see how they’re connected to other members of the group.
What do you think? How would you use network analysis features like this to help inform your marketing initiatives?
