Posts Tagged ‘ContextMine’

Influence is a power that can affect, persuade and cause changes to someone or something. But, to attain this power to get intended output isn’t easy, especially when it deals with people. In order to influence people, we need to discover what is already influencing them. What makes them tick? What do they care about? What are they listening? And, Whom are they listening?

Recently  I was working on a formula for deriving most influential users on social media. This formula was intended to work across sources [Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit, etc]. The challenge was not to find people who are influencing others but to find how much influence they have. This was little tough when we had to measure it across sources of various nature. Nevertheless, the formula was constructed and we used it at ContextMine. Once this feature was added to the application, I tried to test it. The first thing I did was to find out who is the most influential user for keyword “Social Media”. I was amazed to see the output. It was showing Pete Cashmore and TechCrunch. You can get the list of most influential users for your own keyword here. 

Moving further, I tried to research little more on this subject. I came across Twitalyzer which publishes The Most Influential People in Twitter. There are so many other reports on Influence of people in different aspects of life. There is an article on businessweek about The 25 Most Influential People on Web.

 
Few questions which may drag attention on this entire discussion are: Do we really need to know who are influential? Does that really impacts my business? I would say – No, this is not required but Yes, it does have impact. We must have this information and how to use it, should be our call.

There is an another thought. Jonah Peretti, who the New York Times called the "viral marketing hotdog”, says, Influence is overrated. He further explains –

We all love the idea of “influentials”—those hyper-connected, ultra-respected thought leaders that can make your product reach the tipping point. But have you ever actually met an influential that can repeatedly and consistently make a product go viral? Probably not, because the latest science and real world experimentation shows that “influentials” don’t really exist, that viral growth is partly random, and that riding a wave is much easier than creating it.

If we consider this thought – nothing is constantly influential. It changes. It acts randomly. The viral effect can be an outcome of a trivial incident or a trigger. But, if we can measure the influence – can’t we use it? Reason may be different. It may be random. But, can we deny the importance of this information? Probably not. Though, how to use this measurement may be a matter of personal / organizational thought process.

Looking for your views.

Aggregation is not a new concept for marketing professionals, but, it’s usage in Social Media is certainly a new buzz for them. As we understand from my previous post [on Social Media Marketing], the need to address this emerging market is fiercely felt. Companies are aggressively placing their marketing budgets to this newly created sphere.

In IT, we have been using aggregation in various forms. Drudge Report and The Huffington Post started the news aggregation while lots of other RSS feed readers started aggregating syndicated web content. These services played a big role in taking the web content easily to million of users who didn’t have time to browse websites one-by-one. After the social networking boom the next round of aggregation started in the form of Social Networking Aggregation. Lots of products / services were launched to cater this need. The new era on Internet is the era of Social Media. It has become the numero uno reason for browsing internet, surpassing the previous popular reason, porn. Plenty of social media sites are running and by each passing day it’s getting crowded more n more. Tracking each of these services is tough, hence, we need another form of aggregation, Social Media Aggregation.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit has their own distinct features. Different set of people use these websites for different reasons. As a marketer I get a tough time when I try to track online presence of my brand across all these websites. In this scenario I would love to have an aggregator which can monitor all these social media websites and give me a consolidated report. ContextMine is one of such tools which does this aggregation. This market is also diverse in nature. For example, there are specific search engines to search content / messages floating on real time web. Collecta is one of those search engines.

Aggregated data which is contextual and real time, gives a real feel of your social reputation. Marketing professionals are already planning to utilize this domain, and owing to this need, there are plenty of services ready to cater. It would be interesting to watch out this space going forward.