I’m at a wine tasting tonight at the Roger Smith Hotel for Corkd.com and as i’m tasting the 2009 La Vielle Ferme Côtes du Luberon care of @garyvee, I’m thinking about something I experienced earlier  today- just how difficult it is to find influencers using Social Media Monitoring tools - to be honest in a lot of cases I’d have more luck using Google (and that’s not to give Google a pat).

I think the problem is social monitoring tools are too keyword based (as I’m sipping the 2009 La Vielle Ferme Côtes du Luberon I’m thinking I don’t like it as much as the wine I just had – the NV Domaine de La Taille aux Loups Brut Tradition which I gave a 87/100 at  http://corkd.com/~3w @corkd.

Drinking the 2009 La Vieille Ferme Cotes du Ventoux Rose which I was less than enthusiastic about despite it getting close to the Red Wine, which is my favorite (but hey, Gary’s selling in and tasting it at Wine Library TV, I bet) I was thinking how constrained social media platforms are by keywords and how we need to move past that – and that’s what I thought earlier today.

Would have had more luck with Comscore or Compete (if it went all the way and categorized everything) than the tools we’re using now to identify influeners.  For example, say I want to know about Automotive Influencers, and then Hotel Influencers, and Restaurant Influencers – for some reason I’m seeing the same list of blogs, more or less, even though I changed the query so it’s entirely different.

I noticed the same issue with multiple platforms I’ve worked with – I’d change the query and still get the same stuff, and the majority was spam, anyway.  Won’t signal out which platforms I used today – since I’ve seen this in multiple platforms and I had the thought as I actually work on this stuff – and I get my thoughts and insights by touching the data – that’s how my mind works.

Ah, now we’re getting to Red Wine, 2009 La Vieille Ferme Cotes Du Ventoux Red Wine, and hearing about the issues with wine harvesters buying land and harvesting grapes (sounds like harvesting Influeners – ha! – this wine isn’t bad at all!) I was thinking about what would have made my searches for Influeners better.   The reviews of La Vieille Ferme Cotes Du Ventoux Red Wine were compared to the host like new Nike shoes.

Getting back to Influencers - it seems to me it’s important to know why someone wants to have specific Influencer information and what they intend to do with it before pulling the information.   And now, as I’ve had a few glasses of wine, I’m feeling positively giddy!

It occurred to me that influencer identification would be a whole lot easier if we figured out how we decide who is an influncer – for example if @garyvee writes about a wine and a wine blogger writes about it soon afterwards it could be surmised that@garyvee influenced the wine blogger but the current crop of Social Media Monitoring tools come up cold (Perhaps Glide Technologies new offering will prove me wrong – I saw a bit of it recently but need to see more).