Been  playing with the new mPACT influencer platform since late last week -  the new offering reminds me a lot  of Compete.com with its free offering for traffic analysis when it first came out several years back (and now a standard way of measuring traffic for many sites and businesses).

I think the same could be said for  mPACT/mBLAST and its new offering that is being announced today, which is also integrated with Facebook and Twitter and includes a way for an individual to measure their own influence against a keyword or set of keywords.

MPACT already offers a paid version of the Influence platform (which I have been using for several months) but this is the first time something like this, a full-blown influencers analysis freemium offering, has been open to the public with no strings attached.

Here’s a short analysis comparing mPACT, TRAACKR and KLOUT, which all report on online influence; mPACT’s real competition is from TRAACKR, I feel, not so much KLOUT – but here goes:

Note: Recent announcements by TRAACKR and Klout have modified some of the rows of this table, above which was prepared over the weekend – specifically, TRAACKR now, as of today, tracks an influencer over time and Klout tracks influence around specific subjects (but not any subject – you still have to choose from a list Klout presents to you).

According to CEO Gary Lee  today’s new offering allows anyone to  find influential voices on a single keyword or series of keywords — it is not a full Boolean search string like (Pro) version (which I have access to and have played with for the last 3-4 months).  People can try mPACT freemium and get used to finding influential voices and then graduate to the paid version if they want more information ( the full product allows for far more complicated search strings, reports, tabs / saved searches, and Influence Map, tracking Influencers over time and an Opportunities database of listings).

The new Freemium mPACT platform is meant to  go head-head with the public version of Klout and offer a true (free) alternative to Klout for determining influence on any subject in the market. While Klout does provide a readout of people who are influential in certain subjects, you can’t just search on whatever you want though Klout has often had as much relevance as mood ring in its results  though the results for Social Media Analytics look decent (see below):

It’s a second generation version of influencer scoring that allows people to see their own influence — but by topics they enter as well as see the top-10 voices.  Meanwhile, the new platform  provides an entry for the more versatile paid platform  for marketing professionals who need to really see more detailed influence reports.

Below is a search done in mPACT free on “Social Media Analytics”:

In the upper right part of this image, above, my influence within the topic of “social media analytics” is considered by mPACT to be 99 – this value can also be tweeted for shared on Facebook via the buttons immediately below the score;  as is known, an individual may be highly influential on Topic A and non-influential on Topic B.

CEO Gary Lee thinks this way of measuring influence is very different from  Klout’s  generic score .  In fact, there is a real need for people to measure their own influence, look at their own word cloud, etc.

mPACT differs from Klout in that it does NOT believe a generic score does anything other than measure your influence which is almost  meaningless unless it is applied to a particular subject.

TRAACKR has an advantage to mPACT and Klout in one very important way – you can add any outlet and any person to a TRAACKR list and it will be ranked along with whatever else TRAACKR discovers -  this has a use for PR firms that often have a list of PR-Influencers that are not showing up on a digital influencer list – TRAACKR allows you to add anyone to that list and reconcile, to some extent two very disparate ideas of influence that exist in marketing – online influence vs. offline influence (see below).

TRAACKR also has released new features today that I have asked for directly – as I interface directly with the development and marketing teams at mPACT/mBLAST and TRAACKR, as well as many other social media and search platforms; I am often in a position to suggest new features platforms I care about  should have.

Among the new features are some improvements for campaign tracking which I think some MARCOM firms will find very useful such as filtering a campaign by a specific tag or set of individuals (see below) that were triggered by specific suggestions I gave the TRAACKR development team – and they delivered:

Filter Monitor by Individual

TRAACKR  added the ability to filter the Monitor a specific individual.  By clicking on any individual influencer’s name in the Monitor, you will generate a “personalized” Monitor for that person.

These two filtering options give you much more flexibility when analyzing the content generated by your influencers.  We have more Monitoring enhancements coming soon as well!

It’s nice to see the direct influence I’ve had…. on platforms.  My real reason for doing this (be an advisor) is … I want a better set of platforms for Analysts such as myself to work with …  having the ear of interested parties at TRAACKR and mPACT has made that possible …. I’m not as close with people at Klout such as CEO Joe Fernandez, but was present at the New York Tech Meetup 3  years ago when Klout first came on the scene and was one of the first users.

All three influencer platforms are mentioned and detailed in my Social Media Analytics book that is going to press in August.

Getting back to Klout – take a look what Klout does with Seth Godin’s profile – Seth Godin does not tweet much – he’s not active on Twitter from what I can gather – yet no one could say that Seth is not an influencer in Marketing or PR – but Seth Godin will not show up in many influencer lists that look at Twitter because he is not participating in that channel much.  Let’s face it – Seth Godin doesn’t need to Tweet – he has plenty of influence via his Blog – but Klout isn’t really looking at Blogs – it’s looking at Twitter and to some extent, Facebook.  That is the issue with Digital platforms – they measure digital activity – but if your activity isn’t digital, or there is no direct path to your actions and digital, they will usually fail to detect important signals they we, as users of these platforms, ordinary expect to find.

When Seth Godin is being reported, last I looked, he was ranked with a Klout Score of 46.  Sometimes known influencers just fail to show up on anyone’s online influence list.  So much for digital influence – well …. nothing is perfect, and as I wrote last week B2B influence is a hard nut to crack anyway since many of the true influencers are “offline” so that neither mPACT, TRAACKR or Klout will pick them up – at least, not today.

But the platforms are improving constantly – but within a few years – who knows?   Maybe what we need is for everyone to be online and participating in all the social media channels – but for all the hype out there that sounds like online social media is the “in thing” – the truth is – we’re far, far away from that.

But then again, if you need a quick topic relevent influencers List – mPACT’s new free offering is hard, hard to beat.

Finally, if you need a platform that is more full spectrum (forums, YouTube, etc) you’ll find it difficult to get all you want from TRAACKR, mPACT or Klout – and that’s an issue when looking at closed communities such as message boards where one needs to be a member and authenticate with a login.   In other cases, we’re looking at Forums that simply may not have RSS feeds set up (perhaps by design) – ratings sites such as Amazon don’t make it very easy to crawl them, neither does TripAdvisor, yet there are influentials there, and Influential conversations that really have to be mined by individuals, for the most part, today.     Then again, anything can be had if one is willing to put enough effort into it – but it will cost a lot to mine Forums, YouTube or select closed communities and one will really have to step back and decide if the effort taken or methodology applied is worth it.

People looking for quick Influencer lists, however, should have a lot to chew on today with mPACT Freemium, TRAACKR’s improvements and Klout’s recent upgrade to Klout.2.0 (which improved their topic analysis capabilities for influencers).