How Influential Are You?

As marketing at most businesses becomes increasingly entrenched in social media, it's important to know whether those efforts are working to expand your sphere of influence. Tools that purport to measure online influence have attracted increasing interest and criticism during the past year. While these online tools are useful, they are but one component of a toolbox for measuring influence.

Influence isn't celebrity or popularity. To truly be influential, your online activity must elicit a change of some sort, either in a person's belief or behavior. If you convince someone to vote for Candidate Brown instead of Candidate Green, you have influenced an outcome. If you convince someone to buy a different type of toothpaste than they normally buy, you have influenced a product purchase. In both cases, the result of the interaction was a change in outcome. Measuring that change means that you need to measure the baseline first, and then measure again later.

Companies providing online influence tools measure things a bit differently. Since the data set these companies have access to is largely based on Twitter, they are defining influence in a way that makes sense with the information they have access to-how content is moved from one person to another on a social network. At the most basic level, if you have a large following on Twitter and those people re-tweet what you say, you are more influential than a person with only a few followers who converse back and forth with one another. Understanding that influence online is largely based on the ability to move and share information is critical to using influence measurement tools correctly.

It is important to examine why you are asking who is influential. If you're trying to develop a program to reach out to those who are influential within a certain market segment, or designing a PR strategy, you may need to use multiple tools to accurately identify influencers within specific niches. Context has been the toughest nut for online influence measurement tools to crack. It's difficult to assess the context in which influencing is occurring in an online setting, primarily because true influence occurs offline as well, which cannot be measured within an online tool.

There are at least a dozen different tools that measure facets of how content is shared online, and by whom. Among the better-known tools are Klout and PeerIndex, which are free tools, and Traackr, a paid, subscription-based service.

Klout

Klout.com is the most talked about online influence tool for a variety of reasons. It's free and easy to access, and the interface and scoring are intuitive. The foundation of Klout's scoring system is Twitter: If you have a Twitter account, you most likely have a Klout score, even if you've never signed in to Klout. Once you sign in to Klout, you can authorize the tool to include your activity on other social networks such as Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and more to measure your influence. Adding more social networks should increase your score, but not adding them should not detract from your score.

Scores are ranked from 1 to 100, so it's easy to fall into the trap of looking at the scores like grades-which they are not. A Klout score of 40 or so can qualify you as influential enough to participate in some perks while other perks require a higher score. Perks are offered by marketers who hope that by providing influencers with access to free products or coupons, those people will in turn spread the word online to others. This perk system is unique to Klout.

Klout looks at three different areas to assess a user's influence: true reach, network influence, and amplification probability. Klout's attempt to address the context question is the +K feature, which allows users to award a +K to other users based on knowledge areas. Klout's critics say the tool measures activity rather than influence, particularly since true influence is also a product of offline activity-which Klout cannot measure. It has also been pointed out that the scoring can be gamed to inflate scores, so Klout has taken steps to mitigate that. But as long as there is a perceived value in a higher score, it is likely attempts to artificially pump up scores will continue.

PeerIndex

PeerIndex.com is another free tool that can help determine the authority of a person within different online communities. Like Klout, the interface is intuitive and easy to understand, and it also looks at three primary areas to assess a score: authority, activity, and audience.

PeerIndex's topic fingerprint map provides a quick look into the topic areas a user discusses most often, which is the tool's way of addressing the need for context. Like Klout, scoring is on a 100-point scale. It uses Twitter as its primary means of generating a score, and it allows users to add other social networks to provide a more rounded portrait of an individual's online presence. While Klout's measurement is heavily influenced by activity, PeerIndex is weighted toward a user's authority within specific areas.

Traackr

Traackr.com is a subscription-based service that helps users identify influencers based on relevant search words. It also looks at three areas to assess influence: reach, resonance, and relevance. The system creates A-lists, wherein the influencers identified based on the keywords are ranked according to these three components. The lists are customizable (you can add influencers you've identified) and dynamic, meaning that as online influencers change topics and become either more or less relevant based on the keywords entered, they are added or removed from the list results. Keyword searching provides context that the free tools struggle with. There's truth in the adage that you get what you pay for. Traackr fees start at $499 a month and depend on how many campaigns (or inquiries) are being measured. Any campaign can include up to 25 influencers.

Assessing the Virtual World

As mentioned earlier, these are just three of many tools out there that look at different ways to quantify online influence. Kred.com is new in the market and, like the others, uses Twitter to derive a score, but it looks at interactions between Twitter users differently by dividing the score into two parts: influence and outreach. As each site uses different algorithms, checking more sites results in a more informed view of online influence.

Any of these tools should be considered a starting point in your research, not an end point. Influence scores should always be supplemented with additional research. Once you've identified an influencer with one of these tools, check out the influencer's blog, Twitter feed, and any other information you can identify. Sometimes you'll discover that the influencer doesn't exactly fit with your target audience. Other times you'll find additional research can fill in the gaps that exist between online and offline influence. And even if the influencer is a perfect fit, you'll now need to establish a relationship with him or her prior to marketing your product or service-always keeping in mind the social aspect of social media: personal contact.

Jennifer Zingsheim is vice president of products and services at CustomScoop, a social media marketing firm in Concord. She can be reached at 603-410-5004 or jzingsheim @ customscoop.com