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.

I am finding, more and more there is a possibly unreconciled confusion between digital influencers and subjective influence as understood by more traditional  folks used to thinking of influencers in a more journalistic way; both are entirely different and produced by different world views.  Here’s an example.

A while back I worked with a company in the office construction sector doing SEO; the owner, I observed at the time, had a different company to do web hosting, another for web development and yet another (me) to do SEO for him.  I asked why and found it the owner was extremely distrustful of putting all his eggs in one basket (as he had been burned in the past for doing this) and deliberately opted to create a situation where one hand didn’t know what the other was doing (losing so many synergistic opportunities that would have helped SEO were lost and any work that was done was complicated by having to coordinate 3 sets of individuals that didn’t know each other from Adam or care one bit about each other).

I run across situations where digital influence vs. offline influencers are overlapped.  The idea, I think is to produce a synthesis – much as two eyes are better than one, and two views of the same data will produce a fuller dimension and data integrity.

But – we’re not looking at the same data – it’s more like mixing apples and oranges,  mixing  two types of information does not automatically lead to a synthesis, which I think is the desired outcome.

Meanwhile, it’s important to point out Klout deals strictly with digital influencers while mPact tries to reconcile digital influence with other signals that are not always strictly online, that is why I find it more useful.

By the way, to illustrate this point, Seth Godin is considered extremely influential in marketing – his blog is very well read and he has written several books, yet he doesn’t tweet at all or accept comments on his blog, last I looked and his Klout score is 46 today.  In many ways, much of what makes Seth Godin influential is  missed if we depend on Klout to pick it up.  Meanwhile, my Klout score is 51 as of today and my first book won’t be published till mid August.

A word on my book, Social Media Analytics – we’re in final edit mode now and I’m excited.

But I’m even more excited over the possibilities after my book comes out of helping to create an environment when the social media analyst can be understood.  Nuff said.

Again, getting my manuscript fine tuned for McGraw Hill is taking much of the time I’d normally post here – hopefully within a few weeks I’ll be able to resume my normal blogging habits.   While preparing for the media blitz around Social Media Analytics book I used the mPACT platform to generate an influencer list using the category keywords below against

Specifics: (Metrics, Social Media Metrics, Visitor Tracking, Visitor Conversions and Social Media Dashboard).

Category social media, web analytics, search engines, content management, audence measurement, influencers, event correlation, Return on Investment, ROI, Social Monitoring, Social Listening, Brand Monitoring, Reputation Monitoring, workflow management, analytics insights)

Here’s the Influencer Map mPACT came back with, which changes daily – I just happened to show up on the list which is a happy circumstance – ha!:

I realize the chart might be covering parts of my sidebar but wanted my readers to be able to see the influencer list the say way I do.