Well …. my manuscript is finally done (at least, in draft form) and submitted to the publisher, McGraw Hill. Whew! Exhausted. But now I can post about mPACT from mBLAST, the new influencer mapping platform that launched last week and I am very impressed, and that is not easy for me – It takes a lot to impress me.
I did a long query with 5 movies including Green Hornet, Green Lantern, Iron Man, Thor and The Avengers movie, all with Marvel or DC Studios, etc. For the most part the influencers I got were plausible and and you can break down the influence map for each Influencer. I also spoke with mBLAST founder Gary Lee last week who supplied an interview for my Social Media Analytics Book and material for a chapter on Influence.
Impressed that I could go back for up to a year, and export all the data into Excel, if I wanted (and I did, here’s the links in Excel and PDF – all article volumes – curious – though I asked for a year, I got about 2 months worth of actual articles, my guess is after 4000 rows, records, that might be the max size of a file, but I don’t know if that is true or not.
THOR – Green Latern – Green Hornet – Iron Man – Avengers 1yr Volume – ArticleVolume – Excel File
ArticleVolume-PDF file
The mPACT package does an exceptional job of linking people to urls, but having said that, it could certainly use some more data on the people, and a platform such as PeekYou fill in some of the gaps; still, it’s impressive they are able to go this far in resolving influence and article attribution back to a person and tell you what they are influential for (in this case, one or more of the 5 Super Hero movies).
In very narrow, niche queries, they have had more information on the influencers (who are all ranked) – but in a topic of this size, I’m greatfull for what they have been able to collect.
You can display an influencer list for each movie, or all of them at one time – FANTASTIC! Here’s a list of the top 25 Influencers for The Thor Movie.
Klout can’t touch this – influence that is topical and subject related.
You can look at the Social Media Mentions by Movie – in this case it is all Twitter and Facebook
While you can click on the Twitter Social Media mentions the Facebook one’s don’t resolve to usable urls, but, you still have the name of the individual in the article url and the mentions can be exported into Excel or PDF files.
The Opportunities section is the only area that has a bug – it seems to show me the same information as the original tab I created for a previous report – I think it’s a bug mPACT is working on fixing – otherwise, the Opportunities would show me changes to engage with influencers from upcoming meetings taking place all over the world.
I think it’s possible to take the output of mPACT and segment it any way one wants – perhaps beyond what mPACT or mBLAST can do, for itself, right now (such as, by country, or by media channel) but that’s the point – it’s the most advanced influencer platform on the planet, and believe it or not, one of the most affordable and easiest to work with.
Finally, I noticed a much stronger presence for Green Hornet than the other superhero movies which I took to mean whatever is prominent at the moment (for example the Green Hornet movie came out over the weekend gets favored).
There’s the actual Boolean Query mPACT shows the user … I pasted the same query into Sysomos MAP and got pretty good results – Sysomos processed the long Boolean query without a problem … And did the same thing, favoring The Green Hornet by a ratio of 5:1. I think I know why. Actually, it’s similar to how people look at strong sunlight and see the aftereffects as ghost images for a few minutes. My guess is monitoring algorithms gift much more weight to whatever is trending upwards right now. If I ran the same query in May, when the THOR movie comes out ……Thor will dominate 5:1 over Green Hornet and the rest, for the most part.
But, then again, what we’re seeing with Green Hornet and mPACT is effects of promotion, getting the message out ….. I guess my analogy to gazing into a strong headlight is not far off from the way it is, after all.
