I spoke with Dave Reed of Social Radar today and we had an interesting conversation about using Social Radar to visualize influencers.  I decided to replicate what we discussed using food bloggers in New York City.

First, I used Sysomos Map to find blogs in NY, NJ and CT that related to a certain type of food.

After eliminating duplicates and any blogs that weren’t pretty close to NYC   – I had about 150 urls to work with.   While Social Radar excels in a certain type of visualization – most have strengths the others don’t and it’s often neccessary to have access to multiple monitoring platforms for those things each does better – that works out ok for an agency – not so well for individuals – lucky for me that I have access to almost any platform I want to look at.    I have found combining them often works better.

Often – I’m curious to see how some of the ideas that pop into my head actually will look like when I try them out - that’s the case here.  Armed with my geo-located food blog/blogger urls I fired up Social Radar and created a Watchlist for the url list.   Social Radar took the urls and was successfully able to add most of them to my Watchlist.

There is a lot of power to the visualization part of Social Radar that really is what makes it stand out and I figured I could use it to see what kind of insight could come out of the visualizations of network influence and interconnection of my list.

The first question I have is – who should I first contact?  The answer is…. Eater, Midtown Lunch and Serious Eats blogs.

What I wish for is a way to make a list out of what Social Radar visualizes  – I find the tool interesting but it’s quite manual to really hone in on influencers in this way – still – there are some nifty and useful diagrams and visuals Social Radar produces I haven’t seen anywhere else.

For example – here’s a visualization of all the blogs and how they interconnect with each other

In fact, Social Radar has a unique strength in that you can set up queries that can be answered visually – such as the interconnected blogs that feature the exact content I’m looking for in my query – I’m assuming red means – they don’t have the content, green means they do.

It would be nice if there was a legend that says that that means – I guess there is a lot that Social Radar can still to improve their visualization engine even more.

The downside – as I mentioned -the visualizations are wonderful but the process of isolating information is very hands on and manual – it’s good for analysis but maybe not so great when I have several blogs I want to investigate individually – say 150 of them.  I suppose you could argue that the visual aspects of Social Radar makes it possible to just hone in on the most important blogs – but in my mind, the entire list is important – so I’m not sure that just because a few globes are brighter and have more of the right color halo around them – that they’ll end up being more useful to me than others that don’t have those things.

Nor does clicking on the globes serve as a hyperlink to the sites – so while you have the actual sites in your watchlist drawn out in an atomic diagram – you can’t really see what your looking at without going to the site yourself.

Getting back to the list – I still don’t have any contact information against the blogs – and they haven’t been fully vetted – but let’s say I could get the heavy lifting done without manually having to go to each one – it’s not so much the time involved – it’s the tediousness of it – and there is a partial solution – one that I bet is used more often than not – using a Web Extractor to pull the information off of the blogs – when a bot can find it – a program like Visual Web Ripper, for example – which has the following capabilities -

• Very user friendly visual project designer.
• Extract complete data structures, such as product catalogues.
• Repeatedly submit forms for all possible input values.
• Extract data from highly dynamic web sites including AJAX web sites.
• Data extraction scheduler with email notifications and logging.
• Custom post-processing and comprehensive API.

To be honest with you, while Social Radar is an interest platform to use – it’s visualizations didn’t actually make my what I was trying to do easier – at best, it added dimension to what I was doing – but it didn’t simplify it, yet,  Social Radar is not the only way to skin this cat – there is another – ECairn – and I will be exploring ECairn in another post, shortly.