A few weeks ago I met with someone from TRAACKR, a fairly new service that provides custom Influencer Lists that are useful for blogger outreach.    Unlike the lists I came up with in Using Twitter to find Influentials and my work with Radian6, Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 and Sysomos, platforms that I have access to, TRAACKR is a service that aggregates a lot of different information and creates a custom list of Influentials based on a series of keywords you provide to TRAACKR.

Note:  Crimson Hexagon uses TRAACKR for Influencer identification.

The service is boutique and not inexpensive, but I found it difficult if not impossible to replicate the list of influentials with any of the tools I have access to – though I think many of the names TRAACKR comes up appear to be individuals I might come up with in a conventional search, on Google, or using a Social Media Monitoring tool, like Radian6 or Sysomos – both which have reports that attempt to identify influencers.

The list above is one that TRAACKR shared with me – it’s part of the top 25 Authorities, according to TRAACKR, that influenced Public Relations …. and guess what … the names seem to be people that I know, all of them – in fact, I know almost everyone on the list.

The Aggregated information for the Influencer List takes a few days for TRAACKR to collect and there is some human intervention that’s needed – about 70% is automated, and 30% comprises of a person double checking the information collected and filling in the blanks, when  neccessary.

I thought the lists could be replicated, and I tried one using Radian6 against a Health Care Influencer List that TRAACKR provided me; after a few hours of looking at the data, I concluded Radian6 was never designed to produce a report like this, and the amount of work needed to produce an influence list as clear as this one would be more expensive and exhausting, than just paying TRAACKR to produce one for you.

However, the real value of TRAACKR is to produce an Influencer List for areas you know nothing about – also it would be nice if TRAACKR could produce a geo-targeted Influence List – but maybe that’s asking for too much.

According to the marketing notes on the TRAACKR website - they do a lot of heavy lifting to come up with the Influencer List. TRAACKR says they  calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these influencers.

You can see the list of keywords being used in each list, so you can try replicating the results using other platforms, but honestly, I doubt you could -though, as I said, you can often come up with many of the same names in other ways – but not all of them.

According to TRAACKR – their  Online Authority List is a list of individuals steering online conversations about a specific market or topic. Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List.

Here’s some facts about TRAACKR  – my point being – yes, you can get something useful from generating your own influencer lists in whatever platform you choose … but – it’s actually more cost effective to use TRAACKR if your an agency.

Personally, I’d like to test TRAACKR using a subject I do know about, like Web Analytics – test it nationally, and test it locally, in, say, NYC – see what it comes up with – would be very interested in trying that.