Social Media Week is over as of Friday night but I didn’t get a chance to write a post about Influencer Identification based on the tools I have access to.  As in the other posts in this series, I will place a datafile you can download at the end of this post so you can examine the information for yourself if you want to.

And, I did post about Finding Influencers – based on the idea that being influential is function of

…. being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

What kind of influencer list can we get from the tools I have access to?

Radian6 has an influencer widget that provides a list of sources that are considered influential for the keywords provided in a Topic Profile (or a collection of Topic Profiles).

However the Influencer ranking is somewhat dependent on how sliders are set up in the Influencer EQ dashboard in the Topic Profile configuration (see below).

Rather than explain what each of these slider bars means – but on the face of it the influencer list provided by Radian6 in this case, looks good.    You can also drill down to the social profile of the blog/website owner (if Radian6 has information) (see below) and get various stats like website traffic on the far right (if you purchase the Compete.com site data).

The Social Profile information is a best guess, I’ve found, it’s often sketchy and inaccurate  – but it’s better than nothing.  On the other hand, you’ll almost always have to go to the website and get the contact information anyway – so having some information from Radian6 doesn’t hurt.  Unfortunately, the Social Profile isn’t exportable, even though the Influencer list, itself, is – a feature I wish Radian6 would add.

I’ve tried to get a blogger list out of the Influencer widget, but found of the 250 sites provided – I had to throw out about 95% of them – upon close inspection.   The list has often been way too noisy to be useful in building lists and I concluded the Influencer Widget, despite the name, was never intended to be a blogger relations list – and had Radian6 wanted to implement such a feature, it could have – the Influencer Widget is more like a Prizm that reflects all the influential sources (or light) that it found – and ranks them by Influence (which you define, partly, by the Influencer EQ settings).

According to this Influencer list SocialMedia.biz, Mashable and SocialMediaWeek.org were the most influential sites and while there are many good measures here, defining betweenness (Influence) is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to is  missing – because

1. The Influencer Widget measures the influence of websites, not the individuals who write them – which is the information most people actually wanted.   Also, you need to drill down to the actual posts that are influential to find out why that site is considered influential, and the author of the the posts in question would be considered the “influencer”.
2. The information about “who” wrote the post that is considered influential is buried deep in the Influencer Widget, making pulling out any kind of useful list of Influencers very time consuming – and the vast majority of sites usually have to be thrown out – in my experience of using this widget.

If you have a good clean topic profile, expect to spend 4-10 hours  of hard work to get about 10 – 20 names of influencers out of it.

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 does have an Influencer Report of sorts and it does identify individuals rather than websites, and is immediately more useful, in this sense, than Radian6’s Influencer Widget – however, Radian6 was never designed to create a influencer list – so i see that just as an oversight that could easily be corrected in a future release.

According to Alterian/Techrigy, I’m considered the 6th most Influential “author” – and I intend to use the Techrigy Top Authors report more often.   However, a closer look at this report shows it’s flaw, Influence is a function of how many posts an author has done, which is a misleading metric, in my opinion.   Never the less, you can get the top authors my media type and by sentiment.

For example, if you wanted to get the top authors by negative sentiment you can do that with Techrigy (see below)

But when you drill down (as I did with Mike Moran, who wrote 1 tweet that Techrigy said was “negative” – it turned out to be, not negative at all).

So …. Techrigy’s problem, to me,  it’s good features are riddled with the same problems all the vendors are having -  the technology is immature and there is a lack of standards that are not yet in place for vendors around influence and sentiment, etc.  But Techrigy’s Top Authors report could be useful as an Influencer list for a subject if the noise is filtered out of a profile and your willing to accept volume (posts or tweets) as the measure of influence.

Sysomos Map Top Influencers (based on authority + recent posts) looks right on to me – and the first blog on the list is the same as for Radian6, SocialMedia.biz – but the rest are mostly different.   Being familiar with many of the blogs and individuals who write them I think Sysomos’s Influencer lists are right on.

Authority (which I equate with Influence, according to Sysomos) is determined by the following features, depending on the type of website being looked at:

Blogs

• The number of unique inlinks to the blog over the last year
• The number of bookmarks at social sites such as Delicious
• Readership information if publicly available
• Posting frequency
• Number of followup comments

Twitter

• Followers and Following data
• Number of tweets
• Number of re-tweets

Forums

• Reach
• Inlink count
• Posting frequency

Traditional Media

• Inlink count
• Reach (if available)

Clear enough – and not bad, since Sysomos does a very good job with noise supression – but it’s also not a measure of Influence that I defined at the beginning of this post as a measure of  a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

First of all, like Radian6, sites are the unit of measurement, not individuals.  Also, there is no real attempt at Social Mapping, much as Google is doing with Social Search (see the Social Profile, below).

My sense it that “influence” could develop the kind of “mapping” that Google has just released the first version of, but hasn’t yet figured out if and why it should.

Perhaps Google’s entry into the Social Monitoring Space(read plus read my long article about Google and Social Media Monitoring (Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0evICP23S ) will galvanize vendors in this space to try harder to reinvent themselves -  Sysomos should follow Google’s lead and and start building social profiles with it’s vast collection of data.

Brandwatch has a Top Sites report that is the closest thing I can find to an Influencer List – esp if the sites are filtered by high credibility.

Honestly, this list isn’t bad and most of the sites make sense – without too much trouble you can get the names of the authors and their contact information.   The problem here is this report is just a proxy for Influence, and it’s really designed to be a list you can use to find influentials connected to a profile – also, there is no social mapping, as I described above.

I would not use BrandWatch to find Influencers as it clearly wasn’t designed for it – neither was Techrigy – but… at least Techrigy does have a top authors report, which does do influence based on number of posts where as Brandwatch doesn’t appear to do influential lists, at all.

Biz360 does have a Top Authors report/widget as well, but not a influencer report – but the Top Author report is decent, as far as it goes (see below).

… and I can’t argue with many of the names on the list above, except 2 – John Q. Public and Admin.

In fact, by clicking on any author you get a drill down of all their posts for a specific time period:

Sentiment is also broken down by author

But it’s not clear if content is being rated by the number of postings or some other factor – and mapping individuals is missing from this package.

But one other approach to finding influencers is using PostRank Analytics – a free report can be generated and if the subject is defined (on their lists) you can get good stuff – but if most of the subjects I’m interested in knowing about – there is no category for.  Still, the list for Web Analytics was / is impressive (see below).

Social Media Week NYC did not exist as a list of blogs I could get, so I tried Web Analytics, and found my blog up near the top.   But for those subjects that do exist, PostRank provides the “wisdom of the crowds” with a change on engagement with a post by the audience.

Still, Postrank and the other platforms examined lacked the ability to map interconnections – and therefore, are immature.

Klout.com also has an influencer list – or Topic List which is very useful.    However, many words aren’t in any list – for example, Klout knew nothing about Social Media Week but does know a lot about Web Analytics.

I am not sure how Klout calculates the Influencers.

Also wrote about Traackr last month and it does a good job at identifying  influencers.

But Stowe Boyd is right – none of these tools maps Influencers as well as it could.

By the way, here’s the Influencers for Social Media Week NYC