Was thinking about my last post about  Influence Mapping – comparing TRAACKR to mPACT – both platforms gave reasonably good results if what your looking for is online influencers, particularly business to consumer (and I’m in the exact same position in both lists, last I looked)- but what about those who are influential but are not primary online?

Even for people online, like Seth Godin, these tools (say Klout) will give him a low score simply because he’s not active in that channel.  If that’s the case – perhaps the only way Online Influence Lists will truly define offline influence is when everyone is fairly active online – and these tools can crawl and gather the data …. and I think we’re about 25 years away from that.

For B2B contacts it’s more likely information is much more likely going to be shared in closed communities, linkedin,  or otherwise offline – the whole point of using online influence tools to define offline influencers may be a mute point since offline influence does not appear to map closely to online influence.

Here’s some examples:

1. Medical - Pharmaceuticals are so regulated by the FDA it’s hard to imagine any drug company or, in fact, any physician or health care professional (except alternative medicine)  openly stating their opinion on anything controversial (that might get them sued).  As a result, even if a doctor does feel a certain way towards a drug, they are unlikely to come at and say it publically, anywhere, including online.

Take cardiology – for example – your more likely to find influencers by looking though Cardiology magazines and doing primary research than any online tool is going to provide.   We might not even have the right keywords – we’d probably want to monitor what a bunch of professionals in the field said and then try to discern that the keywords are they actually used, and how often, and then tune the online influence platforms to those words and then see what we come up with.

Besides, many professionals, including doctors, aren’t that active online, though that is changing.   You’d be more likely to find influencers by looking through closed communities and forums than anything Klout or the other platforms I work with can get at.   But the problem is, with the closed communities, most people use pseudonames and aren’t directly reachable.

2. Real Estate: Again, as much as we like to think everyone is online I suspect LinkedIn is probably more important than Facebook in order for actually connecting up with people.

3. Professional Services – I think it’s to be very successful in a field or discipline entirely via Word of Mouth (photographer, speaker, consultant), that is “offline” word of mouth and reccomendations.    Perhaps there are individuals who are very successful and what they do, but do not generate much or any online content … It’s hard to image these individuals will ever show up on any influencer list.

But, in many cases, I think the people we really want to find are precisely the real influecners – the ones that are often, offline.